Painted Desert Inn

You're standing at the Painted Desert Inn, on the rim of the Painted Desert in Petrified Forest National Park. Look at the building itself: thick, rounded adobe-colored walls and flat roofs, built to look like a pueblo. Then look past it, out over the badlands, banded in reds and purples. Travelers on Route 66 came a long way for exactly this view.

The story starts in 1924, with a man named Herbert David Lore. Lore opened an inn here, at the edge of nowhere, and he built part of it out of the ground around him: petrified wood. People nicknamed it the Stone Tree House. Those logs had been trees about 225 million years ago, which may make it the only roadside stop in America with walls older than the dinosaurs.

In the 1930s the National Park Service took over, and the inn got a second life courtesy of the New Deal. Park Service architect Lyle Bennett drew up a Pueblo Revival design, and from 1937 to 1940 young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilt it by hand, folding part of Lore's old inn into the new one. Those were Depression-era jobs, and you're looking at what they made.

After the war, the Fred Harvey Company, famous for its railroad and roadside hospitality across the Southwest, took it over. Their designer, Mary Jane Colter, reworked the interior, and she brought in a Hopi artist she'd worked with before at the Grand Canyon, Fred Kabotie. In 1947 and 1948 Kabotie painted murals of Hopi life on the walls inside. One shows a journey through this very desert to gather salt. It matters who told that story. This land was home to Ancestral Pueblo farmers for centuries before they joined communities on the Hopi Mesas and at Zuni, and their descendants still live there. Kabotie was painting his own people's ground.

Harvey ran the inn from 1947 until it closed in 1963. Then came the turn. By the mid-1970s, demolition was on the table. The building was supposed to come down. Instead, the public pushed back. The inn went onto the National Register of Historic Places and reopened in 1976 as a Bicentennial travel center. In 1987 it became a National Historic Landmark, honored not just for its looks but for how New Deal money built it.

Nobody has slept here since 1947. But it's a museum now, Kabotie's murals are still on the walls inside, and in summer there's even an ice cream parlor. That's the whole idea of this tour in one building: a place the highway era nearly threw away, kept alive because people refused to let it go.

When you're ready, head southwest, mostly on I-40, about 28 miles and 40 minutes, to Holbrook. Your next room for the night, at least in spirit, is shaped like a tipi.