Following the Back Roads ... Road Discoveries of the American West

by Guest Author Mark Loftin

Inspired by annual road trips of the American West, Mark Loftin recently left the "corporate life" to pursue travel writing and photography full-time. A Bay Area native, Mark grew up in Walnut Creek and has lived in San Francisco for the past 6 years. Mark just turned 30 and is looking forward to continuing the annual road trip of the off-the-beaten American West far into the future...

It began as a one-week road trip to drive grandma across Texas to see a doctor. It turned into a 5-week road odyssey of the American West, with me and my weathered pickup pulling into San Francisco 8000 miles (and about 3000 windshield bugs) later.

The dusty '92 Toyota had carried us through 15 states, reaching Mississippi in the South and Montana in the north. After visiting a friend in Los Angeles, a last-minute decision to travel north on Highway 177 through the Mojave Desert foreshadowed the dominating theme of the trip: taking the road less-traveled, or having the thinnest trace in the State Farm Road Atlas. Alternating between ever-changing geography and roadside curios, each highway number seemed to represent a different ride in a giant amusement park. The must-see tourist sites like the Grand Canyon were not to be missed, for sure, but it was the off-the-beaten-path finds that provided the true reward of discovery of the American West. After grandma had checked out ok, and with nothing pressing back home in San Francisco, the hidden reaches of the American West were open to explore...

About two hours out of Los Angeles on Highway 10, Highway 177's stark desert imagery lured me North. While not the longest stretch of road in the Mojave Desert at only 29 miles, it might register as the most visually desolate: Disappearing into heat vapors, it's feeling of pure nothing looked straight out of some post-nuclear road saga film, or a wrong turn Chevy Chase might have made in the search of Wally-World. Putting the road out of view, leaving nothing more than desert brush and the barren mountain ridges, the vision of Clint Eastwood spaghetti western comes to mind. Ironically, it was on this road leading to nowhere that I discovered something that brought my car to a quick stop. A lone tree? It looked impossibly out of place. But there was more...as I got closer, it looked covered in something more than heat-shriveled leaves. What were those things hanging from the dead branches? Blinking twice to make sure I wasn't already seeing mirages, they came into focus. Draped sporadically over the tree were about 50 varieties of...old shoes! After a few moments of wide-eyed contemplation, I decided it only proper to continue the tradition. So here I was, in the middle of absolute nowhere, hurling a tied pair of worn Nike's onto a dead tree...was I losing it?

If I was finding trees draped in shoes only two hours into this trip, what wacky discoveries may lie ahead? Not a half-hour later, sure enough, was another truck stopper: standing in complete solitude was a wooden sign, with painted arrows pointing the direction of every town within 200 miles. Was I in a Roadrunner cartoon? Again, I had to blink twice.

Roadside surprises like these schooled the eye for the quirky or nostalgic, and for the next 33 days, even in the most desolate corners of the American West, an eager sense of anticipation overpowered any indications of boredom. Treasures of pop art, like a row of 10 Cadillac's perched hood-first in the ground outside of Amarillo, Texas, or the frame of truck perched on stilts 50 feet high in the air outside Yucca, Arizona, continued to stop the truck en route to Texas. Rather than saving all the film for places like Zion National Park or the Grand Canyon, the camera was rolling with shots like these and what might be commonly classified as "junkyard material"...or to some, worthy of that wrecking ball. Along desert backroads and scrapped portions of the old Route 66 were boarded gas stations with weeded parking lots and empty coffee shops and dusty Formica counters, skeletons of once-bustling towns withering away since Highway 40 opened in 1968.

While rustic towns of yesterday like Amboy, California and Cuervo, New Mexico gave a real sense of forlorn American nostalgia, not all had been left for dead on cracked highways of the old "Mother Road." On a stretch of rolling hills between Kingman, Arizona and Seligman, a depression-era gas station in Hackberry was so well preserved I thought the Grapes of Wrath's Joad family would be pulling in any minute. In need of a fill-up and putting the nozzle in my tank, the smirking shop owner explained that not a drop had come from those pumps in over 30 years. The owner pointed east, towards Truxton, for gas. And appearing lost in the same time warp as Hackberry, a true slice-of-Americana was discovered there: The Frontier Cafe.

