The desert at night has a way of swallowing light and swallowing men. I was a medicolegal death investigator working the late shift for a medical examiner’s office in a big Arizona city. The kind of job where the world feels quieter after midnight, and every call is a story waiting in the dark. We…
On February 16, 1867, the quiet expanse of Rabbit Springs Dry Lake in Lucerne Valley erupted with vengeance. Three years after the Las Flores massacre, another clash flared. What followed was less a battle than a sudden strike: a posse of settlers descended on a small Indigenous band—likely Serrano—wrongly believed to be Southern Paiute (Chemehuevi)…
The story of Del Taco, first called Casa Del Taco when Ed Hackbarth set his stake in the sand in 1961, doesn’t simply begin; it reveals itself the way desert truths do. And on that morning, beneath a sky bright enough to feel holy, the Mojave opened its hand and let the future step forward….
This story is dedicated to my parents, former Lake Placid residents, Jerry and Geneva Nugent. They loved their many years together living in Lake Placid, Florida — known as The Caladium Capital of the World, as well as the Town of Murals. A title earned leaf by leaf, field by field that transcended into art….
In 1915, Stephen “Desert Steve” Albert Ragsdale, originally from Coffeyville, Kansas, rattled his way west, coaxing an early‑model automobile across the Mojave as if stubbornness alone could substitute for horsepower. He was bound for a business conference in Los Angeles, because apparently the best route to professional success was straight through a sun‑scorched nowhere, but…
The U.S. Army officer slowly banked his 1940 Stinson Voyager to the left and readied it for a rough landing on the dirt runway. The small 80 horsepower airplane always got a workout during the many flights made by this solder while he surveyed the land below him during a hot summer. A cavalry officer…
Cadiz Summit didn’t just sit on Route 66, it perched there, like a stubborn outpost daring the Mojave to knock it down. Cadiz (pronounced Kay-deez) was one of a series of alphabetically named railroad stations built across the Mojave Desert; Amboy, Bristol, Cadiz, Danby, Essex, Fenner, Goffs, Homer, Ibis, Java, Khartoum and others. The Arizona…
The shifting sands of the Imperial Valley were not just an obstacle; they were a force of nature that swallowed early automobiles whole. By 1913, the challenge had grown so dire that the Auto Club of Southern California summoned all interested parties to El Centro, demanding a solution for a road that could carry travelers…
The Mojave Desert has always been a place where ideas arrive quietly. They drift in like a shimmering mirage, settle into the sand, and wait for someone stubborn enough, or visionary enough, to pick them up. In Newberry Springs, one such idea took root four years ago: revive a forgotten stretch of Route 66, restore its…
On March 20, 2015, the Stars and Stripes rose over the Hinkley Post Office for the very last time. We stood there as the flag came down, marking the end of a chapter for the tiny desert town 14 miles west‑northwest of Barstow, California. Hinkley’s post office had been serving residents since 1908, but like…