London Bridge - Route 66 Side Trip

Before leaving Arizona, there was one more place we wanted to see - London Bridge in Lake Havasu City. It's not on Route 66, but only 54 miles from where we were in Oatman. I'm pretty sure we'll never get back that way again and since Momma-woman's momma is from England just outside of London, we had to make the side trip just to say we'd been there.

London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, AZ.

The London Bridge in Lake Havasu City is the 1831 London Bridge which spanned the Thames River. By 1967, the granite bridge was worn and no longer able to safely support the amount of traffic going across it. The city put it up for sale. About this same time over in America, the Federal Government gave some land and an abandoned military airstrip to the state of Arizona. Located smack dab in the middle of nowhere in a very hot and barren desert, not even the state was really interested in owning it. A lake had been constructed by the Bureau of Reclamation in 1938, but it was not developed and was only used to store water for pumping into 2 aqueducts.

Along came Robert P. McCulloch, owner and chairman of the very successful McCulloch Oil Company, who had an idea. With the promise of developing the area around the lake, the state gave him the property for free.

Crossing London Bridge

Mr. McCulloch financed the building of roads and houses to sell to the public, but Mr. Robert Plumer, McCulloch's real estate agent and lead salesperson for the venture, was finding it almost impossible to get prospective buyers to go out to the property, much less buy a home there. He heard about the London Bridge being up for sale and, hoping to entice more prospects, he asked McCulloch to buy it for the property as a tourist attraction. After second and third thoughts, McCulloch finally agreed and purchased the bridge which had been deconstructed and stored in numbered blocks. Shipping the bridge to the site in Arizona was going to be very expensive, but then Plumer heard of a cargo shipping company who was bringing a newly built ship from England to America. The new ship was sailing empty so Plumer made a deal with the company to pay for all the operating expenses of getting the ship to America if the ship would bring the bridge with it. The blocks of granite were delivered at less than half of what it would have cost without the arrangement.

A new concrete bridge in the shape and size of the original London Bridge was constructed on land along the east shore of Lake Havasu. After completion, the granite blocks from the London Bridge were trimmed and used to clad the new bridge. The whole process took a little more than 3 years to finish. Once it was completed, a canal was dredged under the bridge and filled with water from the lake.

The bridge from the patio of a restaurant
located on one end.

McCullouch financed a big promotional push with the theme "come see the famous London Bridge!" and housing sales began to take off. Against all odds, Lake Havasu City was a success. With the land being given to him for free and with limited costs for the bridge, it wasn't long before Mr. McCullouch had made back his investment and was making a very nice profit.

I'm not sure what we expected before we got there, but I have to say it was a bit of a letdown. I mean, it's just a bridge. There's a couple of signs on the ends indicating it is London Bridge. There are gas stations and shopping centers and eating places and masses of humanity for several miles on both sides. Lake Havasu City doesn't seem to make much of a big deal about it. You drive across or walk across and you can say you've gone over London Bridge.

It was cool to be there; to actually see it; to actually touch it. I guess I'm glad we went. I thought, "Hmmm. Well, here it is and here we are." We sat on a low concrete wall around the outside patio of a restaurant on one end of the bridge and watched as several high-dollar speed boats loudly zoomed through the arches. Then it was just a number of cars driving over the bridge without fanfare. I took a few pictures and we got  back on the road, crossed over London Bridge and headed back to Route 66 before hitting the California border. We didn't even get a t-shirt.

Bye-bye Arizona. We had a blast!

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Route 66 - Oatman

The remains of Ed's Camp

A little over 1 mile west from Cool Springs is Ed's Camp. Lowell "Ed" Edgerton came to the area about 1917 to prospect for gold, but he figured out it was a lot easier to make a living serving the old Oatman Road  travelers than digging in the dirt. About 1920, he purchased some property along the road and opened a camp where the travelers could take a break, camp for the night, and buy some water.

The first building he constructed was for the Kactus Kafe where people could get a bite to eat. Eventually he also built a grocery store, gas station and souvenir shop. The buildings were all simply built from wood and items he found or acquired from other sites and re-used or re-purposed  For travelers who didn't have a tent or trailer, he charged $1.00 to sleep in their car parked on his property or, for the same price, they could sleep on a cot in his screened porch. If you didn't pay to camp or sleep, he charged by the bucket for water.

Kactus Kafe at Ed's Camp

The area around Ed's Camp became known as a rock hunter's paradise and Ed eventually became a widely known expert in the field of geology. Folks from all over the world came to hunt for precious stones and Ed made a good living just from charging people to hunt on his land.  Even after Route 66 was realigned and Ed's Camp was bypassed, he continued to make his living and kept his establishment open until his death in 1978. Today, most of the buildings still stand, but the site is on private property and fenced off. There's enough room for you to stop beside the road and take pictures though.

The scenery behind you as you near Sitgreaves Pass

Past Ed's Camp is where the road really gets interesting - steep, hairpin turns and sharp drop-offs with no guard rails. Watch out for animals and human drivers and bikers coming around those turns. We only encountered two other cars on our way up to Sitgreaves Pass, but one of them was coming around a blind curve and we came within about a foot of exchanging car paint. Providing even more encouragement to slow down and be careful at one point is the crumpled, rusted remains of an old auto which evidently didn't make a turn and crashed down the side of the steep hill.  Fortunately, upon reaching the pass, there is a small dirt flat where you can pull off the road and take pictures. The view back down the way you came is starkly beautiful.

