The Kelso Depot, formerly the Kelso Depot, Restaurant and Employees Hotel, and now home to the Mojave National Preserve Visitor Center, sits in the heart of the Mojave Desert within the National Park Service’s Mojave National Preserve. Kelso Depot is one of the Mojave National Preserve’s star attractions—it played a major role in shaping the…
Update, November, 2025: Claudia and Jim Spotts have officially retired. We thank them for their years of dedication to the museum and wish them the best on their well-deserved retirement. Where did your intrepid Desert Way wanderers go today? Landers, California, of course. Why? Well, we were 31 years too late for the big earthquake,…
Love him or hate him, one has to admit Pegleg’s story is intriguing. It is clear people knew different versions of the same man, as their stories vary wildly. According to On the Trail of Pegleg Smith’s Lost Gold: Legend and Fact Combined to Provide Fresh Clues to the Location of Pegleg Smith’s Famous Lost Mine, he…
Shoshone, California, “The Gateway to Death Valley” is an interesting village with a full-time population of about 31. That’s 31 people who can wake up and go to sleep with this panoramic view of their home. Dublin Gulch is on the southwest outskirts of Shoshone. The caves were dug out of compacted volcanic ash from…
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…
It’s a cool desert evening on November 18, 1954, and the day’s show is over at the New Frontier Hotel and Casino on the emerging Las Vegas Strip. Still, the show must always go on. The young entertainer, along with his valet, Charles Head, are getting ready for an all-night drive to Studio City, near…
Greetings from Camp Cady, California! Armistice Day (later to be named Veterans Day) is still about 60 years away, but here we are, taking you back in time to the loneliest, meanest U.S. Army outpost in the United States, a year before the Civil War went hot. It is a day in 1860, and we’re…
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…