Experience the Classic West Coast Road Trip
In deep winter, my restlessness fully fledged, I started planning my biannual trip to Vegas, that geode of a city that sparkles amid the Mojave’s thick dark.
At about four hours driving time from Southern California, Las Vegas, NV is the ideal long weekend road trip destination – and not just to gawk at the insanity of amputated king crab legs heaped on ice cube mounds near earth’s hottest nook. The drive itself is part of the Las Vegas ritual and all part of the guilty party.
The I-15 Exodus
Palimpsest 66 (Cajon Pass, CA: Dec. 2023)
For SoCal travelers destined for Vegas, all roads lead to the I-15, and we quickly joined the herd on a Thursday mid-morning.
Although the Inland Empire’s suburban creep must finally cease at the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains’ stout feet, drivers squeeze through the two ranges via the Cajon Pass and emerge like glistening kidney stones into the high desert.
Everything before this point is familiar terrain for most SoCal residents. The routes are still close enough to home, they evoke commute rather than trip. But after the Cajon Pass, when the landscape mutates into unfamiliar desert – when the first town’s name sounds like the last whisper of a man dying in Death Valley – Hesperia – a name wheezing with despair – then you know you’re on your way to Vegas.
You just have to get through the traffic first. As Pluto’s gate for all SoCal souls destined for Sin City, the Cajon Pass has grown increasingly congested, and coupled with what seems like eternal construction, is one of the slowest parts of the 3+hour journey.
It’s a rocky, rugged space. Everything has been chewed up and spit out by weather and time, leaving grisly mineral hunks, like the so-called “Mormon Rocks.” These jutting sandstone boulders evoke hard blubber, fractured molars, swooping bones, breaching whales, frozen eruptions, a playground for erosion. You’ll know them as soon as you see them, but their appearance shifts like clouds the longer you look, the harder you try to sightsee.
The rocks’ name hails from the colonists who sheltered beneath them in 1851 en route to claim San Bernardino for polygamy and bicycles. Indeed, the whole canyon is an archive of infrastructure and monuments pioneers erected to memorialize their tiny feats among the mountains, such as Route 66, the Stoddard Monument, and McDonald’s. These pushpins and staples tack down the illusion that all this was for the taking, despite it being Yuhaaviatam homeland.
Route 66 meanders alongside the I-15 like an old dog wandering after a sheep herd. If you choose this route, you’ll quickly realize that every other Vegas trip traveler also had the same idea to drive the historic road, so you’ll have to creep along at an old-fashioned pace. This option puts drivers at eye-level with the freight trains struggling up the mountain via even more sensuous curves, moving as slowly as undercranked film.
On both routes, the wind bullies everybody, everything, batting at trailers so they shiver and sway. Be prepared for the 6%+ grade: turn off your AC, open the windows, and know you are climbing the body of one of the many mothers of the Mojave. Soon you too will enter the rain shadow.
The High Desert, CA
Open Arms (Victorville, CA: Dec. 2023)
You never really leave the mountains behind when you’re in the Mojave.
Even after a descent, you’re still in “high” desert. Perhaps its the connotations of drug-induced jubilance, or maybe loftiness, but the I-15 trifecta of Hesperia, Victorville, and Apple Valley embraces its high desert identity. All three cities have been steadily growing since 2000 as Southern Californians seek cheaper housing farther east of the Southland, worming deeper into the land of sand — testing, testing, how far they can creep into America’s gnarliest wilderness.
Chances are, you’ll miss most of Hesperia. It shies away from the I-15, whispering at the relentless traffic from a distance. But Victorville crowds against the interstate, flaunting its rebar-esque comfort, shouting at drivers to take the next exit. It’s a sturdy little city that’s selfish enough to nest right on the banks of the Mojave River. It sucks up the rare water, and amid the sudden vastness, we heeded its hard call like an obedient dog.
Take the off-ramp to the Starbucks. Join the bathroom queue. Empty your anxious bladder. Give noxious sacrifice to your stern savior. A drizzle of urine. A splash of wetness. Recycled wastewater. Your egesta will quench someone else’s thirst. And here’s a venti coffee for all your future altars.
Barstow, CA
Dead Sea Scrolling (Barstow, CA: Dec. 2023)
Look at Barstow from above and you’ll see the streets end in nubs constantly gnawed on by sand and sun, like dogs jawing bones.
