A night ride in the Mojave Desert

CARMEL, CA – Route 66 enters southern California via a Mojave Desert town called Needles, where the closest gas station charges $3.89 for a gallon of 91 octane. That’s almost a buck more per gallon than what every other gas station sold it for on this trip.

Here the Mojave punishes the dry, brittle landscape just as it does along that last frenetic stretch of Route 66 in Arizona. Miles separate towns along the way. Several times the Mother Road strays wide of I-40, linking towns spread apart that the interstate bypassed decades ago.

I arrived in California near twilight on Monday, not long after zipping over the Black Mountains in the Mini. I was a bit behind my schedule and had been thinking about trying a night ride out in the desert since the planning stages of this trip. My brother in Oregon thought it would be a cool thing to do as well. “Pull over to the side of the road between towns and just stand there and look at all the stars in the sky,” he said. “It puts things in perspective.”

After gassing up in Needles I decided to follow the old two-lane to Barstow, roughly 150 miles away via the wandering route.

Driving at 55 to 60 mph and often being the only car on the road allowed me to casually survey the desert near and far as evening descended. As in west Arizona, I felt like both car and driver were but ants traversing a vast, desolate basin. Darkness arrived in phases, as though someone was slowly but methodically turning a dimmer switch. Clouds partially obscured the sky but the darker it got the stars I could observe grew brighter; other, less-luminous stars also came into view.

On the ground it was just me, the Mini and whatever entered within range of the headlights—mostly cracked and tar-repaired asphalt road. Occasionally a car would pass in the opposite direction, its headlights appearing in the distance to be heading straight at me, then in the center of the road, then in the left lane as the car whizzed by.

The feeling of isolation out there in the dark was palpable. I rolled down the window on the driver’s side and listened to the “shhhhh” of tires on road and the steady, muffled hum of the Mini’s engine. The air already felt much cooler.

Shortly after arriving in California I noticed the desert route had been periodically marked with large, white “Route 66” shields painted in the center of the roadway. Every once in a while these would now quickly appear and disappear in the headlights like ghosts from another time. In the pitch dark they were especially reassuring. Knowing the road in my headlights was in fact the Mother Road, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d see the ambient light of another desert town glowing in the distance.

I’m currently driving Route 1 along the California coast to San Francisco. Today it’s a marathon ride, 600 miles to Eugene, OR. That leaves little time for posting but I’ll upload photos and an account of the final Barstow-to-Santa Monica drive along Route 66 tomorrow. Thanks for reading!