Peach Springs

Peach Springs is the capital of the Hualapai Nation — the 'Hwal'bay,' the People of the Tall Pines, whose million-acre reservation presses against 108 miles of Grand Canyon rim. The springs that named the town watered travelers for centuries; Spanish missionaries noted the peach trees growing near them in 1776. Beale's Wagon Road made it a stopover in 1858, and the National Old Trails Road made it a business — the stone Peach Springs Trading Post of 1928 still stands on Route 66, its ponderosa vigas and stepped parapets built for tourists but owned today by the tribe it always served.

Route 66 turned the town into a waypoint between Seligman and Kingman — and decades later, when Pixar's crew drove the Mother Road researching Cars, Peach Springs was among the towns that shaped Radiator Springs. Interstate 40 bypassed it in 1978, the way it bypassed everything on the old road, but the Hualapai made the geography work: Peach Springs is the gateway to Grand Canyon West, the Skywalk, and the Colorado River put-in at Diamond Creek — the only road that reaches the river inside the canyon.

The file keeps Peach Springs: the springs the missionaries named, the trading post on the Mother Road, and the tribal capital that turned a bypassed Route 66 town into the front door of the Grand Canyon.

Peach Springs is the archive's Route 66 file — the Hualapai capital, the 1928 trading post, and the town that became Radiator Springs.