RIDING THE MOJAVE ROAD : Centuries Old, It Allows Travelers to Journey Both Through Time and the Desert

The Mojave Road. Some call it America’s longest artifact. Others say it’s the best way to see the heart of America’s largest desert.

But for the several hundred recreation vehicle enthusiasts who drive the 130-mile road each year, the Mojave Road is a highway leading back in time, into the 19th Century, when its travelers were Indians, stagecoaches, miles-long freight wagon trains to and from Arizona, mailmen, the U.S. Army, and cowboys herding sheep and cattle from California to Arizona. After the Apache wars of the 1870s, it was the only road linking the Colorado River to Southern California’s coast.

The Mojave Road begins on the California side of the Colorado River. Across the river, in Arizona, lie the ruins of Fort Mojave, an Army base from 1859 to 1890. The road ends at the site of an 1860s Army encampment, Camp Cady, not far from Barstow, just off I-15.

Although the distance is only 130 miles, it takes two days to travel it, counting stops to visit historic sights.

In order to make the trip, sturdy, four-wheel-drive vehicles--lots of them--are needed. The Mojave Road traverses some of the West’s most beautiful scenery, yet also some of its most remote and formidable terrain, where you seldom see another vehicle and the nearest pavement is miles away. Traveling caravan-style, Mojave Road veterans say, eliminates the possibility of turning a pleasant weekend into a survival drill.

Vehicle breakdowns are common. The road is so rough in places, 5 m.p.h. seems breakneck. Sometimes vehicles must drive over half-buried boulders. Other sections are so washboarded they can seemingly loosen your fillings. In one spot, near Kelbaker Road, the road is so deeply eroded that RVs almost completely disappear into the gouged-out road.

Why would anyone risk rock-punctured tires; smashed oil pans, mufflers or gas tanks; paint jobs cut up by sharp brush, cactus or dust storms; getting stuck in soft sand and generally beating the stuffing out of a vehicle, just to drive across an old desert road that few people have ever heard of?

“It’s the history, the mystique of the road,” said Dennis Casebier of Corona, a civilian engineer for the Navy and founder and president of Friends of the Mojave Road.

“It’s the only way to see a large portion of Southern California--the Mojave Desert--that still looks exactly the way it did to the first men to travel overland over Southern California to the Pacific Coast. The desert hasn’t changed much since the mid-1800s, and the Mojave Road gives you a chance to experience the desert the way the Indians, the Army, the old cattle ranchers, the stagecoach passengers saw it.”

Friends of the Mojave Road do maintenance and repair work on their trans-Mojave trips, such as maintaining the rock cairns (instead of signs) that mark the Mojave Road at dirt road intersections. Casebier has written the definitive book on the subject, a hardback mile-by-mile guide to traveling the Mojave Road, “Guide to the Mojave Road.”

Recently, Casebier led a 16-vehicle caravan over the Mojave Road, on a two-day crossing, starting at dawn on the shores of the Colorado River. Folks who travel the Mojave Road with Casebier travel in sort of a rolling lecture hall. Over Channel 14 on his CB radio, he tells the story of one of California’s oldest roads.

Here’s how it went, on the Mojave Road, with Casebier’s “Classroom on Wheels”:

Sunrise, west shore of Colorado River, 15 miles north of Needles--Casebier is standing on the river bank, his back to the barely visible ruins of Fort Mojave, across the river. About 40 members of Friends of the Mojave Road gather around, shivering in the cold morning air. Across the river, beyond the old fort site, lights twinkle.

“You are gathered here this morning on the great river of the West,” Casebier says. “And you are in the heart of the Mohave Indian Nation. They were agricultural Indians, they planted in the overflow areas of the river, much as the Egyptians grew crops along the Nile. Every June and July, the river came over the banks. As the waters receded, the Mojave Indians followed them, planting corn and squash.

“They traveled the Mojave Road and other trails to the coast, to trade for shells with coastal tribes.

“Over there, you can still see the cement foundation for Fort Mojave. With the establishment of Fort Mojave, the Mojave Road became a wagon road. After 1890, the fort became an Indian school. There was once a ferry at this site, and this was known as Beales’ Crossing.”

Lecture One over, everyone climbed into their vehicles and headed West, across Highway 95, and up into a rocky pass in the Dead Mountains, now aglow with the rising sun.

As the vehicles bumped along the rocky road into Piute Valley, Casebier’s voice came over the CB: “Jedediah Strong Smith was the first American to reach the California coast overland and he did it by walking through this pass in 1826 and 1827. And it’s believed the first non-Indian to use the road was Father Francisco Garces, the Franciscan, in 1776.”

While the caravan snaked through Piute Wash, at 7:45 a.m., Casebier came on the radio to announce: “OK, it’s customary that we take a break here. We assume everyone had at least one cup of coffee this morning, and this is an area where we have bushes of respectable size on both sides of the road. Once again, we will exercise our customary deployment of gentlemen to the left, ladies to the right.”

