From Winslow to Flagstaff
and a side trip to Page/Lake Powell
Arizona

After checking out of La Posada we continued on to our next stop, Flagstaff, the unofficial capitol of northern Arizona. Located in the land of deep canyons, endless vistas, snowcapped mountains, and dense pine forests, Flagstaff is the highest point along Route 66. The city is located between the Indian reservations of the Navajo and Hopi.

MartAnne's Burrito Palace
Flagstaff, Arizona

The sign out front declares it “The House That Chilaquiles Built,” and judging by the hungry masses waiting patiently outside, you’ll at once know this is a house you want to enter. If a restaurant can define a community, then MartAnne’s sums up Flagstaff in a nutshell: colorful, generous and a little bit spicy.

Anne Martinez bought the restaurant after waiting tables across the street for 15 years. She inherited a clientele hungry for a hearty Mexican breakfast, but the most important person in her new venture literally came with the building. The well-known and beloved Ms. Alice
had worked in that very spot since the 1960s and passed down many of the recipes that Martinez still uses today.

Ms. Alice’s legacy lives on through the pork green chile, among the many Mexican dishes Martinez turns out every day in generous portions. That location, on San Francisco Street, closed in 2012, but Martinez reopened Martanne’s a block away at a larger location. The historic restaurant is located on Route 66.

“If I didn’t cook it, you didn’t eat here,” says Martinez. “If I’m not here, we’re closed.”—Arizona Highways

While having breakfast we learned about the place chile peppers have in Southwest cuisine and that New Mexico ranks first in the world for the amount of chile produced and acreage planted. When we ordered dishes with chile during our journey, the most common question asked by our servers was "red or green?" All chile peppers start off green and then turn yellow and red when they ripen. The green is almost always hotter than the red.

After having our hearty breakfasts, we took a side-trip on Route 89 north to Page, Arizona.

The federal highway has its southern terminus on the east side of Flagstaff where it intersects with Santa Fe Avenue (old Route 89/66) and I-40. We saw some magnificent scenery along the way, passing by Humphreys Peak, Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and Wupatki National Monument. The highway descended into the Painted Desert and entered the Navajo Indian Reservation.

At the Cameron Trading Post, the road crossed the Little Colorado River. Cameron was established in 1911 when the bridge across the Little Colorado was completed. Today the Trading Post is a popular stop for travelers.

We continued on to Lake Powell, a reservoir on the Colorado River named for explorer John Wesley Powell, a one-armed American Civil War veteran who explored the river in three wooden boats in 1869. The reservoir
straddles the border between Arizona and Utah and is a vacation mecca that has around two million visitors a year.

It was created by the flooding of the Glen Canyon Dam, which also led to the creation of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, a popular vacation destination that has over two million visitors a year.

We visited friends there, staying overnight in the town of Page and enjoyed the next day on their houseboat, followed by a wild motorboat ride through Labyrinth Slot Canyon at sunset.

Before leaving for the Grand Canyon, Lorie viewed Lake Powell from above, in a small airplane.