A black-and-white photograph of a desert wildflower bloom on open sand, taken low and wide with the nearest plants close to the lens. Clustered flower heads and broad rounded leaves fill the left and the foreground, taller flowering spikes rise through them, and the bloom runs back across wind-rippled sand — the ripples throwing long shadows in low sun — to a low horizon of scrub with faint hills beyond. No road is in the frame, and the photograph carries no colour.
Bureau of Land Management California / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
California · Region

Route 66 & the Mojave Heartland

Route 66 crosses the Colorado at Needles and runs its emptiest miles — Amboy, the Kelso Depot, Calico's silver hills, and Barstow's Harvey House — through the homeland of the 'Aha Makhav, the People by the River.

8 places to explore

Before the highway, there was the river. The 'Aha Makhav — the People by the River, written Mojave by everyone who came later — farmed the Colorado's floodplain at this crossing for centuries, planting in the silt the spring floods left behind. Even the desert's name is theirs: it comes from their own word tied to the stone pinnacles above the river that newcomers called the Needles. The Nüwü, the Chemehuevi, ranged the dry country beyond the banks. Every road that ever mattered here — the wagon tracks, the Santa Fe rails, Route 66, then Interstate 40 — crossed the river where people already knew the way.

West of Needles, Route 66 runs some of its longest unbroken old alignments anywhere, two lanes of cracked tar through creosote flats where the towns thinned to a gas pump and a name: Goffs, Essex, Ludlow, and Amboy, where the Roy's Motel sign still stands against the sky. This was the stretch the Dust Bowl families feared most — the last hard test before the promised land, crossed at night with water bags slung on the fenders. Steinbeck wrote this desert into The Grapes of Wrath.

North of the old road, the Mojave National Preserve holds the deep desert at its best — the Kelso Dunes booming underfoot, the restored Kelso Depot, and one of the largest Joshua tree forests anywhere. At the region's western edge the silver camp of Calico climbs its striped hills, and Barstow — a railroad town before it was a highway town — keeps the Casa del Desierto, one of the grand Harvey Houses, above its switching yards. This is the emptiest country Route 66 ever crossed, and the least changed. Fuel up in Needles or Barstow and treat every open gas station between them as a gift; the old road offers long silences and little else, which is the point.

What to See in Route 66 & the Mojave Heartland

8 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

A desert sunflower bloom on the black lava field near Amboy Crater at sunset, hundreds of yellow flowers standing among dark basalt rubble and pale sand across the foreground, a low dark range along the horizon and a sky streaked pink, orange and violet above it. The cinder cone itself is not in the frame.

Amboy Crater

Amboy

A near-perfect black cinder cone off Route 66, one of California's youngest volcanoes and a National Natural Landmark.

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Natural Areas

The crest of the Kelso Dunes seen from on top of the ridge, a sharp sunlit spine of sand curving away to a high summit at the right with footprints tracking along it and dark gravel and dry stubble exposed in a line down the crest. The shadowed flank falls away to the left toward a bare desert flat, with a long rugged range across the valley and thin cirrus overhead.

Kelso Dunes

Baker

The Mojave's largest dune field, and one of the few places on Earth where the sand booms underfoot.

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Historic Sites

Lane's General Merchandise at Calico Ghost Town, a low adobe and timber storefront with LANE'S GENERAL MERCHANDISE painted large across its front, strung with coloured lights and hung with garlands, and POST OFFICE and GROCERIES signs in the windows beside it. A green farm wagon with yellow-spoked wheels stands inside a low picket enclosure in front of the store next to a heavy timber bench, three visitors are looking in at the doorway on the left, and the United States, California and a blue flag fly from poles at the right with the streaked Calico hills rising behind.

Calico Ghost Town

Yermo

An 1881 silver boomtown in the calico-colored hills, saved and rebuilt by the founder of Knott's Berry Farm.

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The 1914 Goffs schoolhouse, a single-storey Mission Revival building in pale stucco with an arcaded porch, red tile roof edging and a shaped parapet, standing behind a barbed-wire fence with a concrete walk running to its doors and a tall flagpole in front. Mesquite trees grow at either side and bare desert runs away behind it under a clear sky.

Goffs

Essex

A near-ghost on the pre-1931 Route 66 alignment, keeper of a 1914 desert schoolhouse and a WWII Army camp.

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Towns & Gateways

An archival black-and-white photograph looking down over Barstow. The Casa del Desierto Harvey House stands long and low in the middle distance, its arcaded galleries running the length of the frontage to a two-storey end block, with the Santa Fe yard crowded with wooden boxcars across the whole foreground. Beyond the depot a steel truss bridge crosses the Mojave River, a dark rock butte rises on the far bank, and bare desert hills close the horizon.

Barstow

Barstow

The Mojave's rail-and-road hinge, where the Santa Fe yards and Route 66 meet at the Casa del Desierto Harvey House.

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El Garces at Needles, a two-storey Harvey House in pale stucco with a tall Doric colonnade running the length of its upper loggia, NEEDLES lettered across the frieze and a scalloped parapet above. Palms stand at the left and a railroad signal gantry at the right, an empty asphalt lot crosses the foreground, and the ground-floor openings are shuttered and blanked.

Needles

Needles

Route 66's Colorado River gateway into California, anchored by El Garces, the Harvey House that Mojave hands built.

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Architecture

Kelso Depot seen obliquely in low backlit sun — a two-storey Mission Revival station with a curved shaped gable carrying the Union Pacific shield, KELSO lettered across the frieze and a LUNCH ROOM sign hung beneath it, a deep arcaded loggia running the length of the ground floor and awnings over the upper windows. Palms and a cottonwood stand on the lawn in front, the sun flaring through their crowns.

Kelso Depot

Baker

A grand 1920s Mission Revival rail depot standing alone in the deep Mojave, now the preserve's visitor center.

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Roadside Stops

The Roy's Motel and Cafe sign at Amboy lit at dusk, its red-outlined star behind a black panel with ROY'S in green neon, a red NO VACANCY bar beneath it and a white board reading MOTEL in yellow over CAFE in white, carried on two square posts with a small US 66 shield fixed to one. A finned 1950s sedan is parked on bare dirt at the left, the cafe glows through its glass frontage at the right under a long cantilevered roof, and a few people move between the pumps and the office. Dark mountains line the horizon under a sky running from orange to deep blue-black overhead.

Amboy

Amboy

Roy's Motel and Cafe and its 1959 neon boomerang, the most photographed lonely stop on Route 66.

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Scenic Drives through Route 66 & the Mojave Heartland

Scenic Byway

Route 66 in California: Needles to the Pacific

The Mother Road's last three hundred fifty miles: the Colorado River at Needles, the emptiest surviving pavement on the whole route, Cajon Pass, and the Pacific at the end of it.

349 mi · 9 hrs
Scenic Byway

Route 66: The Topock Crossing

Ninety-six miles of the Mother Road's hardest crossing — Kingman over Sitgreaves Pass to Oatman, then down to the Colorado River at Topock, where three bridges, a sacred Mojave geoglyph and a chromium plume all sit on the same half mile of ground.

96 mi · 3 hrs

Stories from Route 66 & the Mojave Heartland

History

The Alphabet in the Desert

Amboy, Bristol, Cadiz, Danby, Essex, Fenner, Goffs — the ghost towns strung along Route 66 east of Barstow are not a coincidence but a filing system, laid out in 1883 by a railroad that needed water every twenty miles and named its wells in order as it went.

6 min read

Route 66 & the Mojave Heartland rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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