Fort Piute--In the 1860s, the U.S. Army built five forts or way stations along the Mojave Road, to protect travelers and to escort deliveries of U.S. Mail. Fort Piute is the first such fort today’s traveler reaches after leaving the Colorado River, 22.3 miles into the trip.

The fort was built in a bouldered canyon, about a half-mile from the Mojave Road, at a spring. Casebier points out the cut-rock remains of the fort:

“What you see are the remains of two roofed structures, one for horses, the other for soldiers. The soldiers always stayed close to the horses, because Indian raiders occasionally made off with a horse or two. For most of the life of Fort Piute, 18 men were posted here. “Mail stages came by here twice a week, in both directions, from Los Angeles to Arizona, and the soldiers escorted them.”

A sign near the largest of the old rock buildings proclaimed:

Fort Pah-ute Constructed in 1867 By United States Army Troop 1030 Cerritos, Calif.

Lanfair Valley--The old road had climbed to 3,250 feet, and from a storm of several days earlier, small patches of ice and snow remained alongside the road. Mule deer tracks were visible in the moist soil. Joshuas, junipers and pinions had replaced cactus on the land, and there was a crispness to the mid-day air. To the north, more snow could be seen on the top of the New York Mountains.

As the caravan approached what’s left of another Army fort, at Rock Spring, Casebier explained a confusion of names.

“Turn-of-the-century settlers in the Mojave called the Mojave Road Government Road because there was so much U.S. government traffic on it,” he said. “We like to call it the Mojave Road, because that’s closer to what the Indians called it. Officially today, it’s the Mojave Road Recreational Trail. It’s a myth that this was the Indians’ only road to the coast. They had a network of trails. This happens to be the one they chose to show the white man, in the middle of the last century. We don’t really know how old the road is but something like 500 years would be a good guess, based on what anthropologists say.”

Fort Rock Spring is a small canyon where year-around water bubbles from the ground. On this day, at noon, puddles are frozen. The site is best known to desert travelers for a specimen of 120-year-old graffito. In 1867, a soldier climbed high on the canyon wall to scratch out: “Stuart 4th Inf. May 16”.

Casebier: “Fort Rock Spring was considered one of the worst assignments in the U.S. Army, and most of those who were posted here deserved it.”

Only faint signs of a rock corral remain of the fort, which had about 20 men stationed there. It was lonely, miserable duty. The officer lived in a natural cave in the hillside and his men “hutted” themselves, according to Casebier. There was a high desertion rate. The fort was abandoned in 1868 because the mail route was moved to another road and because local Indians were no longer perceived as hostile.

Above the fort site is an old stone house, built in the 1920s by Burt Smith, a World War I gas-attack victim seeking pure, clean air. Doctors told him he had only a few years to live. In his little house above the ruins of Fort Rock Spring, he lived 30 years. An artist, Carl Faber, currently lives in the stone house.

Gunslingers Dept.--Casebier told of range wars in Lanfair Valley, of conflicts between cattlemen, homesteaders and shepherds; of bootleggers and moonshiners; of hot-headed, hard-drinking cowboys on the lam, and disputes over water at sites such as Rock Spring and Government Holes.

Two gunnies of the 1920s in the area, Bill Robinson and Matt Burts, had a showdown in 1925 at Government Holes, a well about two miles from Rock Springs.

“Both of those two gunslingers were said to be able to keep a tin can in motion with continuous firing from their .45s,” he said. “When they finally had it out, they emptied their revolvers into each other at point-blank range.”

After the shootout, in a shack at Government Holes, visitors one day found the bullet riddled bodies of both men, about six feet apart.

On the way to Cima Dome--The caravan left Round Valley at a point that was the highest of the trip, 5,300 feet. It was bright, sunny, and 44 degrees, in early afternoon. Casebier chose the occasion to tell the story of when camels were brought to the Mojave Desert.

“The U.S. Army conducted an experiment from 1856 to 1858, to find out how camels would work on the Mojave Road,” he said. “Originally, it was the idea of Jefferson Davis, who in the 1850s was secretary of war. The Army was losing lots of horses and mules, due to the heat. The camels worked out fine, except for one major problem: They terrified horses and mules. The experiment went on hold when the Civil War started, and was never resumed.

“It’s interesting to speculate if whether or not we’d be rounding up wild camels today in the Mojave, had the Civil War never occurred.”

While descending from the Mid Hills range, the Mojave Road can be seen twisting up the west side of Cima Dome, a faint, but enduring scar on the desert. Descending a graded portion of the Mojave Road from the Mid Hills at 1:30 p.m., the caravan crossed the first pavement seen since Highway 95, at dawn. It was the Kelso-to-Cima county road.

