Route 66 is best known for neon signs, roadside motels, and kitschy pie counters, but the road also winds through some of the country’s most striking natural landscapes. State parks and National Park Service units—including national recreation areas, national monuments, and national historic sites—punctuate the 2,448-mile drive, enticing travelers to pull off the shoulder and explore cliff dwellings, caves, and coastal bluffs. Each tells a story about the land that shaped the highway, which was decommissioned in 1985 but maintains its near-mythical pop-culture lore. Paired with hotels that have their own character and history, these stops reveal a side of Route 66 that extends beyond nostalgia.
Malibu Creek Park in California is hidden in the Santa Monica Mountains just north of Los Angeles by the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s great for outdoor adventures, hikes, wildlife, and waterfalls.
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Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, California
Route 66 starts—or ends, depending on your perspective—at the Pacific. Sprawling across 153,075 acres, the Santa Monica Mountains rise just behind the western terminus, and the surrounding recreation area ranks as the world’s largest urban national park. It’s home to mountain lions, gray foxes, and mule deer, and more than 500 miles of trails climb ridgelines, weave through chaparral, and drop into canyons; particularly epic is the 67-mile Backbone Trail, which can be tackled by hikers, equestrians, and mountain bikers, offering views of downtown and the Channel Islands.
Where to stay: Restaurants, mansions, and luxury inns dot the shoreline, and the Nobu Ryokan Malibu is one such dot. At the serene, Japanese-inspired hideaway, most rooms open to the ocean, making it the ultimate coastal bookend for a nature-inspired cross-country journey.
Mojave National Preserve
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Mojave National Preserve, California
As Route 66 approaches the Nevada border, it skirts the southern edge of Mojave National Preserve, which protects nearly 1.6 million acres of desert wilderness—making it the third-largest NPS unit in the contiguous U.S. Mojave. It is full of contrasts, containing dunes that hum when the wind shifts, volcanic caves you crawl into with a flashlight, and Joshua trees as far as the eye can see.
Keep your eyes peeled for the critically endangered desert tortoise. If you visit during the springtime, you’ll be rewarded with blooming wildflowers. The park often seems empty in a good way, like a secret stretch of California, and you’ll see more freight trains than cars.
Where to stay: Continue about 45 minutes to the Arizona border until you reach Hotel Topock 66, on the Colorado River. The 24-room property is crisp and functional, with road-sign–shaped headboards and a palm-lined pool. It’ll save you from the peeling-stucco motels that still dominate in this stretch of the desert.
The Petrified Forest is a starkly beautiful desert landscape filled with petroglyphs and fossils.
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Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
Nowhere else on Route 66 looks quite like the Petrified Forest, which is known as much for its Triassic-era fossils as its collection of critters, such as pronghorn, prairie dogs, and jackrabbits. Fossilized logs glitter in the sun, while badland hills, mesas, and buttes glow purple and blue, making it immediately clear why this area is called the Painted Desert.
Stop to walk the short trails through the surreal landscape, and you’ll see the ruins of pueblos built nearly a thousand years ago. Don’t miss the Painted Desert Inn, a Pueblo Revival–style landmark that was built in the 1920s and later renovated by the legendary architect Mary Colter; it’s no longer open for overnight stays, but it does house a museum and seasonal ice cream parlor.
Where to stay: If you do want to sleep in a Colter-designed building, head about an hour west to Winslow and the La Posada Hotel, her 1930s railroad masterpiece. It was rescued and restored beginning in the late ’90s, and the property now features gardens, tiled courtyards, and the Turquoise Room restaurant, which serves green chile on everything.
Native American Indian ruins at Wupatki National Monument in winter, Flagstaff, Arizona
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Walnut Canyon, Sunset Crater Volcano, and Wupatki National Monuments, Arizona
Just outside Flagstaff, new landscapes tumble over each other in quick succession. At Walnut Canyon, cliff dwellings cling to limestone walls, staring across at each other through the gorge. On the mile-long Islands Trail, you’ll hike past 25 rooms, which housed members of the Sinagua people more than 700 years ago.
Drive 25 minutes north, and the ground changes again, revealing jagged lava fields left behind by the eruption of Sunset Crater Volcano in the 11th century. Keep going and you reach Wupatki, where ancestral pueblos rise out of the red desert, stone walls set against an open sky; the largest pueblo comprises 104 rooms, a ball court, and a blowhole, a geological phenomenon in which air is naturally expelled from the ground. Each site reveals a different way people have adapted to this terrain.
Where to stay: Sitting at 7,000 feet, Flagstaff’s High Country Motor Lodge is a roadside inn transformed into a boutique hotel, with a Nordic spa for cold nights.
Stone structures in New Mexico’s El Malpais National Monument
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El Malpais National Monument, New Mexico
Southeast of Gallup, the land takes a strange and dramatic turn, with sandstone bluffs, cinder cones, lava fields, and caves that plunge underground. El Malpais lives up to its name (which means “the badlands” in Spanish) in terms of harshness, but it’s anything but barren. Rim trails stretch for miles, offering views that seem to go on forever, and across the landscape reside unique desert animals such as horned toads, roadrunners, and plenty of bats. If you’d like to explore the park’s lava tubes, note that these are totally undeveloped caverns, with no trails, steps, or lights, and you’ll need a caving permit to enter legally.
