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USA · 2022

Day 5 - California

6 May 2022

White farmhouse and sheds stand in a dry golden field.
A campground shelters a picnic table, tent, and parked SUV. The sun sets in a blaze of orange over a flat marsh. A vast sagebrush plain leads toward a rugged mountain range. A dark red sedan sits on gravel near a black SUV and utility poles. Boulders and old signs decorate the outdoor yard of Bottle Tree Ranch. An olive-green fighter jet sits parked on gravel. A vintage olive-green military jet parked on sandy desert ground beneath a cloudless blue sky. Close-up of a white airliner nose bearing the Mojave Air and Space Port logo. A gray military jet stands head-on, its red-tipped wings spread wide before desert mountains. A side profile of a gray aircraft with a bright red vertical tail parked in an arid field. A white jetliner with the Mojave Air and Space Port livery stands on the tarmac. The arched stone entrance sign for the Mojave Air and Space Port reads Imagination Flies Here. A black SUV sits on a gravel lot beside a calm pond ringed by marsh plants. A red trailer pump with a thick green hose sits by a reedy pond. A still green pond reflects the blue sky, ringed by reeds and dry grass. A long freight train of yellow and black cars rolls across a flat, dry plain. A green dome tent sits beneath a wooden shade shelter beside a parked SUV. Orange freight locomotives pull a train past a white house on a dry plain. A white two-story farmhouse with a porch sits behind a fence in dry grassland. A long freight train stretches across the horizon of an enormous dry field. A green gabled building reads 'Tulare County Free Library' above a white porch. A white building with a bell tower stands behind a fence near white salt flats. A dark wooden veranda frames golden grassland and a quiet rural road. An old white station house sits beside the tracks as a freight train rolls past. Old wooden barns with green roofs stand in dry pasture behind wire fencing. A small timber shed sits alone in golden grassland, flanked by a wooden building corner. A timber walkway leads between historic wooden buildings across dry grassland. White farmhouse, dark barns, and a rusted metal wheel lie in golden grassland. A long low building with a shingled roof spans behind scattered trees and a cracked road. A gray gabled building with a shaded porch sits beside trees, an old barrel, and a wayfinding sign. A small red clapboard house with a shingled roof and wraparound veranda stands on a green lawn under a bright sky. An elongated white wooden building with a dark shingle roof and a row of windows sits beside a cracked road and small green trees. A long red wooden homestead with a shingled roof and open porch stands behind green grass with a large bushy tree. A white house with teal door and window trim, a hip roof and brick chimney stands behind a wire fence on dry golden grass. A white house with teal trim and a dark roof shows figures on its porch, fronted by a thin young tree on dry ground. A pale mint-green building with a stepped false front, big display windows, and a white-railed entrance stands on dry ground with a visitor at the window. A dark green board cabin with white-framed windows and a chimney pipe sits beside a big bushy tree in golden grass. A golden grassland scene shows a green cabin, red gate posts, an old wooden wagon, and dark sheds beneath a vast blue sky. A small green wooden cabin with a white porch stands in a dry grass field. A vintage red railroad boxcar painted 'Santa Fé Route' rests on a short track. A dark board-and-batten farmhouse stands in tall golden grass beside an old wooden wagon. A rusty vintage piece of farm machinery stands on a concrete pad in a dry field. A white farmhouse with a dormer roof stands in grassland under soft evening sunlight. A person in dark clothing stands at the front door of a pale farmhouse. A teal-painted farmhouse with white trim sits behind a dark wooden fence on a green lawn. A blue farmhouse with white porch railing and dark support posts is framed by trees. A leaning tree stands before a white farmhouse with a stone chimney and a rail fence. A white clapboard house with a shingled roof stands beside a weathered wooden barn. A white house with a small cupola stands in a golden prairie field behind a cross-buck fence. A blue-gray building with a chimney and white-trimmed door sits alone in dry grass. A dirt path leads to a blue-gray building beside a long open-sided barn. A mint-green clapboard house stands behind rail fencing beside a large leafy tree. A mint-green clapboard house rises behind golden grass and rail fencing. A row of historic red, white, and brown buildings stretches across a dry field beside a paved path. Warm sunlight falls on a weathered wooden barn and shed surrounded by dry golden grass. A cream-colored landmark with wood-shingled gables and a small square tower stands alone in dry grass.
Journal Notes

General

California is the most populous state of the United States and one of the largest economies in the world, and its identity rests on the range of its landscapes rather than on a single one of them. The state reaches from the temperate rainforest of the north coast to the deserts of the south east, from the cliffs of the Pacific to the high Sierra, and the route that crosses it from the deserts of Nevada and Arizona to the farm country of the interior passes through two of the most distinct regions of the west: the Mojave Desert and the Central Valley.

