Cool Springs Station is a stone filling station on the Oatman Road at the foot of the Black Mountains, rebuilt between 2002 and 2004 on the original stone pillars and foundation of a Route 66 camp and now kept as a small museum and gift shop below the climb to Sitgreaves Pass. The first station went up in the mid-1920s on the Old Trails Highway, which became Route 66 in 1926. In the 1930s James Walker, who had brought his family from Huntington, Indiana, built eight cabins and improved the station, and his wife cooked; after she married Floyd Spidell, their chicken dinners became a known stop for travellers in western Arizona. A straighter alignment through Yucca in the early 1950s drained the traffic away, and a fire in the mid-1960s left only fragments of the foundations and the stone pillars.
The ruins had a second career in film. For the 1991 movie Universal Soldier, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, the crew built a temporary frame station around the old pillars and then blew it up at the end of the scenes shot there.
Ned Leuchtner, a real estate broker, found the ruins in 1997 and spent about three years persuading the owner, Nancy Schoenerr Waverka, to sell; she agreed in the summer of 2001. Cleanup began in January 2002, and Leuchtner and builder Dennis DeChenne rebuilt the station from vintage photographs. When the power came back on, on 7 December 2004, it was the first time the lights had been on there since 1966. By the owners' account they chose not to sell food or gas.
Getting there
35.0260, -114.3051
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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