The obvious way to drive from Minneapolis to Phoenix is I-35 South to I-40 West — a straight shot through Iowa, Kansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and across New Mexico. It works. It takes about 25 hours and delivers a lot of empty highway. This route takes five days, covers around 2,170 miles, and goes somewhere else entirely.
Instead of cutting through the Panhandle, this itinerary turns west into Kansas to drive the Flint Hills — one of the last intact tallgrass prairie landscapes in North America — and then loops through a chain of five designated scenic byways before arriving in Phoenix. After the Kansas plains it climbs into the Colorado Rockies via the Frontier Pathways, drops south into New Mexico through the Enchanted Circle north of Taos, and follows the High Road through a string of 17th-century Spanish colonial villages before picking up I-40 at Albuquerque. The final day crosses the Route 66 corridor through Winslow and, if you allow one detour, descends into Phoenix through Sedona’s red rock canyon. The direct route misses all of it.
Five days is the right structure for this trip. Four days is technically possible but compresses the byway sections in Kansas and Colorado into transit driving — which defeats the point. The overnight stops are Topeka, Garden City, Pueblo, and Albuquerque, each positioned to put the next day’s scenery in front of you as early in the morning as possible. The full turn-by-turn route is mapped at MyScenicDrives.
Day 1: Minneapolis to Topeka, Kansas
494 miles · about 8 hours driving · Iowa, Missouri, and the Kansas border
Day 1 is a transit day with better bones than it first appears. The route south on I-35 through Iowa is flat and direct, but it leaves I-35 before Kansas City and takes a more interesting path through the Missouri River towns on the Kansas border before arriving in Topeka. Leave Minneapolis early — reaching Des Moines by midday keeps the afternoon options open.
I-35W S → I-35 S Minneapolis to Des Moines, Iowa
I-35W South out of Minneapolis becomes I-35 South at the Iowa border and runs without complication to Des Moines, about three hours from the city. Iowa on I-35 is precisely what you’d expect — wide, flat, and efficient — but Des Moines repays a stop if you time it for lunch. The Pappajohn Sculpture Park on the Western Gateway is free, walkable from the interstate exits, and houses a serious collection of large-scale contemporary sculpture including work by Richard Serra and Willem de Kooning. The East Village neighbourhood east of the Capitol has the best concentration of restaurants within easy reach of the highway. The Iowa State Capitol’s gilded dome is visible from I-235 as you skirt the city and doesn’t require a detour to appreciate.
I-35 S → US-36 W → I-29 S → US-59 S Into Missouri and across the river
South of Des Moines, I-35 crosses into Missouri and the route makes an unusual move: rather than continuing to Kansas City, it exits onto US-36 West near Cameron and works its way through the river bluff country via I-229 and US-59 toward Atchison, Kansas. This routing adds context rather than miles. St. Joseph, Missouri sits a few miles east of the route’s path and is worth knowing about — it was the eastern terminus of the Pony Express in 1860, and the Pony Express Museum on Penn Street preserves the original stable where the first riders departed. It’s 45 minutes from a I-29 exit and worth the detour if history is on your agenda.
US-59 S → US-24 W → US-75 S Atchison to Topeka
US-59 crosses the Missouri River into Atchison, Kansas — one of the more undervisited towns on this route and worth a brief stop. Atchison sits on high bluffs above the river with Victorian commercial architecture along Commercial Street and a compact downtown that still looks largely as it did in the late 19th century. It’s the birthplace of Amelia Earhart: the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum preserves the house on North Terrace where she was born in 1897, with views down to the Missouri River below. The drive south on US-75 from Atchison to Topeka is rolling Kansas farmland, unremarkable but pleasant, and covers the final 60 miles to the overnight.
Where to stay in Topeka: Topeka has a solid range of chain hotels near the I-70 corridor. If you want to be closer to the city centre, the downtown hotels on Kansas Avenue put you within walking distance of the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk and the restaurant district — useful for an evening arrival when you don’t want to drive further for dinner.
Topeka itself is worth an hour the next morning before leaving if you’re not pressed for time. The Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site at Monroe Elementary School is one of the more quietly powerful museums in the Midwest — the school where the Supreme Court case originated is preserved largely intact, with exhibits that treat the legal and human history of the case without sensationalism. The Kansas State Capitol building a few blocks away has a recently restored dome with murals by John Steuart Curry depicting the abolitionist John Brown. Neither requires more than an hour combined, and both put the history of the Kansas plains into a context that makes the landscape more legible for the rest of the trip.