The drive up the side of Cima Dome is perhaps the roughest of the trip. A century’s worth of floods and runoff have washboarded the road. Speeds were reduced to less than 5 m.p.h. The caravan passed by the ruins of another 19th Century Army installation, at Marl Springs.

After an hour of slow, bumpy going, the caravan reached the site of probably the most spectacular view of the trip. The Providence and New York Mountains, among the highest in the Mojave, rose above the desert floor. The view imparts a special feeling of the desert, as a silent, majestic place, without time.

The campsite--Cresting the side of Little Cima Dome, Casebier plucked an audio cassette from beneath his dashboard and put it on his cassette player. “I always like to play this here, it sort of enhances the scenery,” he said, grinning. He placed his open CB microphone in front of the speaker in time to catch the first refrains of the theme from “Bonanza,” Boston Pops version. Next came “Rawhide,” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

The campsite was a flat area a few hundred yards off the paved Kelbaker Road. As the 16-vehicle caravan rolled in at about 3:30 p.m., John and Barbara Mathews were already busy at work, building the fires which would cook the traditional mid-trip camp dinner of the Friends of the Mojave Road, Mojave Road Stew.

At the end of the first day’s travel, only one vehicle breakdown had occurred, and that one occurred just a few miles from the campsite. Rich Timmons had driven his rig over a cattle guard of experimental design. It doesn’t work. It knocked the nut off his differential housing, and he lost all his oil. Someone came up with a replacement nut. Oil was added, and travel resumed.

After the RVs were parked and tents pitched, the Mojave Road travelers gathered around the main campfire, where hunks of desert wood burned noisily.

“Well, what do you think of the road so far?” Casebier asked a first-timer.

“Ten years ago, I walked it. Took me eight days. I’ve studied the history of the Mojave Desert for 25 years. I used to worry about RV traffic on the Mojave Road, I wasn’t sure what effect it would have on it. But I was also worried about allowing the road to fade into history, forgotten. So, since 1970, we’ve worked fairly closely with the Bureau of Land Management on management policies regarding the road and other desert issues.”

In years to come, Mojave Road RV travelers may be able to drive a 400-mile desert historic route known as the Ivanpah Loop. Casebier and his Friends of the Mojave Road are mapping out a 400-mile Mojave route that would link portions of the Mojave Road with other 19th Century Mojave roads, mining camps, way stations and ranch roads.

Conversation at dinner--delicious Mojave Road Stew, brandy-spiked coffee--was about a report from the expedition’s scouts, Neal Johns and Spence Murray. They’d been dispatched to check what recent rains had done to Soda Dry Lake, traversed by the Mojave Road for about eight miles. The report: Too soft. A detour was planned for the following morning, from the nearby paved Kelbaker Road to Baker, west on the I-15 Freeway a few miles to the Zzyzx turnoff, and back on the old road, heading west.

Zzyzx--Casebier brought his caravan to the ancient shore of Soda Dry Lake, where he told the tale of one of the Mojave Desert’s most fabled characters, Dr. Curtis H. Springer. Springer, in 1944, on the site of another old Army way station, the outpost at Soda Springs, built a health resort. To name it, he wanted the very last word in the English language, and concocted “Zzyzx,” pronounced Zye-zix.

Springer espoused the curative powers found in mineral waters of nearby springs, the evils of drink, abstinence from arguing and old-fashioned religion. He advertised in newspapers and magazines, and his taped radio messages were heard across America. It was a thriving commercial enterprise by the 1950s. But the BLM, contending Springer had never acquired legal title to the land, began eviction proceedings in 1968. In 1974, he was forceably removed.

Today, the old resort is a University of California conference center.

The Mojave’s Grand Canyon--The Mojave Road rolled over the Mojave River Sink flatlands and into Afton Canyon, called by some the Mojave’s “Little Grand Canyon.” The Mojave River, a largely underground, eastward-flowing river, and possibly the only one in California that flows away from the sea, is forced to the surface in Afton Canyon by subterranean rock dikes. The caravan splashed through the shallow, narrow stream in several places.

The vehicles drove through the picturesque canyon, beneath 200-foot-high rock walls. On one canyon side, Union Pacific Railroad tracks were on a shelf, just above the river bed.

Road’s end--Westward Mojave Road trips once ended at the site of Camp Cady, an Army encampment on the Mojave River in 1860, and later from 1865 to 1871. However, a private school now occupies the site and permission to pass is required.

On this day, the end of the Mojave Road was Martha’s Cafe, on Highway 91 just east of Harvard Road, adjacent to I-15, 20 miles east of Barstow.

Casebier thanked members for their help on the expedition and explained how one could keep abreast of “Friends of the Mojave Road” activities.

“Subscribe to the Baker Valley News,” Casebier said. “When our membership got up to 1,500, it got expensive to mail the newsletter. So I mail it to the Baker Valley News, and they run the whole thing.”