Now, if you’re thinking this might be a story about the storied ‘Highwaymen’ of years long passed, you might want to read on and become elucidated a bit on southwest lore. Because this, dear friends, is a story about those desert dwellers who built and maintained the roads between Needles, California, and all points west…
During the Panic of 1907, a financial crash that began with a severe drop on the New York Stock Exchange, James Hart and the brothers Bert and Clark Hitt, discovered pockets of rich gold ore in rhyolite on a steep slope in the Castle Mountains, approximately 4 miles south of the 23-miles long Barnwell &…
At the northwest corner of Waalew Road and Dale Evans Parkway in Apple Valley, just across the road from the Los Ranchos Mobile Home Park, is a vacant piece of desert with a few cement foundations and a smattering of trees near Bell Mountain. Next time you drive by there you might want to know…
Not quite the desert, but Cucamonga was on the border. At the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, Route 66 was still the way to or from the great Mojave, from where I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. I remember many trips to Cucamonga to explore the abandoned stone houses of early…
While we have been known to move around a lot in the style of a comedic witness protection program, this is the first time we have actually written about our current hometown. That says something about La Quinta, California. Located in the Coachella Valley surrounded by the Colorado Desert, La Quinta was founded as a…
Once there was a town. Rice, California, formerly named Blythe Junction, west of the Colorado River, between Twentynine Palms and the Arizona state line. Now the place is just a lonely train siding with the tattered remains of a few buildings, an ubiquitous “shoe tree” and an abandoned airfield watching cars race by at 90 miles…
The town of Oro Grande, dates back to 1852 with the founding of a trading post along the Mojave River. Gold mining operations began shortly after. First known as “Upper Crossing,” and then “Halleck,” Oro Grande was later named after the first mine found nearby. The name literally means “big gold” in Spanish. The history …
We originally referenced 100 of our favorite desert books five years ago. We still enjoy browsing museum gift shops and used book stores for nuggets of gold in the form of guidebooks, nature guides and history books. Discovering obscure out-of-print books is extra fun. Many new books have been published recently that also deserve our…
Update: Brendan O’Brien –not the Pearl Jam producer– bought the Route 66 Mother Road Museum property from the city and will be reopening Barstow’s Route 66 Mother Road Museum on Saturday, March 22, 2025, at the same location. Former museum proprietors, Deb and Ken Hodkin, are enjoying their retirement. Route 66 has lost another gem….
Note: We gave a presentation about this subject on September 14, 2023, to the Big Bear Historical Society. This article is the culmination of a month’s long research project. We also debuted a video, which we plan to upload to our YouTube channel. Our warmest thanks goes to historians Anne Roark, Jonni Vindiola, Mark Durban,…