Day 2: Topeka through the Flint Hills and Kansas wetlands to Garden City
436 miles · about 8 hours driving · two scenic byways and the Santa Fe Trail corridor west
Day 2 is the day Kansas earns its place on this itinerary. It opens in the Flint Hills — the largest remaining tallgrass prairie in North America — passes through one of the most important bird migration staging areas on the continent, and ends with a long westward run across the high plains through Dodge City. Leave Topeka by 8am if you want time at both byways without feeling rushed.
I-70 W → KS-177 N Flint Hills Scenic Byway
West of Topeka, I-70 runs straight into the Flint Hills — a 50-mile-wide band of limestone and chert hills that defeated the 19th-century plough and in doing so preserved four million acres of tallgrass prairie that was converted to cropland almost everywhere else in the Midwest. The route turns north on KS-177 from I-70 and follows the Flint Hills Scenic Byway through its most dramatic terrain. In spring, ranchers conduct controlled burns across the hillsides to encourage new grass growth — between late March and early May the hills cycle through burnt black, fresh green, and amber gold within weeks of each other, and the smoke is often visible from the highway before you reach the byway itself.
The essential stop is the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Strong City, a National Park Service unit protecting nearly 11,000 acres of native grassland. A small bison herd roams the preserve’s northern pastures and is often visible from the road. The Spring Hill/Z-Bar Ranch house on the preserve grounds is an 1881 Second Empire mansion that looks improbably grand in the middle of open prairie — tours run most days and take about an hour. Cottonwood Falls, three miles south of Strong City, has the Chase County Courthouse: a French Renaissance limestone building completed in 1873 and still in active use as the oldest operating courthouse in Kansas. The town’s main street along Broadway is compact, well-preserved, and has a good diner for breakfast or an early lunch.
Timing note: The Flint Hills are at their most striking in two windows — late April to early May when the post-burn green is at its most vivid, and October when the bluestem grass turns copper before the first frost. Summer visits are still worthwhile but the visual impact is subtler. If you’re driving in late March, check local news for controlled burn schedules — the smoke can reduce visibility on KS-177 significantly on burn days.
I-135 S → US-50 W Wetlands and Wildlife National Scenic Byway
From the southern end of the Flint Hills byway, I-135 South leads to Hutchinson and the start of the Wetlands and Wildlife National Scenic Byway — a 72-mile loop through the wetland complexes of central Kansas. Cheyenne Bottoms, near Great Bend, is the largest inland marsh in the interior of North America and one of the most critical staging areas on the Central Flyway: during peak spring migration in April and May, up to 45 percent of all North American shorebirds pass through, along with hundreds of thousands of ducks and geese. Whooping cranes, among the rarest birds on the continent with a wild population of around 500, stop here reliably during migration. The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks maintains observation areas with spotting scopes along the byway roads — even outside peak migration periods the wetlands hold a resident population of herons, egrets, and raptors that makes a slow drive worthwhile.
Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, 35 miles southwest of Cheyenne Bottoms, covers 22,000 acres of salt marsh, mudflats, and grassland. The auto tour route through the refuge is unpaved but passable in most vehicles and takes about an hour. If birds aren’t your priority, the wide-sky landscape of the central Kansas wetlands — flat in every direction, with grain elevators on the horizon and marsh grass in the foreground — has its own austere appeal that is entirely unlike the Flint Hills you drove through this morning.
US-50 W → US-56 W Fort Larned, Dodge City, and the run to Garden City
West of the Wetlands byway, US-50 and US-56 follow the historic Santa Fe Trail corridor across the high plains toward Garden City. This stretch is practical driving with genuine historic texture along the roadside. Fort Larned National Historic Site, near Larned, is one of the best-preserved frontier army posts in the country — nine original stone buildings from the 1860s and 1870s, built to protect Santa Fe Trail wagon trains from conflict with Kiowa and Cheyenne tribes, stand largely intact on a small rise above the Pawnee River. The site is rarely crowded and the self-guided tour through the barracks, officers’ quarters, and blockhouses takes about 45 minutes. Pawnee Rock, a sandstone outcrop a few miles north of Larned, was one of the most prominent landmarks on the Santa Fe Trail and is covered in names carved by 19th-century travellers — it’s a five-minute stop with a decent view across the surrounding plains.
