Two Guns - Route 66 Attractions In Ruins
Two Guns, Arizona
The desert stretch of I-40 between Holbrook and Flagstaff features several exits that aren't towns, just abandoned Route 66 businesses.
One of them is Two Guns, a Wild West theme park, with a grafitti ravaged entrance sign and faded western characters still visible on an old storage tank. What's unique about Two Guns is that its ruins are built atop the ruins of an older, equally ill-fated place named Canyon Diablo, a genuine Wild West ghost town. Canyon Diablo's great claim to fame was that its residents once dug up a dead gunslinger, gave him a shot of whisky, then posed for pictures with the corpse.
According to Mother Road lore, Two Guns was originally a trading post, opened in the 1920s by Earl and Louise Cundiff, and a zoo built by "Injun Miller," who was not a Native American. Injun (whose real name was Harry) eventually shot and killed Earl, then later was attacked by one of his caged mountain lions. When Route 66 was rerouted to the other side of Canyon Diablo's canyon, the business folded.
All that remains of Two Guns/Canyon Diablo is a sign reading "Mountain Lions" (its most prominent feature), some crumbling stone buildings, a set of gas pumps that appear to have exploded, and the ruins of the "Apache Death Cave" built by Injun and the old Route 66 concrete arch bridge over the canyon (Both are too dangerous to explore; please don't try).
A thunderstorm rolled in, lightning crackled along the canyon, and we hightailed it back to the interstate.