Map - Needles, California (Needles)

Needles is a city in San Bernardino County, California, in the Mojave Desert region of Southern California. Situated on the western banks of the Colorado River, Needles is located near the Californian border with Arizona and Nevada. The city is accessible via Interstate 40 and U.S. Route 95. The population was 4,959 at the 2020 census, up from 4,844 at the 2010 census.

Needles was founded in May 1883 during the construction of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which originally crossed the Colorado River at Eastbridge, Arizona three miles southeast of modern Needles. Needles was named after "The Needles", a group of pinnacles in the Mohave Mountains on the Arizona side of the river. The crossing was a poor site for a bridge, lacking firm banks and a solid bottom.

A bridge was actually built, but it was of poor quality. Not only was it a "flimsy looking structure", but it was an obstacle to navigation on the river. The flooding of the Colorado River destroyed the bridge three times – in 1884, 1886 and 1888. The railway built Red Rock Bridge, a high cantilever bridge, at a narrower point with solid rock footings ten miles downstream near today's Topock. The bridge was completed in May 1890, and the old bridge was dismantled.

At first simply a tent town for railroad construction crews, the railway would eventually build a hotel, car sheds, shops and a roundhouse. Within only a month, Needles would have a Chinese laundry, a newsstand, a restaurant, several general stores, and about nine or ten saloons. Needles quickly became the largest port on the river above Yuma, Arizona. The railway and the Fred Harvey Company built the elegant Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts style El Garces Hotel and Santa Fe Station in 1908, which was considered the "crown jewel" of the entire Fred Harvey chain. The landmark building is on the National Register of Historic Places and is being restored.

Needles was a major stop on the historic U.S. Route 66 highway from the 1920s through the 1960s. For migrants from the Midwest Dust Bowl in the 1930s, it was the first town that marked their arrival in California. The city is lined with motels and other shops from that era. The "Carty's Camp", which appears briefly in The Grapes of Wrath as the Joad family enters California from Arizona, is now a ghost tourist court, its remains located behind the 1940s-era 66 Motel.

In 1949, the United States Bureau of Reclamation began an extensive project to dredge a new channel for the Colorado River that would straighten out a river bend that was causing serious silt problems since the Hoover Dam was completed.

Needles is a tourism and recreation center. The city is the eastern gateway to the Mojave National Preserve, a scenic desert area.