San Francisco native Robert Frost concludes his famous poem, The Road Not Taken, with the following phrase: “two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference”. As some of you know, I’m a healthcare financial consultant whose specialization is rural hospitals and clinics. This focus has led me to many “less traveled” roads over the years – visiting or passing through places that few city dwellers have ever even heard of: Heber, Landers, Walker, Beckwourth, Greenville, Westwood, Fall River Mills, Cedarville, and Adin to name a few.
Last week in the midst of a road trip, I decided to explore two “less traveled” California roads…Highway 247 between Barstow and Yucca Valley and Highway 62 between North Palm Springs and the Nevada border. As noted in my previous post, I was on a combination business/personal trip in southern California. After spending the weekend with family, I started the business portion of my trip with a drive to Victorville, a small city located at the southern edge of the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles (~90 miles). When asked about the desert, most people would probably say “desert is desert” – what’s the difference? Actually, as someone who lived a significant portion of his life in the southern half of California, I can tell you that there’s a big difference. The Mojave is a “high desert” (“high” due to its elevation above sea level), which experiences all four seasons of the year and where sagebrush and joshua trees predominate. The southeastern corner of California, including the community of Palm Springs, is in the Colorado or Sonoran desert. The city of El Centro, which I wrote about last July, is in the Colorado or “low desert”. You know where my preference lies when I tell you that the primary features of the low desert are its extreme heat and the creosote bush.
When I was young, prior to the construction of Interstate 15, Victorville was a sleepy little town on Route 66 that I mostly remember as the first “potty stop” on the road from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Today, the communities of Victorville, Apple Valley, and Hesperia form a mini-metopolis of approximately 250,000 people. So much for time marching on! After completing my work in Victorville, I headed east and picked up Hwy 247 just west of Lucerne Valley. At this point, the road runs along the backside of the San Bernardino Mountains and provides a “back door” access to the various mountain communities (Big Bear, Running Springs, Lake Arrowhead) via Hwy 18. As soon as I passed through Lucerne Valley, I entered the great wide open (see below, with a wink and a nod to Tom Petty).
The road continues southeast, eventually turning south into a pass that separates the San Bernardino Mountains from the Little San Bernardino range. Heading south through the pass, I came upon the community of Landers. There’s no town center or main street because it’s pretty much a scattering of houses and trailers bordering the highway for several miles. Landers is best known (if known at all) for two things. It’s the home of Giant Rock – an enormous freestanding boulder (see below), which in the period from 1950 – 1970 was a popular gathering point for UFO aficionados. The area was also the epicenter of a magnitude 7.3 earthquake in 1992 that caused considerable structural damage in the surrounding area.
At the southern end of the pass, joshua trees began to appear as I started the short descent into the town of Yucca Valley (still in the high desert), where Hwy 247 meets Hwy 62.
My destination was a hospital in the town of Joshua Tree, so I turned left (east) onto Hwy 62 at the junction. Like Victor Valley where I’d just come from, the towns of Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, and Twenty-Nine Palms (never use the number when writing it) now form a much smaller “urban” enclave (according to the U.S. Census Bureau) of about 50,000 people. Also like Victorville, I remembered these communities as consisting of a few storefronts that we would pass on our way to what is now Joshua Tree National Park (see below) or to the Colorado River.
Much of the area’s growth can be attributed to Joshua Tree’s elevation to National Park status and to the increased importance of the Marine training base outside Twenty-Nine Palms. That base is the staging area for Marines headed to Iraq and Afghanistan. If I had turned right (west) at the Hwy 247/62 junction, I would have descended through the Morongo Valley and into the completely different climatic and ecological zone of the Colorado Desert. In fact, while it seems to be a world away, Yucca Valley is only 20 miles from North Palm Springs and Interstate 10.
Back up in the Twenty-Nine Palms area, I remembered a road trip we once took along Hwy 62 to the Colorado River. From where I lived in the Los Angeles basin, it was much easier to get to the river (a popular spring break destination) by taking I-10 east to the town of Blythe and going north on U.S. Hwy 95. One year, we decided it would be more of an adventure to take the “back road” (Hwy 62) to the river. Of course, only in car-crazed southern California would this be considered an adventure. Anyway, the adventure was in courting adventure, not actually having one – because soon after you pass out of Twenty-Nine Palms, a roadside sign provides you with an innocuous, but ominous warning of what’s in store (see below).
We “got across” that day (using the famous phrase from the “Grapes of Wrath”) without any problems, arriving at the Vidal Junction where we turned south onto U.S. 95 headed to the town of Parker. All of the prime river destinations at that time were below Parker Dam. I could go on with spring break stories and to tell you about the dam, which is the deepest in the world and creates Lake Havasu – but you’d probably sleep through it all.
Suffice to say that for me, the roads less travelled represent a wonderful opportunity for reflection and peace that is one of the best parts of my job. Are you still awake?
