The Devil's Highway

Here is a secret this road would just as soon you did not know. The highway you are driving this very minute — the Coronado Trail — carried another name and another number for most of its life. It used to be U.S. Route Six Sixty-Six.

That is right. Six-six-six. The Number of the Beast. They called it the Devil's Highway.

Now the number itself was innocent enough. In the old federal numbering system, a three-digit route beginning with a six was a branch of Route Sixty-Six, and this was the sixth one. That is the entire explanation. A clerk with a ledger, no more sinister than that.

But once folks noticed what the number spelled, the legends caught like a grass fire in cured grass. And this particular stretch of it did nothing whatsoever to help its own case. Look at what you are driving: a brutal, twisting mountain road with four hundred and sixty curves in it, precious little guardrail, drop-offs you would not want measured, fog that comes up out of nowhere and black ice that sits in the shadowed corners of the switchbacks long after the sun has cleared everywhere else. It has a wreck record to match. Any road like that collects bad stories. Give it the number of the Beast and the stories write themselves.

And they did. Truckers swore a black car with no headlights would come at them out of the dark, run them for the shoulder, and be gone. There was talk of a great hound that paced alongside at speed — pacing a car, mind, not chasing it — and would not be outrun. There were hitchhikers picked up on empty stretches who were not in the seat when the driver next looked. Somewhere along the way people started calling the whole route the Highway to Hell.

Was any of it real? I will say this. A road that dark and that twisted, driven tired at three in the morning, will show a man a great many things. And a number that everyone has agreed is cursed does remarkable work on a tired mind at the far end of a long night. The reputation fed itself. Each driver arrived already knowing what the road was supposed to do to him.

What finished it was not the ghosts, though. It was the souvenir hunters. The six-sixty-six signs got stolen off the posts almost as fast as the highway departments could bolt them up — by teenagers, by collectors, and by people who genuinely did not care for what the number stood for. Church groups petitioned to have it changed. Businesses along the route said the name was costing them custom. And in two thousand three the states finally gave up and renumbered the whole thing. On paper, the Devil's Highway ceased to exist.

But you cannot renumber a reputation. The old-timers around here still call it by its true name, and you will find the odd hand-painted sign and bumper sticker keeping the joke alive.

So mind these curves, friend. The state says this is Route One Ninety-One now, and I am sure the state is right. I would only point out that the road did not get any straighter when they changed the sign.