Motoring West

Last week I was on another of those business trips that have been keeping me busy this year - this time to Barstow, CA.  Now, Barstow is a small town, about halfway between LA and Las Vegas.  The Marines base there is one of the largest employers, if not the largest, and that was my destination.

I usually make a plan to take in some cultural aspect of these destinations...in this case, I only had the song "Route 66" as a point of reference, so I had resolved I would find a stretch of it somewhere and take a short drive.

Now, I had driven through the Barstow area once on the way to USC for graduate school, but to be honest that was a long trip with the destination within sight at last, so I didn't remember anything about passing through there - except a vague impression of the high desert.  I hope to have an image from one of my colleagues later in the week that I can share the one lasting impression of the drive through the first time.

Sure enough, the old highway was out to the east of the base - it also runs through downtown Barstow.  But there is a five mile stretch of it to the east.  It runs up and down small grades and arroyos, which turn out to be washes that feed into the Mojave River.  As Wikipedia notes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_River) this river flows mainly underground - the surface was certainly bone dry when I drove across it and took these two photos:

It was quite a thing of beauty to see.  I've heard tales of folks drilling wells near the river and finding the flow, which was quite strong.  And there was an anecdote on the base about some heavy rains that filled the streambed to a depth of seven feet - threatening to rise out of the banks even.  That is something that was honestly hard to imagine during my trip.