Sitgreaves Pass

Oatman is an interesting place, but today it is really just a tourist draw complete with fake gunfights in the street and very docile "wild" donkeys looking for a hand-out. It began as a gold mining town named Vivian because most of the residents worked for the Vivian Mining Company. A post office opened under that name in 1903, but the name was changed to Oatman in 1909 to honor a young girl, Olive Oatman, who had been rescued a few years after being taken captive by Mohave Indians in the area and sold into slavery.  Eventually, Oatman became Arizona's largest gold-producing district and for a while had over 2,000 residents. The town's business district had a theater, a lumber company, restaurants, saloons, general stores, service stations and hotels. Upon completion, the Oatman Hotel became the first adobe structure in the county. In 1938, Clark Gable and Carol Lombard got married in Kingman and spent the first night of their honeymoon in the Oatman Hotel.

The town of Oatman, AZ.

The mines began to play out in the 1930's and the town began sliding to ghost-hood. The last mine closed in 1942 and Route 66 was realigned and bypassed the town in 1952. By the mid-1950's, nearly all the stores were boarded up and abandoned. With its rustic scenery and buildings, several movies were filmed in and around Oatman in the 1950's and '60's including How the West Was Won and Edge of Eternity.

More recently, Oatman has found new life mostly as a tourist town. There is a little mining activity that has resumed and the old buildings have been refurbished to sell paintings, do-dads, gewgaws, souvenirs, and antiques. The so-called wild donkeys, descendants of the burros brought in by miners back in the day, are accomplished moochers and will even try to push their mouth into your pockets if they think you have something tasty to give, but are holding out on them. None of them appeared to have missed any meals.

Youngest-daughter petting one of the many "wild"donkeys
walking around the town.

I was perplexed to see probably several hundred tourists walking around town when we had only seen a handful of cars on the road all the way in from Kingman. While Youngest-daughter petted the donkeys and fed them donkey food (which several stores sold for a fancy price), I stood there for a while thinking, "Where the hell did all these people come from?" We heard some shouting up the street a little ways and then some incredibly loud gun shots, but it was just the fake cowboy actors putting on a show. The white donkey my daughter had been feeding and petting didn't even twitch an ear at the commotion.

Gunfight actors standing around in front of the
Oatman Hotel waiting to excite the tourists.

I asked Youngest-daughter if she wanted to shop for a while and she shocked me when she said, "No, this place is just a tourist trap. It's not real. I'm ready to leave when you are." We were in the truck heading on down the road 3 minutes later and in the rear view mirror, I saw the white donkey mooching from the next person who had a hand full of food.

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Route 66 - Cool Springs

Leaving out of Kingman, any true Route 66 road tripper simply must take the old pre-1952 road through the Black Mountains to Oatman rather than the newer route which is boring, boring, boring Interstate 40. The only reason to stay on I-40 is if you are driving or pulling a large RV. The road to Oatman is a narrow, twisty, sharp turns mountain road with steep drops. No big deal for a car, but iffy for a big RV.

Continue on Andy Devine Ave. west to the outskirts of Kingman and the road will return to being posted as Route 66. You will parallel I-40 for a while and come to I-40's exit 44 where you will need to take a right on Shinarump Dr. Go under the interstate (this is known as the McConnico undercrossing) and take a left on Oatman Road. You'll go past a couple of little housing communities and then civilization is quickly left behind as you enter the Sacramento Valley.

Route 66 between Kingman and Oatman

This was the most feared section of Route 66 for travelers of yesteryear, especially during the Dust Bowl years when families had to navigate Gold Hill Grade up and over the mountains in their under-powered, prone to overheat vehicles which were often held together with nothing more than wire and make-do repairs. Most were so under-powered, even in 1st gear, they had to drive the curves and switch-backs up to Sitgreaves Pass in reverse. If something went wrong, they only had themselves to rely on or wait and pray for help from the next traveler.

As Youngest-daughter and I sat in the leather seats of our very comfortable, air-conditioned, 8-cylinder Ford pickup, we tried to imagine the trepidation and fear those drivers and families must have felt as they made their way across this sun-scorched road. All I had to do was go slow, watch out for animals on the road and when the road went up, push down the pedal on the right a little bit. If something goes wrong, there is always the cell phone to call, hands-free, for somebody to come save us. We were enjoying the drive. For those who came before us? Probably not so much.

About 20 miles out of Kingman on the eastern slope of the mountains, just before heading up the most difficult section of Gold Hill Grade, is Cool Springs. On Route 66, but in the middle of nowhere, it was built in the 1920's as a camp and service station. It served the west-bound travelers as an important stop to rest, fill up the car with gas and check for mechanical problems before tackling the drive to the other side of the mountains. For travelers coming from the west, it was a place to stop and calm the nerves after the heart-pounding drive.
 

Cool Springs station

In the 1930's, James Walker uprooted his family from their home in Huntington, Indiana to live in Cool Springs. He made improvements to the station and built 8 cabins. His wife and children ran the cafe. Before WWII though, Mr. Walker went back east and left the operation to his wife and kids. Mrs. Walker eventually remarried and her new husband, Floyd Spidell, moved in and helped to manage the place and did the maintenance work. Cool Springs continued to be a success and provided a good living for the family until the 1950's when a new straighter alignment for Route 66 opened. This new route, which is now basically the same route taken by I-40, bypassed Cool Springs and traffic on the old road dried up. Not long after, the former Mrs. Walker moved on and left Cool Springs to Floyd.

Restroom at Cool Springs

In 1997, a fellow named Ned Leuchtner came through and found the ruins fascinating. He eventually managed to buy the site in 2001 and, using old pictures of the station, he began the massive job of cleanup and restoration.  After more than 3 years of work by Ned and his business partner, Cool Springs re-opened as a gift and snack shop. It's a really nice spot to pull off, maybe buy a souvenir and get a cold drink, relax for a while and enjoy the beauty of the desert, the silence, and the fresh air. And know that, except for the modern cars we have now, nothing much has changed here in a long, long time.

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