It’s a city trapped in an hourglass. A sand-globe town. As time passes, the citizens sweep away the sand, sweep away the sand, sweep away the sand that always returns. One day, enough people will set down their brooms – will stand with hands on hips, peer into the distance, and decide to give in to the Mojave – and the city will turn to dunes.
In the meantime, Barstow remains the best stop for road snacks, and most importantly, the last chance for cheap gas before entering the real Mojave. Yes, Barstow thrives because Las Vegas-bound tourists deep down understand the looming dryness shouldn’t be underestimated and somebody forgot to fill up their Hydroflask.
The Ellipses
What’s missing fills the rest of the Mojave.
Municipal omissions fade right next to bright, desperate blips of living. Victorville…Barstow…Baker…Primm…PARADISE! In the realm of the ellipses, desertion spreads like a fungus as the survivors try to stave off extinction with strange sculptures, frantic graffiti, Ron Paul signs…
Yermo, CA
Jenny Rose Corpse (Yermo, CA: Dec. 2023)
First, there’s the triad of feminine diners at comatose Yermo.
Peggy Sue’s 50’s Diner throbs like a jukebox just off the I-15, as it has since the 1950s. Just across, the neon and chrome Penny’s Diner glints like a Googie dream.
This odd nostalgic pocket, this particularly fertile matriarchal acre, thrives probably because Peggy Sue’s bombards drivers with billboards for ten miles, and Penny’s just siphons off tourists when the wait gets too long across the street.
Peggy Sue’s is good for a cup of coffee and a look around. 50’s memorabilia bedazzles the inside, prehistoric statues mutely roar in a hectic “Diner-Saur” park behind the restaurant, and stuffed cowboy mannequins pose in odd places. It looks like giant children set down their toys in the middle of the desert and never came back.
Alas, the third member of the feminine diners — Jenny Rose Restaurant — sits shuttered just 500 yards away, on the north side of the I-15. Despite serving nothing, people still flock to the heavy-browed building to sight-see abandonment and for a photo-op with the fading heart-shaped sign-turned-headstone.
We stopped for our own photo-op with Jenny Rose on our Vegas trip. Like a big chunk of amber, it’s a perfectly preserved diner: caramel chairs, bulbous booths, and a long counter trapped inside, just waiting for diners. There’s even a Sorry, we’re closed sign in the window, as if the owners have just stepped away for the day, rather than a decade.
Perhaps it’s apt that the jilted Jenny Rose marks the entrance to Ghost Town Rd., which leads up to the circa-1880’s mining ghost town of Calico that’s now a lively tourist destination.
If you want to see a real, living ghost town instead, just drive through Yermo proper, which was abandoned by the I-15 in the 1960s. Sun-bleached house and commerce fossils glare around town, as graffiti clings desperately to the high ground of these signs and walls, sensing that to touch the sand would be to disappear.
Newberry Springs, CA
A Permanent Mirage (Newberry Springs, CA: Dec. 2023)
The desert is filled with the dead’s hard remains.
Humans don’t dismantle things here, they just leave them to be scavenged by the heat, the centuries, and curiosity. America’s first waterpark – Lake Dolores Water Park – was born in a void about ten miles east of Yermo in 1962, died there in 2004, and now lives on as a giant vandalism playground.
In-between, Lake Dolores was modestly successful, reincarnating as the Rock-a-Hoola Waterpark, and then the Discovery Waterpark, before permanently shutting down. When I took my first Vegas trip in 2009, graffiti was just beginning to germinate on the closed buildings, towers, and pools. A few tentative fat letters here, a tendrilled tag there.
Nowadays, colorful excrescences coat every hard surface, shouting bold gibberish at the I-15 traffic, at the vastness, at the fact that we’re all gonna’ die some day, BUT SYMBOLS ARE IMMORTAL! As a result, the water park is more vibrant than in its heyday, a strange desert superbloom.
Over the years, I’ve deciphered the florid messages. It turns out, each one really says: I was here. I remember me.
Ron Paul Revolution
About ten miles up the road, after passing the Halfway to Vegas point – though halfway from where, nobody really knows – the Ron Paul Revolution sign rears up out of the empty desert landscape.