Dodge City sits 75 miles further west on US-56 and needs little introduction. The cattle trail mythology is well-worn but the Boot Hill Museum on Front Street reconstructs the original 1870s business district with some care, and the Long Branch Saloon recreation is less embarrassing than you might expect. It’s worth an hour if you arrive in the late afternoon with time to spare. Garden City, 50 miles beyond Dodge on US-50, is the overnight — a regional agricultural centre with a full range of hotels and restaurants, and a substantially better base than the map’s literal overnight pin at Ingalls, 15 miles further west.
Where to stay in Garden City: Garden City has reliable chain hotels clustered near the US-50/US-83 corridor — Hampton Inn, Comfort Inn, and Holiday Inn Express are all well-maintained and straightforward. The Lee Richardson Zoo near downtown is unexpectedly large for a city of 25,000 and is free, which makes for a useful evening walk if you arrive before dark.
Day 3: Garden City to Pueblo, Colorado
420 miles · about 8 hours driving · the Santa Fe Trail corridor and the first mountain road of the trip
Day 3 is the day the landscape changes for good. You leave Garden City on the same route the Santa Fe Trail followed into Colorado — the Arkansas River valley, cottonwood-lined and flat, with the Rockies appearing on the horizon around mid-morning. By afternoon you’re on a mountain road through the Wet Mountains above Pueblo, and by the time you arrive in the city the plains are 3,000 feet below. It’s a good day.
US-50 W Into Colorado and the Santa Fe Trail Scenic Byway
US-50 West from Garden City crosses into Colorado at the state line and enters the Santa Fe Trail Scenic Byway — a 96-mile corridor along the Arkansas River that follows the Mountain Branch of the historic freight and emigrant route. The landscape is high plains at first, dry and open, with the river running through a belt of cottonwoods to the south. Rocky Ford, about 35 miles in, is worth a brief stop in late summer: the town has grown cantaloupe on the Arkansas River bottomland since the 1870s and the fruit stands along US-50 in August are a legitimate regional institution. Las Animas, further west, sits near the site of Bent’s New Fort, the second trading post William Bent built after abandoning the original in 1849 — there’s a historical marker but little else. The Rockies begin appearing as a pale smear on the western horizon around Las Animas, still 100 miles away but unmistakeable on a clear morning.
CO-194 E Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site
Eight miles east of La Junta on CO-194, Bent’s Old Fort is the most significant stop of the day and deserves an unhurried visit. William Bent and Ceran St. Vrain built the original adobe trading post here in 1833 — the only major permanent American structure on the Southern Plains at the time — and for 16 years it was the hub of the southern Rocky Mountain fur trade, a meeting point for Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa tribes, Mexican traders, American mountain men, and US Army expeditions. Kit Carson worked here. The Army of the West staged here before the 1846 invasion of New Mexico. The National Park Service reconstructed the fort in 1976 using the original footprint and period materials, and it is one of the more convincing historic reconstructions in the country — the scale of the adobe walls, the dark interior rooms, and the livestock in the corral give it a density that many such sites lack. Living history interpreters in period dress work the fort most days. Allow 90 minutes.
La Junta for lunch: La Junta is the main town on the Santa Fe Trail byway and has straightforward lunch options on Colorado Avenue. The Hana Japanese Restaurant is a local favourite and an unlikely but well-reviewed find in a small Colorado plains town. If you prefer something more in keeping with the surroundings, the kitschy Cow Palace Inn has been feeding travellers on US-50 since 1953.
US-50 W → CO-165 S Frontier Pathways Scenic Byway
North of La Junta, US-50 follows the Arkansas River west toward Pueblo, and the Rockies that have been a distant promise all morning resolve into a proper mountain wall. The route turns south onto CO-165 before reaching Pueblo, picking up the Frontier Pathways Scenic Byway through the Wet Mountains. This is the first genuine mountain road of the trip: CO-165 climbs through the village of Rye and into San Isabel National Forest, switchbacking up through ponderosa pine and spruce to elevations around 9,000 feet before descending into the Greenhorn Valley. The views back east across the plains from the upper sections of the road are considerable — on a clear afternoon you can see 60 or 70 miles of Kansas and Colorado laid flat behind you, which puts the last three days of driving into useful perspective.
