Diamond Creek Road leaves Route 66 in Peach Springs and runs north about twenty miles down Peach Springs Canyon to the Colorado River, and it is the only road that reaches the river between Lees Ferry and Pearce Ferry. It follows the line of the first tourist route into the Grand Canyon. In the mid-1880s Julius and Cecelia Farlee and their partner James Young opened an eight-room hotel about a mile from the river, where Diamond Creek joins Peach Springs Wash, and brought guests from the Peach Springs railroad station by horse, wagon or stagecoach. It was the first hotel on the floor of the Grand Canyon and went by several names: the Farlee Hotel, the Diamond Creek Hotel, the Santa Fe Hotel and the Grand Canon Hotel.
The hotel averaged about a hundred guests a year. Competition from John Hance, who began taking tourists at the canyon rim in 1884, drew guests away. The hotel had closed by the end of the century, and by 1901 its lumber had been carried off for other uses. A photograph long thought to show Hance's place was later found to show the Farlee Hotel.
The road is on the Hualapai Reservation and needs a tribal permit. River trips through the canyon use it as a take-out, and rain can close it.
Getting there
35.5291, -113.4255
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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