It’s anchored by a now defunct store with MARKET scrawled in quavering red letters on its roof. That’s what happens out here: the buildings become billboards advertising absence and the billboards sell delirium.
Baker, CA
Fresh Alien Jerky (Baker, CA: Dec. 2023)
One road towns lose businesses like dominos.
Baker is essential and decaying. The desert and the pandemic picked at its brinks, forming little building scabs. Where Vegas is a fortress buttressed by glass, metal, and air conditioners, Baker is drywall and wood, eroding. A procession of gypsum corpses draped in graffiti lace. A death knell, an SOS ignored by everyone who pauses to rest here.
Despite the decay, this tiny town bustles with Vegas trip travelers thirsty for civilization after 45 minutes of desolation. The hottest spots are The Mad Greek, the Baker Travel Plaza, and Alien Fresh Jerky. The first, like Peggy Sue’s, thrives through pure advertising aggression.
The jerky joint is abbatoir-esque, with walls coated in bags full of buffalo, cow, and alligator – animals fragmented into meat hunks. A fortune teller alien awaited our coins, perhaps to warn us that Vegas would give us no fortune, just a chance at chance.
The new-ish Travel Plaza is a hectic collection of people deciding which greasy item they’ll regret least. We stopped at the Coffee Bean counter in search of Wi-Fi for a virtual work meeting, to no avail, but the cashier directed us back down Baker Blvd. to the long-standing Burger King. Free “Whopper Wi-Fi” radiated from its innards, and we sat outside, milking the connection, just like the aliens above Baker.
(The Burger King has since gone the way of others: it huddles, blue and shuttered, one many abandoned bodies in this patch of Mojave. Meanwhile, a new building has mushroomed behind it, creamy and clean, soon to be Peet’s Coffee, and just far enough off to avoid the stink of rot.)
Mojave National Preserve
From Sun (Mojave National Preserve: Dec. 2023)
After the desperate hustle of Baker, all that still remains is the Mojave and the Mojave is all still remains except for the Joshua trees.
These yuccas grow confidently and vigorously from horizon to horizon in a centuries-long stampede towards the sky. If you wait long enough, you’ll see the Joshua trees grow, you’ll see life, living.
They are electric, barbaric, historic. The heat and aridity have pruned them into strange shapes – some might say coral, or Biblical figures, or aliens, but after serious scrutiny in the stop-and-go traffic, I realized they most closely resemble Beaker the Muppet.
Anybody is welcome to enter the Mojave National Preserve via the Kelbaker and Ivanpah entrances, but most cars resolutely follow the thin, two-lane tarmac strip of the I-15 destined for Nevada. We, too, kept in line, breaking formation only to pass slow pokes, before quickly falling back into the long march to Sin City: Vegas Trip rat-tat-a-tat, Vegas Trip rat-tat-a-tat!
The Sun and the Mirage
I beheld, after passing between the Mescal and Clark Ranges, three lakes of light – each ringing a tower that snared my sight with glare as bright white as ice. What strange phares were these, with endless zealots encircling their bases, tens of thousands of shiny square faces staring at the sun and gifting the rays to their colossal saviors?
Why it’s just the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, which uses mirrors to concentrate our favorite star’s energy into the heart of a massive boiler capping each tower. Steam forms and whoofs into turbines, spurring them to churn out the electricity that powers all the kitchen lights Californians flick on at midnight.
This solar “system” is both spectacular and utilitarian. Like some alien art installation, some otherworldly lighthouse trio leftover from a long-dead sea, Ivanpah signal-glints to Vegas-bound travelers that they have nearly arrived, nearly arrived, nearly arrived, nearly arrived…
But the Ivanpah Solar System isn’t even the strangest feature along this stretch of road. I beheld, less than a mile from the towers, nine lakes of water, each hugging a green.
Actually, you can only see this from inside. The highway skims past verdant, mature trees peeking over an embankment, betraying water nearby, along with a grass-ringed Primm Valley Golf Club sign like some strange crop circle sodded on sand.
This full-blown golf course in the desert gobbles up spring water and transforms it into recreation. Pure leisure. It’s the perfect prelude to Las Vegas.
Certainly, the spring will dry up at some point and the golf course will become all bunker and stump – the organic version of the Rock-a-Hoola Waterpark.