The unmissable stop on CO-165 is Bishop Castle, about 12 miles south of Rye. Since 1969, a man named Jim Bishop has been building a stone castle in the San Isabel National Forest by himself, without professional assistance, using rocks gathered from the surrounding mountainside. It is now several stories tall, with turrets, iron-wrought dragons on the parapets, a grand ballroom, and a suspended iron orb over the main tower that visitors can climb to. It is entirely free to visit, accepts donations, and is one of the more genuinely remarkable things you will see on this trip — not because it is beautiful, though parts of it are, but because the sheer accumulated stubbornness of one person building a castle alone over 50 years is difficult to process. Jim Bishop is often on site. He has opinions, which he will share. Allow an hour.
Overnight: Pueblo, Colorado
CO-165 descends from the Wet Mountains back onto I-25 and into Pueblo — a steel city on the Arkansas River that tends to be underestimated by travellers passing through to more celebrated Colorado destinations. The Historic Arkansas Riverwalk channels the river through a landscaped canal in the downtown core with restaurants, sculpture, and a paddleboat operation along the banks. The Union Avenue Historic District has the densest concentration of late 19th-century commercial architecture in southern Colorado, much of it restored, and anchors an arts and restaurant scene that has grown considerably in the last decade. The Rosemount Museum, an 1893 Victorian mansion built for a local merchant, is open for tours and worth an hour if you arrive in the afternoon. Pueblo is a good overnight city: well-positioned for the early morning run south on I-25 toward New Mexico, and substantial enough that dinner and a decent hotel require no effort to find.
Where to stay in Pueblo: The Marriott Pueblo Convention Center and the Hampton Inn & Suites Downtown are both well-reviewed and close to the Riverwalk. For something with more character, the Abriendo Inn on West Abriendo Avenue is a 1906 bed-and-breakfast in the city’s historic neighbourhood — one of the better-regarded small hotels in southern Colorado.
Day 4: Pueblo to Albuquerque, New Mexico
427 miles · about 8 hours driving · the Enchanted Circle, the High Road to Taos, and down to the Rio Grande
Day 4 is the scenic centrepiece of the trip. You leave Pueblo on I-25 South and enter New Mexico by mid-morning, but the day’s logic isn’t about covering ground — it’s about two mountain loops that together take you through some of the most visually arresting terrain in the Southwest. Leave early. The Enchanted Circle north of Taos is best driven in the morning light, and the High Road to Taos runs better south-to-north than the reverse, so the sequencing here matters.
I-25 S Pueblo to Raton and into New Mexico
I-25 South from Pueblo climbs briefly before descending into Trinidad, a small Colorado coal town at the base of Raton Pass that has quietly become one of the more interesting small cities in the Southern Rockies. The downtown on Commercial Street has a concentrated run of late Victorian commercial buildings and a modest arts scene that punches above its population. The A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art on Main Street houses a substantial collection of cowboy and ranch paintings with genuine regional character — it’s free and worth 30 minutes if you arrive before it opens at 10am. The pass itself, at 7,834 feet, crosses the Sangre de Cristo Mountains into New Mexico and marks a genuine climatic and cultural boundary: the landscape south of Raton is darker, more volcanic, and distinctly New Mexican almost immediately. Raton has good breakfast options on Cook Avenue if you didn’t eat before leaving Pueblo.
I-25 S → US-64 W → NM-522 N → NM-38 E → US-64 W The Enchanted Circle
The Enchanted Circle is an 84-mile loop through the mountains north of Taos, named for the ring of peaks — Wheeler Peak, Taos Mountain, and the Cimarron Range — that surround it. The standard approach from I-25 takes US-64 West from Cimarron through Cimarron Canyon State Park, where the road narrows along the Cimarron River between basalt walls before opening onto the Moreno Valley and Eagle Nest Lake. The canyon section alone justifies the detour: the river runs beside the road through a tight gorge of dark volcanic rock for about ten miles, with fly-fishing access at multiple pull-offs. Eagle Nest Lake at the northern end of the valley is a 2,400-acre reservoir at 8,200 feet, backed by the Cimarron Range to the east and Wheeler Peak — New Mexico’s highest point at 13,161 feet — to the west. The Enchanted Circle’s highest pass, Bobcat Pass on NM-38, sits at 9,820 feet.
From Eagle Nest, NM-38 drops west through Red River — a ski village and summer mountain town at 8,750 feet with an intact main street of Western-fronted buildings and reliable lunch options. Angel Fire, south of Eagle Nest on NM-434, is a ski resort with a summer mountain biking operation if the loop is timed for a stop. The full Enchanted Circle from Cimarron Canyon back to Taos takes about three hours including brief stops — budget four if you want to fish the canyon or walk any of the lake trail at Eagle Nest.
