From Winslow, the road climbs into the world’s largest forest of Ponderosa pines: tall, majestic trees smelling of vanilla. We take a night off Route 66, along a scenic bypass to the highest mountains in Arizona, North of Flagstaff. The Skilift Inn off Route 180 has darling cottages, with gas-heated wood stoves, if there is such a thing. You are out in a mountain meadow with the prairie dogs--who like Mountain 66 just fine.

There’s not much snow on the ground, but that great wedge of rock which is Aggasiz Mountain is frosted like a poptart. These are the San Francisco peaks, one of the four corners of the Navajo universe--though the Hopi and other tribes hold them sacred as well. Their sharp cones protrude from the earth like an adz, a blunt ax buried into the earth.

Flagstaff might just be the artiest location on Route 66--outside its great cities--as measured in art-gallery-and-coffeehouses-per person. It has had as many as three microbreweries, and its historic hotels are still in service, such as the extraordinary Hotel Weatherford, with a balcony over downtown supported by two-story exterior pillars, or the Hotel Monte Vista, whose funds were raised by community subscription at the end of the last century, when the city grew large enough to need one.