Welcome to Nevada
Dusk Hypnosis (Primm, NV: Dec. 2023)
Primm, Roach, Borax, Jean
Grim Primm straddles the state-line and welcomes everyone to Nevada with Wild West camp. The vaguely offensive trifecta of Whiskey Pete’s, Buffalo Bill’s, and Primm Valley Resort rears up out of the Mojave dark like some Lewis and Clark fever dream.
Over the decade-plus of my Vegas trips, Primm has visibly decayed, losing room lights like stars burning out in the desert night. It’s turned from a resort location into a genuine ghost town haunted by a few guests.
The once-famous Desperado roller coaster that used to rollick around Buffalo Bill’s now sits lifeless like some giant serpent’s skeletonized spine. At just 40 minutes outside of Las Vegas, Primm is much too close to the main action to be anything more than a place to pause.
Indeed, at the base of the massive resort corpses, the gas stations and fast food joints teem with transitory visitors. The semis line up like cigarettes at the Flying J Truck Stop, while sedans pack the Chevron gas pumps, filling their tanks with the liquified remains of life that died in another desert.
South Las Vegas Blvd scritch-scratches alongside the I-15 from Primm all the way to Paradise, and you can drive this strip of a side road until it bloats into the actual Strip. After Primm, comes Roach, Borax, and Jean, which sound like the meth-head siblings of the Three Stooges. The first two are mining ghost towns that you’ll pass by without ever knowing they were there, then gone.
Jean has made a name for itself as a rest stop 30 miles from Vegas, with the “World’s Largest Chevron” located at its circa-2018 Terrible’s Road House. While Primm seems to mostly suck in Vegas-bound travelers desperate for hullaballoo after the quiet of the National Preserve, Jean lures in all the tourists who wanted to get “on the road” right after their Vegas trip check-out, and now desperately need coffee and gas.
Since 2020, Jean hosted the shuttered carcass of Terrible’s Hotel & Casino, which contains the bones of the 1980’s Gold Strike Hotel and Gambling Hall. The false front complex was strangely reminiscent of fondant and floated in an enormous parking lot made even bigger by the absence of any cars. As of 2024, the whole shebang is being torn down and turned into a mega-industrial park that will surely attract travelers to stop and gawk, drawn in by presence amidst the overwhelming emptiness of the Mojave.
We left Whiskey Pete’s, Buffalo Bill’s, and Terrible’s behind like a bunch of half-remembered tall tales told by rich men around a desert campfire. Just ahead lay a true fiction constantly being rewritten and we were barreling towards becoming the coolest characters in it.
(Whiskey Pete’s has since closed its doors and now sits eerily quiet as everyone clamors for gas at the adjacent Chevron.)
Paradise, NV
Star Light (Paradise, NV: Dec. 2023)
Welcome to Paradise. How it has grown! – like thousands of dried yucca flowers strewn across the Mojave.
Everybody on the I-15 is in a rush and the sprawling city ushers them towards its core. Hurry up now, you don’t want to miss the party. Hurry up now, Vegas is happening without you.
If you’re arriving during rush hour on the I-15, which is always, you can skirt its meat by taking the parallel Dean Martin Dr. – though this industrial road once named Industrial Rd. puts you at eye-level with an alarming number of shooting ranges.
Those who prefer the traditional Vegas trip entrance should exit at Blue Diamond Dr and turn left to cruise up the south side of Las Vegas Blvd. You can’t miss the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” Sign jutting like a colorful, cocky rooster from the roadside, and a whole barnyard of tourists waiting for their photo op with the 65-year-old marker.
However, on my first Las Vegas trip, I learned to never again take the Strip all the way to my destination. Driving the Strip is all survival and no sightseeing. Better to be part of the swarm of pedestrians at every intersection than the poor car waiting to turn left for fifteen minutes as everyone’s bums caress their bumpers.
Now I cling to the freeway or the Jane Doe side roads as long as I can. Vegas needs no grand entrance; that comes after the check-in. And on the back roads, I can watch the city playing Whack-A-Mole with the desert, which rears up over and over in vacant lots.
Adjacent lowrider buildings tuck their skin and windows in and slowly get erased by the sand as the Strip gleams on…
TL;DR
Jenny Rose Autopsy (Yermo, CA: Dec. 2023)