Winslow, Arizona has a meteorite crater, a rescued hotel, and the Eagles lyric that started it all

There’s a lot more to this Route 66 town

Winslow, Arizona, sits at nearly 4,900 feet in the high desert of northern Arizona, and most people come for the same reason: a lyric from a song recorded in 1972.

But the town that inspired the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” has been stacking up history since before the railroad arrived.

Ancient pueblos, a rescued railroad hotel, and a crater left by a meteorite the size of a house all sit within a few miles of each other. And in 2026, the whole stretch of road that runs through town turns 100.

The Eagles lyric that put Winslow on the map

“Take It Easy” came out in 1972 and climbed to No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. Jackson Browne wrote the core of it, and Glenn Frey helped him finish it.

According to Frey, the lyric about standing on a corner in Winslow came from a real moment when Browne’s car broke down there during a drive to Sedona.

The song went on to become one of the most recognized rock songs ever recorded, and a small town in northern Arizona got written into American music history because of a broken-down car.

Step onto the corner where the song came alive

The park opened in September 1999 at the corner of Route 66 and Kinsley Avenue in downtown Winslow. A life-sized bronze statue called “Easy” stands there, guitar in hand, cast by sculptor Ron Adamson.

Behind it, a two-story mural painted by John Pugh shows a girl in a flatbed Ford reflected in a storefront window. A real flatbed Ford sits parked on the street.

In September 2016, a tribute statue of Glenn Frey was placed at the corner after a fundraising effort led by Phoenix radio station KSLX. People come from all over the world to stand exactly where the lyric says to stand.

Winslow grew up around the railroad

Before the song, before Route 66, there was the railroad.

In 1881, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad set up Winslow as a water, crew, and maintenance stop on its transcontinental line. The Santa Fe Railroad bought the line later and made Winslow its Arizona headquarters.

The Fred Harvey Company moved in and built hotels and restaurants along the route, running linen-tablecloth service on the frontier. Route 66 brought automobile traffic through town starting in the 1920s.

When Interstate 40 bypassed downtown years later, Winslow slowed down, but its historic core held.

La Posada: the railroad hotel that almost disappeared

Mary Colter designed La Posada and oversaw everything about it, down to the furniture, the landscaping, and the dinner china.

It opened on May 15, 1930, as the last of the great Fred Harvey railroad hotels, and construction costs alone ran more than a million dollars in 1929.

Colter built a fictional history for the place, casting it as the grand hacienda of a wealthy Spanish family she called the Pajaros.

Built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, the hotel sits on the National Register of Historic Places. Colter called it her masterpiece.

How La Posada came back from the edge

The hotel closed in 1957 when passenger rail travel fell off.

Two years later, the furnishings went to auction and the interior was gutted for Santa Fe Railroad offices.

The building sat empty and threatened for decades, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation put it on its endangered list. Allan Affeldt bought the property in 1997 and spent years putting it back together.

Today, La Posada runs as a working hotel with 54 guest rooms, art covering the corridors, and gardens that fill the grounds. What came close to a demolition order is now the best place to sleep in Winslow.

Dinner at the Turquoise Room with a freight train rolling past

The Turquoise Room restaurant sits inside La Posada and takes its name from the private dining car on the Santa Fe Super Chief, the luxury train that ran between Chicago and Los Angeles.

The original Harvey restaurant at La Posada ran from 1930 to 1957.

The restored version serves regional Southwestern cuisine and draws diners from across the area, not just hotel guests.

You can watch freight trains roll past the windows while you eat, which lines up perfectly with where you’re sitting. It’s open to anyone for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Ancient pueblos three miles from downtown

Homolovi is the Hopi word for “Place of the Little Hills,” and it’s the traditional Hopi name for the Winslow area.

Homolovi State Park sits about three miles north of downtown and covers more than 4,000 acres at roughly 4,900 feet. The park holds over 300 ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites, including four major pueblos.