Cimarron Canyon vs. the direct route: The standard Enchanted Circle entry through Cimarron Canyon (US-64 West from I-25) is the more scenic approach and the one the map follows. The alternative — driving I-25 directly to Taos via Raton and Cimarron town — skips the canyon and is faster by about 30 minutes. If you’re behind schedule, skip the canyon; if you’re on time, don’t.
NM-68 S → NM-518 S → NM-76 S The High Road to Taos
The High Road to Taos is the mountain alternative to the faster NM-68 river route between Taos and Santa Fe — a 56-mile road through the Sangre de Cristo foothills along NM-518 and NM-76 that passes through a chain of Spanish colonial villages founded in the 17th and 18th centuries. Drive it southbound from Taos toward Santa Fe, which puts the best views ahead of you rather than behind. Ranchos de Taos at the southern edge of Taos is the first stop worth making: the San Francisco de Asís Mission Church, built around 1815, has been painted by Georgia O’Keeffe and photographed by Ansel Adams, and its massive adobe buttresses at the rear are among the most compelling pieces of architecture in New Mexico. The church is still an active parish — visit respectfully.
The road climbs east from Ranchos de Taos through Talpa and Chamisal into the high pinon and juniper country. Truchas, at 8,000 feet, is the visual peak of the High Road: a linear village on a narrow ridge with a 360-degree panorama across the Rio Grande valley to the Jémez Mountains and, on clear days, Mount Taylor 120 miles southwest. The village has changed little in 200 years and several working artists’ studios are open to visitors along the main road. Las Trampas, a few miles south, preserves the most intact 18th-century plaza in New Mexico — the San José de Gracia Church there, built in 1760, is considered one of the finest examples of Spanish colonial ecclesiastical architecture in the United States and is a National Historic Landmark.
The last essential stop on the High Road is the Santuario de Chimayó, near the village of the same name toward the southern end of the route. Built in 1816 over a site considered sacred by the Tewa people long before the Spanish arrived, the santuario draws 300,000 pilgrims annually — the largest Catholic pilgrimage in the United States — who come to collect the reddish earth from a small pit inside the chapel, believed by many to have healing properties. The chapel itself is small, dark, and covered in the crutches and photographs left by people who believe they were cured here. Whatever your position on the theology, it is one of the most atmospheric rooms in the Southwest and is never entirely without visitors, which tells you something.
Chimayó for dinner: Rancho de Chimayó, just below the santuario, is one of the most celebrated New Mexican restaurants in the state — a 19th-century hacienda serving red and green chile dishes that have been on the menu since 1965. It books up; try to arrive by 5:30pm if you want to eat before Albuquerque. The sopaipillas with honey are not optional.
US-285 S → I-25 S Santa Fe and on to Albuquerque
The High Road emerges near Nambé, south of which US-285 South leads into Santa Fe in about 20 minutes. Santa Fe is an obvious overnight alternative to Albuquerque — the Plaza, Canyon Road’s gallery district, and the Palace of the Governors are all within walking distance of the city centre, and the hotels on the Plaza are among the better places to stay in New Mexico. If you’d rather spend an evening on Canyon Road than in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill, adjusting the overnight here is entirely reasonable. The map routes to Albuquerque, which puts you 60 miles closer to Phoenix for Day 5, but Santa Fe costs only an extra hour in the morning.
If you’re pressing on to Albuquerque, I-25 South from Santa Fe covers the 60 miles in under an hour through the Bajada Hill descent and into the Rio Grande valley. Albuquerque spreads across a high desert basin at 5,312 feet with the Sandia Mountains rising abruptly to the east and the Rio Grande running through the valley floor to the west. The Nob Hill neighbourhood on Central Avenue — Historic Route 66 — is the best area for dinner and a walk: a stretch of mid-century neon signs, independent restaurants, and the Kimo Theatre, a 1927 Pueblo Deco cinema that is one of the more extraordinary buildings in the American Southwest. Old Town, where the city was founded in 1706, is ten minutes west by car and preserves the original adobe plaza and San Felipe de Neri Church, which has been in continuous use since 1793.
