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100 Years of the Mother Road

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Route 66 at Amboy in the Mohave Desert

If you’ve used the Google search engine today, you will have been reminded that this is the one hundredth anniversary of U.S. Route 66, the “Mother Road” that stretched from Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier two miles from where I live. Of course, now it’s California Route 2 between Centinela Boulevard and State Route 138 near Wrightwood.

As John Steinbeck wrote in Grapes of Wrath:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.

I have ridden three segments of the Mother Road. My favorite is in Arizona between Seligman and Oatman, where I visited Grand Canyon Caverns, which is run by the Hualapai Indian nation. The first time I took that road, I picked up a Hualapai hitchhiker who needed a lift to the Greyhound Bus Station in Kingman. We had a pleasant ride there until I discovered that the tribal police were waiting for him there to take him into custody. Apparently he had been to a wild party the previous night and did something to put him afoul of the law. I never did find out.

The other two segments were thus:

  • A short stretch in California between the Amboy Road and Kelbaker Road through the now deserted crossroads of Amboy
  • A very desolate stretch in New Mexico between Laguna Pueblo and I-25.

I don’t count the stretches of Route 66 that are coterminous with the Interstate system. It’s an entirely different feeling on the Interstate.

Amboy: Signs of Life

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On our long road back from Las Vegas, we stopped for a few minutes in Amboy, on the “shore” of Bristol Dry Lake. In past years, I jokingly referred to Amboy as California’s equivalent of Tolkien’s Mordor. This time, the café was actually open; gas was being sold; and beverages and snacks were available.

One has to consider that Amboy is no longer really on the road to anywhere. It is where Old Route 66, the “Mother Road,” meets the road to Twentynine Palms. You can take Route 66 east from Barstow, but the road is closed past Kelbaker Road, which goes north to Kelso and ends up in Baker. That’s the way Martine and I took, staying on 66 only as far as the turnoff to Twentynine Palms, where Martine used to work as a civilian employee at the Twentynine Palms Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command (MAGTFTC).

Although there was some human activity visible at Amboy, including a post office across the highway (?!), the desert heat is incredibly fierce. I can’t see anybody being comfortable there except for a few minutes around dawn or dusk. So I doubt you’ll see a McDonald’s or a Starbuck’s there any time soon.

The Land of Mordor, Minus the Shadows

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Beautiful Downtown Amboy

Beautiful Downtown Amboy

There are several places in Sunny California which I would compare to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mordor. You know he place I mean:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Except the places I would liken to Mordor are singularly without shadows. Curiously, they are all connected to dry lake mining operations. The grimmest of all is Amboy, on the original Highway U.S. 66. It lies a few miles east of Barstow, a hellhole in its own right, which is a rail junction and the gateway to Fort Irwin.

Today the population of Mordor—I mean Amboy—is perhaps four. Roy’s Coffee Shop and Cabins is no longer a going concern, unless someone is filming in the neighborhood. (Bagdad Cafe was filmed in Bagdad, a few miles west on 66.)

Amboy owes its existence to Route 66, but also to Bristol Dry Lake, which contains some 60 million tons of salt for your French fries.

Bristol Dry Lake

Bristol Dry Lake

Also in the area are mines containing Boltwoodite, a relatively rare form of uranium, along with gypsum, calcite, and fluorite.

I got to know Amboy when Martine used to work at Twentynine Palms at the U.S. Marine Base there (she was a clerical worker at the Naval Hospital there). A couple of times, I would pick her up, drive through the ghastly “community” known as Wonder Valley settled by veterans of gas attacks in World War I along a road which terminated at Highway 66 in Amboy. From there we headed to Las Vegas using the Kelbaker Road and the Morningside Mine Road. It’s a desolate area with sand dunes (near Essex) and some spectacular stands of Joshua Trees.

What are the other places in California I liken to Mordor? They’re right next to each other on the road from Ridgecrest and China Lake to Death Valley: namely, Trona and Borosolvay. Both are desolate but more habitable than Amboy. Yes, hell can be sunny sometimes.