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book of the week
The route of the matter: Albuquerque’s Sondra Diepen takes a visual trip along the Mother Road
Albuquerque’s Sondra Diepen has been getting her kicks on Route 66 since she was a kid.
She remembers traveling with her parents on portions of the historic highway in Arizona and California, where she grew up.
Over the last 12 years, the adult Diepen has been driving along the Mother Road in New Mexico.
The result of those trips with cameras is her recently-published book “Route 66 New Mexico: A Visual Tour.”
It is packed with more than 200 of her photographs. At the back of the book are related narratives, subtitled “Stories, Facts and Tales,” most of which she wrote.
“The book evolved from just being photographs to my getting interested in the history of these places,” Diepen said in a phone interview.
The first photographs she took along Route 66 in New Mexico were of the faded murals on the walls of the Old Crater Trading Post west of Grants (Exit 72 of Interstate 40). Diepen’s narrative offers background: Claude Bowlin closed his trading business in Gallup in 1936 to open the Old Crater Trading Post.
As he had in Gallup, Diepen writes, Bowlin mostly traded with Navajos at his new location near Bluewater.
Bowlin expanded his business with Navajos, building corrals, vats for dipping and disinfecting sheep and sheds for shearing them. As business increased, she writes, Bowlin’s Trading Post grew into a community center.
Bowlin’s closed in 1973, after the construction of I-40 just a few blocks away, Diepen said.
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The photographs and narratives tell similar stories of travelers using I-40 and skirting many Route 66 businesses they had visited for years.
Some of Diepen’s photos are of faded neon signs and murals, symbols of historic Route 66 in New Mexico:
- A solitary 1950 Packard with a busted windshield in what was the town of Endee not far from the Texas line.
- A disconnected pump at a run-down gas station in San Jon.
- The now-abandoned Frontier Museum between Cuervo and Santa Rosa.
- A onetime package liquor store in what had been the community of Dilia, 17 miles west of Santa Rosa.
Diepen describes Dilia as one end point of what had been the Santa Fe Loop of Route 66. Between 1926 and 1937, Route 66 looped north to San Jose and Santa Fe and then swung around and headed south to Albuquerque.
After 1937, Route 66 was realigned — straightened as an east-west shot, sans loop, between Santa Rosa and Albuquerque.
Though there’s no image of the Longhorn Ranch in the book, Diepen writes that it was a roadside attraction seven miles east of Moriarty, and “went from boom to bust in 37 years.”
The “ranch” offered stagecoach rides, a museum, Indian dances, a saloon, a hotel and a longhorn cow named Babe.
“Babe’s home today is a pile of rubble with a bent sign creaking and swaying in the afternoon winds,” Diepen writes.
The book also contains Diepen’s photographs of neon signs, billboards of still-thriving communities along both alignments of the historic route.
Among those communities are Tucumcari, Santa Rosa, Santa Fe, Algodones, Bernalillo, Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, Moriarty, Edgewood, Albuquerque, Laguna Pueblo, Grants, Milan, Thoreau and Gallup.
Diepen wrote most of the narratives, but she gives credit to Carol Adamec, Don Bullis, Johnnie Meier and Dorothy E. Noe for writing a few of them.
There are also some still surviving businesses on Route 66 between Albuquerque and Grants. The trading post is doing well after all these years, said Diepen, a member of the New Mexico Route 66 Association.
She includes the exit numbers off I-40 if you want to visit the Route 66 communities that are — or once were — there.
She has met people from all over the world who travel the historic highway, which stretches from Chicago to Santa Monica, California.
“The wide open spaces are very appealing to them. So is their interest in cowboys and Indians,” Diepen said.
Two years from now — 2026 — will be Route 66’s centennial.