Where to stay in Albuquerque: Hotel Andaluz on Copper Avenue NW is an elegantly restored 1939 hotel in the downtown core and the best choice if budget allows — the rooftop bar has views of the Sandia Mountains. The Marriott Pyramid North in the Balloon Fiesta Park area is a reliable mid-range option. If you want to be in Nob Hill for walkable dinner access, the Nob Hill Motor Inn on Central Avenue is a renovated mid-century motel that is both cheap and characterful.
Day 5: Albuquerque to Phoenix
391 miles · about 6 hours 20 minutes driving · Route 66 across Arizona and down through Sedona
Day 5 is the shortest driving day of the trip and the one with the most flexibility built into it. The base route along I-40 West from Albuquerque to Phoenix via Winslow and Flagstaff takes about six and a half hours without stops. With the Sedona detour — which you should take — it runs closer to eight. Either way it’s an easier day than anything that came before, and the morning is loose enough to allow an hour in Albuquerque before leaving.
Albuquerque — before you go
If you didn’t reach the Sandia Peak Tramway the evening before, the morning is the right time. he tram departs from the northeastern edge of the city and ascends to 10,378 feet at Sandia Crest. — the ride itself is one of the longest aerial tramways in North America, covering nearly three miles of cable over a vertical rise of 3,819 feet. The views from the top on a clear morning extend across the Rio Grande valley to Mount Taylor and, on the best days, to the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff 180 miles southwest. The tram runs from 9am and the first cars are rarely crowded. Allow 90 minutes including the descent. Old Town, if you didn’t visit the night before, is ten minutes from the tram base and worth a walk around the 1706 plaza and into the Church of San Felipe de Neri before hitting the interstate.
I-40 W Into Arizona — the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest
I-40 West from Albuquerque follows the Rio Puerco valley into the high desert of western New Mexico, passing through Gallup — the largest trading centre for Native American jewellery, rugs, and art in the United States, with a dense run of trading posts on Historic Route 66 through the downtown if you want to stop. The Continental Divide at 7,245 feet is marked by a roadside sign about 25 miles east of Gallup and is worth a brief pull-off if only to note that every drop of rain east of this point drains to the Atlantic and every drop west drains to the Pacific. The landscape shifts into Arizona’s high desert after the state line: the Painted Desert begins in the distance to the north, its banded layers of red, orange, and lavender mudstone visible from I-40 in long, low ridges.
The Petrified Forest National Park entrance on I-40, about 25 miles east of Holbrook, gives access to a 28-mile park road that passes through both the Painted Desert and the fossil forest — 225-million-year-old Triassic trees replaced molecule by molecule with silica until the wood became stone, lying in enormous coloured logs across the desert floor. The park road has no backtracking; you enter off I-40 at the north entrance and exit onto US-180 at the south entrance, adding about 45 minutes to the drive. The Blue Mesa section mid-park, where the road winds through eroded hills of blue and purple bentonite clay, is the visual centrepiece. Do not remove petrified wood — it is a federal offence and the park visitor centre has a display of wood returned by guilty conscience that is both funny and sobering.
I-40 W Winslow, Arizona
Winslow sits on I-40 about 55 miles west of Holbrook and is the Route 66 highlight of the day. The Standin’ on the Corner Park on Kinsley Avenue commemorates the Eagles lyric from Take It Easy — the corner itself, with its flatbed Ford and trompe-l’oeil mural, is a five-minute stop that is simultaneously tourist-trap and genuinely cheerful, and there is no correct way to feel about it. The more substantial reason to stop is La Posada Hotel on Historic Route 66 at the eastern edge of town. Mary Colter designed La Posada in 1930 as the last and most ambitious of the Fred Harvey railroad hotels — a sprawling hacienda meant to evoke a Spanish land-grant estate, with hand-painted tiles, walled gardens, and enough interior rooms and corridors to wander for an hour. It fell into disrepair after the railway declined, was nearly demolished in the 1990s, and has been meticulously restored by its current owners. The Turquoise Room restaurant inside is one of the best restaurants in rural Arizona; if your timing puts you in Winslow around noon it is worth planning a proper lunch stop here rather than eating on the road.
La Posada as an overnight alternative: If you want to break the Albuquerque-to-Phoenix leg into two days, La Posada is the place to do it. A night in Winslow with dinner at the Turquoise Room and a morning walk through the hotel gardens is one of the more civilised pauses available on any American road trip. Flagstaff, 55 miles west, is the alternative — a university mountain town at 7,000 feet with good hotels and an active downtown on San Francisco Street, and a stronger base if you want to make an early start for Sedona.