The Mojave is the smallest and driest of the four deserts of North America, lying in the rain shadow of the southern Sierra Nevada and the Transverse Ranges. It is named after the Mohave people and covers parts of south eastern California, southern Nevada, north western Arizona and south western Utah. Most of it lies between 2,000 and 4,000 feet, which is why the region is known locally as the high desert, and its topography follows the basin and range pattern of parallel mountain ranges and dry valleys. Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, lies within it.

The Central Valley is the opposite of the desert in every respect. It is a broad, elongated and almost flat valley that dominates the interior of the state, between 60 and 100 kilometres wide and about 720 kilometres long from north west to south east, covering roughly 47,000 square kilometres, or about eleven per cent of the land area of California. The Coast Ranges close it to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east, and its watershed extends over 160,000 square kilometres, more than a third of the state.

The southern half of that valley is the San Joaquin, the breadbasket of California. It draws on eight counties, among them Kern, Kings, Fresno, Merced, Stanislaus and part of Tulare, and although the region is predominantly rural it contains four dense clusters of population around Stockton and Modesto, Fresno, Visalia and Porterville, and Bakersfield. Tulare County alone counted 473,117 residents at the 2020 census, with its seat at Visalia, and it extends from the floor of the valley eastwards to the Sierra Nevada, where Sequoia National Park and part of Mount Whitney lie inside its boundary.

What makes the valley productive is water. More than seven million acres are irrigated from reservoirs and canals fed by the snow of the Sierra Nevada, and California as a whole produces more than half of the fruits, vegetables and nuts grown in the United States. The county was named after Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes, which was drained for agriculture and now survives only as a shallow basin in the neighbouring county, filled in the wettest years and dry in most others.

History

People have lived in California for more than thirteen thousand years, and the region contained one of the densest and most diverse populations of indigenous North America, with hundreds of tribes speaking distinct languages. In the desert the Mojave people gave the desert its name, and the farming communities of the valley and the coast lived from acorns, fish, game and the produce of the wetlands long before the arrival of Europeans.

Spanish exploration of the coast began in the sixteenth century and settlement followed in the late eighteenth, when the mission system established a chain of stations from San Diego to Sonoma. The missions became centres of agriculture and of colonial administration, and they also brought about the disruption and decline of the indigenous communities around them. California then belonged to Mexico before it was transferred to the United States in 1848 at the end of the Mexican American War.

The discovery of gold in the same year transformed the territory within a decade. The Gold Rush brought hundreds of thousands of people from the eastern states, Latin America, Europe and China, and the mining camps of the Sierra foothills were followed by the farms, the railways and the cities that made the modern state. Route 66 belongs to the next chapter of that movement: established on 11 November 1926 and signed the following year, the highway ran 2,448 miles, or 3,940 kilometres, from Chicago to Santa Monica and became the main road of westward migration during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Route 66 lost its traffic to the interstate highways in the middle of the twentieth century and was officially removed from the highway system in 1985, but it left behind a long corridor of small towns, motels, filling stations and roadside signs that are now visited as heritage. The same decades produced the aviation industry of the desert. Kern County opened an airport east of the small town of Mojave in 1935 to serve the gold and silver mines of the region, and in 1941 the federal government improved it for national defence with two asphalt runways, each 4,500 feet long, and a taxiway.

Agriculture in the valley grew into an industry in the same period. The draining of Tulare Lake, the digging of canals and the building of reservoirs turned the dry grassland of the southern San Joaquin into one of the most productive farming regions of the world, worked by successive waves of settlers from the eastern states, from Mexico and from the dust-blown plains of Oklahoma and Texas. The railway, which reached the valley in the second half of the nineteenth century, carried the harvest out and brought the settlers and their supplies in, and the small stations and farm buildings that stand along the line still mark that history.

Geology

The geology of California is among the most complex and active in North America, because the state lies along the boundary between the Pacific and the North American plates. The San Andreas Fault system is the best known expression of that boundary, and the movement along it, together with the uplift of the ranges and the erosion that follows, continues to reshape the landscape from year to year.

The Sierra Nevada is the clearest result of the process: a long block of the crust raised along its eastern side and composed largely of granite that solidified deep underground and was later exposed by uplift and erosion. The same range produces the rain shadow that makes the Mojave a desert, since the moisture carried eastwards from the Pacific falls as snow and rain on the western slopes and little of it reaches the valleys beyond.

The Central Valley is the trough between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges, filled to a great depth with sediment washed out of both. Its surface is flat because that fill is young and has not yet been cut into by the rivers, and the two large river systems that cross it, the Sacramento in the north and the San Joaquin in the south, meet in the delta before flowing into San Francisco Bay. It is this combination of level ground, deep soil and available water that makes the valley farmable on such a scale.

