Shooting stars

Chuck photographed some of his favourite abandoned spots along the USA’s famous Route 66 in the dead of night

Route 66 is an old highway cutting through the American Southwest, made famous in numerous movies, starting with The Grapes of Wrath. Soon, modern freeways bypassed Route 66, causing the demise of towns and roadside attractions alongside the iconic highway. Two Guns is such a town, 50km east of Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s a town with a rich history of sorrow and unfulfilled dreams. The town was the site of a massacre of fierce warriors of the Apache tribe by the normally peaceful Navajos, at what is now known as the Apache Death Cave. It was then a place of dreams unfulfilled with lost businesses when the freeway bypassed the town. Today it’s a ghost town of a dozen or so ruins and an old bridge from the original Route 66.