A Motorist's Nightmare

Highway 66, along with other highways of the day, offered attractions and diversions for the motorist. These attractions did not require speeding off a high speed freeway on a ramp and then negoiating what sometimes is a maddening series of turns and detours. In the days of the two-lane highway, a motorist simply had to pull directly off of the highway to visit one of these attractions.
  Yet, the two-lane highway also had a tendency to offer dangers that are not seen on a passionless slab of four-lane monotony that we call freeways.
 For example, one of these dangers that existed along Highway 66 was the dreaded Jericho Gap about 60 miles east of Amarillo, Texas.
  In this area, there are some low hills and ridges which Route 66, and now Interstate 40, had to negotiate. Between the towns of Groom and Alanreed was the most feared stretch of highway in the United States in the early days of automobile travel. The most infamous stretch was the aforementioned Jericho Gap  the legend  and lore happened in the years from 1926, when U.S. Highway 66  officially became a federal highway, to 1937, when the highway was completely paved and this unpaved stretch of it was re-routed. East and west of this section were paved stretches of road, but this area was unpaved and, thus, a "death trap" for automobiles of the day. You see, the soil in this area is sort of a black, gumbo type soil that sticks to everything  after a rainfall or snowfall. Route 66 went directly through this black, gumbo soil  and it was extremely hazardous  when it was wet. The legend of the Jericho Gap grew and grew until it reached epic proportions. It is still talked about to this day. A traveler's guide that was published by the Civilian Conservation Corps(CCC) in the early 1930s had this to say about the Jericho Gap:
  "The New Age automobiles could move on that highway [66], but were helpless in the gooey, gummy mud of Jericho Gap. Tires spun, mud balled up under the fenders and, if your car fell into the deep ruts, you were there until someone pulled you out...only a team of horses could extract your car from the gumbo..."
  Many farmers who lived along the highway made alot of money by charging motorists to pull their autos out of the thick mud with a team of horses. There is an unproven, but likely, legend that, even during dry times, these farmers would sneak out at night and thoroughly soak the dirt highway so they could make money off of unsuspecting motorists the next day by extracting their vehicles from the sticky mud. This legend has never been proven, but every farmer that lived along the route owned a water wagon and there are accounts that were made by people traveling on Route 66 back in the day that they got stuck in the mud in the Jericho Gap and they had absolutely no idea why the road was so muddy in that particular location when it was not muddy east or west of there.