Hwy 666

Born: 1926
Died: Summer 2003

If you’re familiar with the old blacktop two-lane, you know that U.S. Highway 666 ‘ Triple 6 ‘ connected a pawn-shop town to a Superfund site, that it ran through some of the most unforgiving terrain in three states, that it was the site of some of the wildest summer lightning storms and steering-wheel-gripping black-ice blizzards in the winter, and that the outlaw image of the highway was all wrapped up in its name. Highway 666 was the Devil’s Highway, the perfect setting for the making of modern-day legends. Highway 666 has other stories, local legends of outlaws and saints so tied to the road that they’ll go with it as it’s slowly nomenclaturally replaced by Highway 491. Triple-6 was a great setting for a good story because it ran with the devil. Or, to be more accurate, it had a reputation for running with the devil, for the Bible may refer to 666 as the “number of the beast,” but this highway didn’t have much inherently evil about it. It acquired its name not because of the land it crossed or the people who lived there, but because it was the sixth spur off of Highway 66. Whether it actually attracted good stories or just gave them life is hard to say, but it provided the raw setting for a rough assortment of local legends that became part of Four Corners lore.

It wasn’t stories about outlaws that were the downfall of 666, though. It wasn’t the real-life characters that gave the highway an identity that was its doom. It was fear, pure and simple. Highway 666 was killed (or at least its Official Highway System Designation was killed) by people who were afraid of a number and of being associated with that number — afraid evil would rub off on them or that other people would think it had.

Whatever happened to rugged individualism and the free and the brave? This is the Wild West after all, a region with a reputation for accommodating nomads, warriors, pioneers and miscreants — people for whom independence, self-reliance and freedom are vital. For centuries Westerners have survived dust storms and drought, forced marches and disease, fires and floods, snake bites and sun stroke, only to have their modern-day offspring recoil at the sight of a number.