Update 2021: Fellow former child actor, Paul Petersen, started a GoFundMe fundraiser to help cover Crawford’s medical costs. Johnny Crawford died in a personal care home in Los Angeles on April 29, 2021, at age 75, after contracting Covid-19 pneumonia which exacerbated his Alzheimer’s disease. Rest easy, cowboy. We are proud to have called you our…
Pasadena, California.The young girl sat in the garden, listening, as her grandfather, a self-made millionaire, told of floating above the Earth in hot air balloons, supplying intelligence on Rebel forces to the Union Soldiers standing below. Grandfather was Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, scientist and inventor. His influence on the world was notable indeed, and…
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…
It is a given that when researching information about a particular topic, one discovery often leads to another. Such is the case when we recently wrote about the T Cross K Ranch in Mission Creek Preserve, just down the road from Desert Hot Springs, California. Cabot Yerxa’s name kept popping up in old newspapers. An…
When Roy’s Hotel is not ground zero for multiple thriller film shoots or welcoming the throngs of dusty tourists getting their fair share of the Route 66 experience, the quiet of Amboy settles in all around.
The solitude is so profound it’s almost deafening. The peace of the ghost town with its long-abandoned St. Raymond Church and nearby pioneer graveyard consumes you. It invites you to explore and renew.
Give yourself time to absorb this little time capsule of a town and its cemetery just a bit east on Route 66…
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 desert has often played an important role in religions, spiritual enlightenment and artists seeking the esoteric. A half-mile past the turnoff to Pioneertown Road in Yucca Valley, 40 larger-than-life biblical statues from the mid-century rise from the rocky sandscape to offer a peaceful place for contemplation and renewal. It all started when Reverend Eddie…
There are currently 649 Cracker Barrel locations across the United States. But California was not one of them.
If you lived in California’s high desert, and got a craving for Cracker Barrel’s Southern specialties, you had to plan for a long road trip. The closest ones were in Kingman and in Yuma, Arizona, both respectfully over 200 miles away.
We know, because we’ve done it. More than once. Until now…
Harper Dry Lake bed in the Mojave Desert was the site of secret flight test programs conducted by the Hughes & Northrop aircraft companies during the 1940s, including the first flight by an American rocket-propelled aircraft. Howard Hughes tested aircraft and built a hangar here. Years later, it was decided Harper Dry Lake was the best place to launch the space shuttle’s heir apparent, the Lockheed Martin Venture Star…
Last week we wrote an article about our favorite desert books on our shelves. We would be remiss to our Texas friends and family if we overlooked our collection of Texas books. As many already know, we traded in the California desert for Bandera, Texas for a couple of years before returning to the land…