Still in business and under the current owner since 1957, it doesn't get any more authentic than their greasy-spoon cheeseburger. Striking up a conversation with a gray bearded trucker finishing up his meat loaf sandwich, I learned that it was near Valentine (the last town on this stretch before merging back with Interstate 40) that the last piece of the original Route 66 was completed in 1937. "...right up 'dare near Valentine..." he said as he started in on his cherry pie, "...it was finished the year I was born...and this shop didn't come around much later."

The sunsets in the barren reaches of the west could be as photographic as towns like Hackberry, but the key word is barren. Being caught behind a string of telephone poles, fast food restaurants or trailer houses at sundown could ruin that one-in-a-thousand photo, and sun seemed to sink faster the lower it got.

So at times there was only one solution - gun that gas pedal! This countdown to find the open terrain often made the last hour the day the most intense.

But other times the clouds themselves were all you needed. Over the boundless wheat fields disappearing into horizon of western Kansas off of Highway 400, they seemed to have a life all their own. Constantly changing shape, huge rain billows could transform into thin strings of cirrus. Sundown could produce pink cumulus pillows resembling lumps of cotton candy. The sun was constantly disappearing behind thick cloud basins, but again, this wasn't always bad thing; often there was a crevice or hole for sun's beams to escape.

Piercing the ground like slotted lasers, the amusement park could immediately transform into the mystical setting of a sorcery fairytale or yet another film set - Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Aside from the sights, and tastes, of the west's off-the-beaten-path, the radio was part of the whole experience. Garth Brooks dominated the airwaves in about every state but California. Southern Baptist preaching ("Don't ever, ever mention that word divorce, 'cause once it is brought out in the open, what happens? It becomes... a possibility. So DON'T DO IT. Just DON'T DO IT"!) was heard in the Missouri Ozarks, while Huey Lewis and the News dominated Kansas. One rock song seemed to stand out across all state borders, though: Styx's "Mr. Roboto," (which might be despised by even the most diehard fans of 80's rock'n'roll) was heard in eight different states!

Near the Grand Canyon on Highway 89, a Native American station came through, complete with the steady thump of a drum, tribal chants, and a haunting voice deriding "cars, computers and all things material." And New Age music, with it's spacey, atmospheric synthesizers and running-stream nature sounds, was the perfect background music for the surreal Mars-like rock formations and red-orange hues along Utah border roads such as Highway 163.

It was heading home down "The World's Loneliest Highway" (Highway 50) through the Nevada desert something happened. Sounding as random as the entire trip, the vision of a lone fiberglass Brontosaurus juxtaposed against Wyoming's mountainous scenery came into my head. Was I losing it again? Found outside of Dinosaur, Colorado, the creature's previous home could have been a miniature golf course. Yet the backdrop of Wyoming's Absoroka Mountain Range was worthy of the next National Geographic. Had I been on the road just one day too long?

But there was some meaning to this crazed connection, as it gives an idea of the sheer range of treasures the American West's Park of Random Discovery had to offer. Day one started off heading east from Redondo Beach, Los Angeles and continued through the barren Mojave Desert, rolling hills on a stretch of Route 66 in Arizona, and ended at the Grand Canyon just in time for sundown. Day 32 was leaving Colorado on Highway 70, which sent me through a narrow, rock-walled slot out of the Rocky Mountains and into the moon-like rock formations of Eastern Utah. Tracing the southern border of Salt Lake at sunset, the blinding sun reflection of the lake led up to it's source hovering just over the horizon. But this didn't end the day - The Great Salt Lake Desert (right) had me convinced I was on Mars.

What could be next? A roller coaster drive winding through Montana mountain wilderness or a rusty oven with its door hung open, leaning against a road sign reading "OPEN RANGE"? A roadrunner sprinting alongside the road or a 6-foot statue of a "Jackalope," the mythical half-rabbit, half-antelope desert creature rumored to mimic human voices and be aggressive with it's sharp horns (not to mention the team name of the Odessa, Texas minor league hockey team)?

While the more "touristed" sites like Yellowstone's Old Faithful and Zion National Park had to be visited, (after all, there must be a reason the tourists are flocking there in the first place, right?), many of them had already been seen before on a postcard, magazine cover, or calendar.

It was Winslow, Arizona at sundown (...standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona..." from the Eagles song "Take it Easy")...or a string of wind-sign caricatures mocking pop icons like Monica Lewinsky and O.J. Simpson along a Kansas wheat field...wind whistling like a chorus of a thousand Coke bottles being blown...(did I mention the tornado-warning siren blaring from Mullinville against the wall of storm clouds ahead?)...

These are what provided the true reward of random discovery.