The Desert Way with Jaylyn and John

Happy Wanderers Exploring the Southwest Deserts

The Desert Way with Jaylyn and John

Happy Wanderers Exploring the Southwest Deserts

new!

HOW A CHAINSAW BOUGHT A BRIDGE

Jaylyn and John98 mins

By 1963, Robert McCulloch moved his businesses to Arizona and bought 26 acres of land right next to Lake Havasu. He paid a little over a million dollars for the place, and Lake Havasu City was born. He even opened a chainsaw factory that employed several hundred workers. After all, every city needs a population. So then, when you’re at the top of your game, and you own your own city, what do you do next? A multi-million ton antique to decorate the place might be nice…

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Randsburg, California: Mine Blown

Jaylyn and John711 mins

Just what keeps the memory of this old town alive more than a century after it was born in the midst of the mining boom of the 19th Century?

Walk down Butte Avenue and, in the middle of the block, you will surely find the answer at the Rand Desert Museum.

Founded in 1943 and given over to Kern County in 1948, the museum is the heart and soul of the old town…

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Cabazon Dinosaurs: Tripping the Light Jurassic

Jaylyn and John08 mins

The creation of the Cabazon dinosaurs began in the 1960s by Knott’s Berry Farm sculptor and portrait artist Claude K. Bell (1897–1988) to attract customers to his Wheel Inn Restaurant, which opened in 1958 and closed in 2013.

“The dinosaurs aren’t dead and they never will be,” Bell’s daughter, Wendy Murphy of Costa Mesa, said. “He wanted to build a monument that would withstand the sands of time, and he has done that…”

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Camp Rock Spring: Fortified Paradise

Jaylyn and John311 mins

The Mojave Road. It still stirs the imagination like few other places in this amazing desert. Before the railroad came along in the years after the Civil War, the Mojave Road was the preferred, and often dangerous, route from all points east, to the Southern California coast. Rock Spring was an important stop along the trail. So much so that the U.S. Army designated it an official military post…

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Ludlow, California: More Than Ice Cream and Gasoline

Jaylyn and John2713 mins

Admit it. If you’ve traveled on the I-40 or Route 66, you’ve stopped for ice cream or gasoline. Maybe a corn dog.

The tiny ghost town of Ludlow, California is just off these long stretches of roads. You can’t miss it and if you do, you have miles to go before you can turn around.

We think Ludlow is the perfect little desert spot in the middle of nowhere. Ludlow is home to quite a few abandoned ramshackle houses and countless rusted cannibalized vintage cars. Ludlow even has its own pioneer cemetery. Like many ghost towns, what Ludlow has the most of is a wealth of history.

You could say Ludlow has it all…

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Rand District Cemetery: Memorials and Minerals

Jaylyn and John24 mins

Collected at Rand District Cemetery are the final resting places of some five generations of dream chasers, miners, merchants, ranchers, freighters, madams, promoters, vigilantes, teachers, movers and shakers, loafers and busy bodies; most from somewhere else, from all over the world, all brought here by the winds of fortune, and caught, like nuggets, in holes in the ground.

Burro Schmidt, famous for digging a half mile tunnel through a solid granite mountain for 38 years, left his beloved town only twice in his lifetime. Little did he know as happenstance would have it that years after his death a widow by the name of Tonie would pay the ultimate tribute to the miner by protecting his legacy for the rest of her life, and spending eternity next to his grave…

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