Where to stay: Hotel el Rancho in Gallup doubles down on Old Hollywood glam. Movie stars have stayed here since the 1940s, especially during the heyday of Western filmmaking, and their signatures still line the lobby staircase. Navajo rugs, timber beams, and a neon sign that doesn’t quit make it a Route 66 classic.
Petroglyph National Monument, New Mexico
On Albuquerque’s West Mesa, volcanic boulders serve as canvases for more than 24,000 petroglyphs, comprising one of the largest collections of stone carvings in North America. Between 400 and 700 years ago, Native Americans and Spanish settlers marked volcanic stones with birds, plants, humans, symbols, and abstract designs—all of which tell a still-living history of the region. As you hike through the quiet of the desert, the whole place reads like an outdoor gallery.
Where to stay: Hotel Chaco, across the river downtown, brings that Indigenous history into a modern context. Built with stone and wood and filled with Native art, it’s one of the most thoughtfully conceived properties in the state.
Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Texas
The Texas Panhandle hides a surprise: the second-largest canyon in the U.S., stretching 120 miles and plunging nearly 800 feet. Trails at Palo Duro dip into red amphitheaters, twist past hoodoos like Lighthouse Rock, and lead to viewpoints that don’t seem possible out here in cattle country. In summer, the park even hosts two alfresco theater shows: Texas Outdoor Musical and Shakespeare in the Canyon, which can be paired with preshow dinners from Robinson’s BBQ.
Where to stay: Amarillo, just up the road, combines the park’s natural wonder with an architectural one: the Barfield, Autograph Collection Hotels, a 1920s skyscraper polished into a hotel that seems improbably cosmopolitan for the Panhandle.
A fishing boat in the middle of Grand Lake in Oklahoma at sunset
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Grand Lake State Park, Oklahoma
Oklahoma’s Grand Lake is where the drive along Route 66 pivots from desert, rock, and canyon to open water. Set near the state’s northeast corner, the lake is a human-made reservoir, created in 1940 with the construction of a dam. Trails hug the shoreline, marinas buzz with boats and people, and in summer, the lake turns into the state’s playground. The park is divided into seven separate areas, each of which has its own amenities and natural features.
Where to stay: Shangri-La Resort sits on Monkey Island, a sprawl of golf courses, spas, pools, and lake views that’s as close as this slice of the road gets to luxury.
The museum at Gateway Arch National Park got its first major facelift since Eero Saarinen’s arch opened in 1965.
Courtesy of Missouri Division of Tourism
Gateway Arch National Park, Missouri
You know the Arch. Everyone does. But you’ll want to spend much more time in the 91-acre national park surrounding the Eero Saarinen–designed landmark after you’ve taken the requisite four-minute tram ride to the top. A newish museum tells the story of westward expansion and the Indigenous and Creole culture of St. Louis before the Louisiana Purchase, while the historic Old Courthouse, which reopened in May 2025 after a five-year, $27.5 million renovation, comes with a new gallery about abolitionist Dred Scott. Perhaps coolest of all, you can still take a 19th-century paddlewheel riverboat cruise on the Mississippi.
Where to stay: Hotel Saint Louis occupies an 1893 landmark designed by Louis Sullivan, “the father of skyscrapers,” and it mixes historic marble and a stained-glass lobby ceiling with modern art and rooftop views of the monument.
Meramec State Park, Missouri
An hour southwest of St. Louis, Meramec State Park has trails and rivers that cut through the hills, but this place is all about the caves. The park’s most impressive feature is Fisher Cave, which is open for naturalist-guided tours. Visitors can traverse its narrow passageways and vast limestone chambers and see calcite columns that stretch 30 feet tall, and even preserved bear claw marks. Above ground, the Meramec River contains more than half of the fish species found in Missouri, making it a popular spot for anglers trying to land black bass, catfish, and panfish.
Where to stay: To fully immerse yourself in Route 66 history, stay at the Wagon Wheel Motel, in the town of Cuba. It’s the oldest continuously operated motel on the entire highway, a stone-and-neon icon that’s been going strong since 1935.
Abraham Lincoln lived in this house in Springfield, Illinois, from 1844 to 1861.
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Lincoln Home National Historic Site, Illinois
In the capital city of Springfield, three hours southwest of Chicago, this national historic site preserves the home where the 16th president lived between 1844 and 1861, as well as the surrounding neighborhood. Restored 19th-century houses line quiet streets, with signs about their role in the Underground Railroad. Tours of the Lincoln Home itself are unusually intimate compared to the marble monuments elsewhere, offering a glimpse into spaces like the future president’s bedroom, where he might have written the “House Divided” speech, and a compact kitchen that’s slightly smaller than the entire log cabin in which he was born.
Where to stay: The Inn at 835, a 1909 property with period oak detailing and fireplaces, perfectly captures the historic mood without seeming stuck in it.