The Mojave owes its character to elevation as much as to latitude. Most of the desert lies between 610 and 1,220 metres above sea level, which keeps the summers slightly less extreme than those of the Sonoran Desert to the south but makes the winters cold. The parallel ranges and basins that cross it were formed by the same tectonic extension that shaped the basin and range country further east, and between them lie playas, dry washes and broad plains of gravel and rock.

Wind and water are the two forces that finish the work. Rain in the desert arrives in rare and violent storms that move sediment from the mountain fronts onto the alluvial fans, and the wind sorts the finer material and carries it away, leaving the surfaces of closely packed stones that are known as desert pavement. Creosote bush, yucca and the occasional Joshua tree grow where enough soil has collected, and the scrub vegetation of the Mojave is described in the botanical literature as a community of its own, distinct from the vegetation of the deserts on either side.

Things to See

The Mojave Air and Space Port is the most surprising place on this route. It lies at Mojave, at an elevation of 2,801 feet or 854 metres, and consists of three runways on an area of 2,998 acres, or 1,213 hectares. Its activities fall into three groups: flight testing, the development of the space industry, and heavy maintenance and storage of aircraft, which is why rows of airliners stand in the desert beside military jets and experimental machines.

The airport was opened by Kern County in 1935 to serve the mines of the district, and it was improved for defence purposes in 1941. Its later history runs parallel to the rise of aviation in the desert: the clear air, the enormous empty spaces and the long runways made it a natural centre for testing, and on 17 June 2004 it received the designation that gave it the name it carries, as the first facility in the United States licensed for horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft. In 2022 the formal name was extended to include the Rutan Field addition.

For the traveller the airport is a place to look at rather than to enter. The entrance sign, the stored airliners along the perimeter and the aircraft parked in the open are visible from the road, and the town of Mojave itself is a small desert settlement with a railway, a few motels and the straight streets typical of the high desert. Beyond it the land opens into scrub and dry washes towards the mountains.

Route 66 runs through the same country, and its remains are still there for anyone following the old alignment. The road came through Barstow, Ludlow and Amboy on its way to the coast, and the communities along it preserve the ordinary architecture of the mid twentieth century: motels with neon signs, filling stations with tall canopies, cafes and trading posts. Long sections of the highway have been superseded by the interstate, and the emptiness of those stretches is part of their attraction.

The Central Valley begins where the desert ends. The transition is abrupt: the Tehachapi Mountains close the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, and beyond them the landscape changes to irrigated fields, orchards, vineyards and the long lines of the railway. Visalia, the seat of Tulare County, is a town of tree-lined streets and brick blocks that grew as a market centre for the farms around it, and the smaller places along the line preserve the timber verandas, storefronts and station buildings of the same period.

The farm buildings are the real monuments of the valley. White farmhouses with deep porches, wooden barns, sheds, windmills and the occasional vintage boxcar of the Santa Fe route stand beside fields of alfalfa, cotton, citrus and grapes, and the scale of the agriculture becomes clear from any small rise in the ground. The county library in a gabled building of the 1910s, a school, a church and a cemetery are often all that remains of a settlement that once had a post office and a general store.

Two national parks stand within reach of the valley, and both belong to the same mountain system that makes it fertile. Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon lie east of Visalia in the Sierra Nevada, where the giant sequoias grow, and Mount Whitney, the highest summit of the contiguous United States, stands on the county boundary. From the farm country the road climbs in a matter of hours from irrigated fields to granite and pine forest.

The practical notes for the route are the notes of the desert and the valley together. Water, shade and fuel are scarce between the towns of the Mojave, the summer heat is dangerous in the middle of the day, and the distances between settlements are long, while the valley in winter can be cold and damp in a way that surprises visitors who know only the California of the coast. The reward is a crossing of the state that shows the two halves of its geography in a single day: the empty high desert and the irrigated garden that feeds much of the country.

References

  1. Wikipedia contributors (2026). California. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California
  2. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Mojave Desert. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert
  3. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Mojave Air and Space Port. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Air_and_Space_Port
  4. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Central Valley (California). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_%28California%29
  5. Wikipedia contributors (2026). San Joaquin Valley. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Joaquin_Valley
  6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Tulare County, California. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_County%2C_California
  7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). U.S. Route 66. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_66
  8. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sierra Nevada. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Nevada
  9. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Death Valley National Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_National_Park
  10. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchison%2C_Topeka_and_Santa_Fe_Railway
  11. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Kern County, California. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kern_County%2C_California
  12. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Visalia, California. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visalia%2C_California
  13. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Agriculture in California. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_California
  14. Melosi M.V. (2022) The California Gold Rush: Placer and Hydraulic Mining. Water in North American Environmental History. 75-85. doi.org/10.4324/9781003041627-11
  15. Vogel D. (2019) Gold Mining. California Greenin’. 22-47. doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691196176.003.0002