Hopi ancestors lived here from about 1260 to 1400 AD. The largest site, Homolovi II, once held about 1,200 rooms.

The Hopi tribe considers these places sacred, which is why the park dropped the word “Ruins” from its name in 2011.

Walk the ruins and watch for golden eagles overhead

Two sites, Homolovi I and Homolovi II, are open to visitors with sidewalk access and interpretive signs. Short dirt trails lead to petroglyph panels showing Katsina and clan symbols.

The visitor center and museum display traditional Hopi pottery, carvings, and artifacts from the site.

If you bring binoculars, the park has recorded over 100 bird species, including golden eagles, Gambel’s quail, and great blue herons.

From April through November, the park holds monthly stargazing programs at the visitor center. The elevation and the open desert make for a clear sky.

A crater a meteorite punched into Arizona 50,000 years ago

About 18 miles west of Winslow, just off Interstate 40, a nickel-iron meteorite hit the Arizona high desert and left a hole 3,900 feet across and 560 feet deep. That was roughly 50,000 years ago.

Arizona’s dry climate and the crater’s relatively young age make it the best-preserved meteorite impact site on Earth. NASA used it as a training ground for Apollo astronauts preparing for the Moon.

The Barringer family has owned it since the early 1900s, when mining engineer Daniel Barringer staked a claim and spent decades trying to convince scientists the crater came from an impact, not a volcano. He was right.

Stand at the rim and look down into the impact zone

The visitor center has an interactive discovery center, an 80-seat theater, and a 4D experience room. A rim trail gives you a full view across the crater floor.

Inside, exhibits include genuine meteorite fragments, and some of the specimens are ones you can touch.

The displays walk through how Daniel Barringer made his case for the impact theory and how long it took for scientists to accept it.

Researchers still study the site today as a reference point for understanding how impacts reshape planetary surfaces. You won’t find a crater like this anywhere else on the planet.

Two historic buildings worth a stop before you leave downtown

The Old Trails Museum sits in a 1921 bank building directly across from Standin’ on the Corner Park and gets in free.

Inside, exhibits cover the Santa Fe Railway, the Harvey Girls, Route 66, and the region’s Native American heritage.

A few steps away, the Winslow Visitor Center occupies the Hubbell Trading Post building, built in 1917 by the Richardson brothers.

Lorenzo Hubbell took over in 1921, and the place became known across the region for Navajo rugs and silver-and-turquoise jewelry until the 1960s.

Both buildings still stand on the same Route 66 alignment they’ve always been on.

Route 66 turns 100 in 2026, and Winslow is celebrating all year

Route 66 was established on Nov. 11, 1926, and this year marks a full century.

Winslow sits on one of the longest and best-preserved stretches of the Mother Road in Arizona, and the town is running centennial events throughout the year.

The expanded Standin’ on the Corner Festival runs Sept. 25 through 27, 2026.

Near the 9/11 Memorial on the east side of town, a musical road plays the melody of “Take It Easy” as cars drive over it.

That same area holds the 9/11 Remembrance Garden, which displays actual wreckage from the World Trade Center.

Downtown’s brick buildings from the railroad era still line the original Route 66 alignment, and the whole corridor looks close to what it looked like when the road was new.

Explore the Route 66 history of Winslow, Arizona

Winslow sits along Interstate 40 in northern Arizona, about 58 miles east of Flagstaff. The historic downtown is walkable, with most of the main attractions within a few blocks of each other.

If you want to skip the drive entirely, Amtrak’s Southwest Chief stops at the La Posada depot, making Winslow one of the rare Route 66 towns you can still reach by train.

From here, the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest National Park, and the Hopi mesas are all within day-trip range. Give yourself at least two days to cover it properly.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

Read more from this brand:

• 500,000 people a year stop in this Arizona ghost town that refuses to stay dead
• The coolest town in Arizona is a former copper camp glued to a canyon wall
• Grand Canyon Railway’s 125th year comes with more steam train chances