I-40 W → AZ-89A S Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona
Forty miles west of Winslow, I-40 reaches Flagstaff and the junction with AZ-89A South — the road down Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona. This detour adds roughly 40 miles and 90 minutes to the day but delivers the most dramatic single stretch of driving on the entire trip. AZ-89A descends from the Coconino Plateau through Oak Creek Canyon: 16 miles of switchbacks through a narrow canyon of Permian sandstone, with the creek running alongside the road at the canyon floor and the walls rising 800 feet on both sides. Slide Rock State Park, about halfway down, is a natural sandstone water slide worn smooth by centuries of creek flow — worth a stop in summer, closed to swimming in winter, worth slowing for regardless of season.
Sedona appears at the canyon mouth as the walls open and the red rock formations take over. The geology here — Schnebly Hill Formation sandstone capped by Coconino white sandstone — produces the specific sequence of towers, buttes, and spires that have made Sedona one of the most photographed landscapes in America. Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, and the Courthouse Butte are the most recognisable formations and are visible from AZ-179 south of town without any hiking required. Uptown Sedona on US-89A has the crystal shops and jeep tour operators that have become the dominant character of the town; the Tlaquepaque Arts and Shopping Village south of the Y-intersection is more considered architecturally and has better galleries. The drive south through the Village of Oak Creek and on to I-17 gives continuous red rock views for about 15 miles before the formations give way to the Sonoran Desert transition.
Sedona timing: Sedona’s parking situation in the Cathedral Rock and Bell Rock area has been managed by a Red Rock Pass system for several years — you’ll need to display a pass to park at most trailheads and viewpoints, available from kiosks at the main lots. The lots fill by 9am on weekends between March and October. If you arrive in the afternoon on a weekday, parking is generally manageable. The drive-by views from AZ-179 require no parking at all.
I-17 S The Verde Valley and into Phoenix
I-17 South from the Sedona junction descends from the Colorado Plateau through the Verde Valley — a broad agricultural basin at 3,000 feet with the distinctive profile of Mingus Mountain to the west — before dropping sharply down the Black Canyon into the Sonoran Desert proper. The temperature rises noticeably as you lose elevation: the ponderosa pine and juniper of the plateau give way to saguaro cactus and ocotillo within about 30 miles, which is one of the more abrupt ecological transitions you can drive through in North America. The saguaro forest along I-17 between Cordes Junction and the Phoenix metro is the first sustained saguaro landscape of the trip and worth a moment’s attention before the sprawl of Phoenix’s northern suburbs absorbs it.
Phoenix arrives from the north on I-17 through the Anthem and Carefree communities before the city proper begins. From five days and 2,170 miles of prairie, mountains, painted desert, Spanish villages, and canyon roads, the palm trees and blue sky of Phoenix feel like exactly where the trip was always heading.
A few things worth knowing before you go
The best time to drive this route is spring or early autumn. Late April and May puts you in the Flint Hills during controlled burn season — the most visually dramatic window — and gives you the Enchanted Circle and High Road to Taos before the summer tourist peak. October is equally strong in reverse: the Cimarron Canyon aspens turn gold, the Truchas ridge is clear, and Phoenix is emerging from its summer heat into genuinely pleasant weather. Summer is the one season to approach with caution — the Kansas plains and southern Colorado are fine, but Albuquerque through Sedona runs very hot in July and August, and the Petrified Forest and Sedona parking situation is at its most difficult between June and August.
The stops most worth protecting if you’re short on time are Bent’s Old Fort, the Enchanted Circle through Cimarron Canyon, and Sedona. Everything else on the route has a reasonable shortcut alternative — Fort Larned can be skipped, the Wetlands byway can be condensed to a single refuge, Bishop Castle is on the road rather than a detour. Those three don’t have equivalents. If the schedule is genuinely tight, the Flint Hills byway on Day 2 can be compressed to a single stop at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and rejoined at Emporia without losing the essential experience. The Santa Fe Trail section on Day 3 from Garden City to La Junta is also skiable if needed, though Bent’s Old Fort is worth any reasonable rerouting to reach.
The full turn-by-turn route, day-by-day mileage, and byway directions are at MyScenicDrives. Keep it open alongside this guide rather than relying on either alone — the byway sections in Kansas and Colorado use state routes that standard GPS navigation tends to route around, and the MyScenicDrives directions have a level of detail that makes those sections straightforward rather than approximate.