Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Dirt: Mojave Desert Crossing, Part 1

Mojave Desert Crossing, Part 1

There are faster ways to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. We chose the slower one, working east across the Mojave Desert on a series of dirt tracks and backcountry roads. The complete crossing covers several hundred miles, and Part 1 takes us only partway across. Along the way, the route connects abandoned mining country, Joshua tree woodland, volcanic terrain, an open dry lakebed, and one of the desert's more unusual memorial sites.

What interested me about this route was how quickly the Mojave changed once we left the main highways behind. At Evening Star Mine, the landscape is defined by what people removed from the ground. Near Cima, elevation and vegetation change the character of the desert. Around Black Tank Wash, the story shifts to volcanic processes measured in millions of years. Cuddeback Dry Lake makes the distance across the desert difficult to judge, and we finish this first leg at the Husky Memorial, where the focus turns from geology and mining back to the people who have traveled through this country.

Beginning in Mojave Mining Country: Evening Star Mine

Our first major stop is Evening Star Mine, where the surviving headframe and other mining remains immediately put the route into context. Dirt roads in the Mojave often exist because someone once needed to reach a mine, ranch, railroad, water source, or settlement. What now looks like an isolated backcountry track was once part of a working transportation network.

Approaching the Evening Star Mine

Evening Star was most active during the 1940s and produced tin, tungsten, and copper. The National Park Service identifies it as one of the better-known surviving mining sites within Mojave National Preserve, with a headframe, outbuildings, shafts, tunnels, and other artifacts still present. Those remains show how much infrastructure was required to extract ore from a location that still feels remote today.

From the mine, we continue east and leave the hard lines of the headframe and disturbed mining ground behind. Joshua trees begin to take over more of the landscape, and the Mojave starts looking very different from the lower desert we had been crossing.

Through the Joshua Trees to Cima

The road toward Cima moves through one of the Mojave's significant Joshua tree landscapes. The change is partly a matter of elevation. Higher ground around Cima Dome supports a broad Joshua tree woodland, making this section feel less like an open basin and more like a road threading through widely spaced trees.

Traversing the Dome Fire burn area

This landscape has also changed in recent years. The Dome Fire burned through the Cima area in August 2020, affecting roughly a quarter of the Joshua tree forest around Cima Dome. The National Park Service continues to study how that vegetation is recovering. For our crossing, Cima serves mostly as a waypoint. It is a small human reference point surrounded by a much larger landscape, and after passing through the area the character of the ground begins changing again.

Feeding Donkeys an Apple at Cima Store

Black Tank Wash and the Cima Lava Fields

Beyond Cima, pale desert soils give way in places to much darker volcanic ground. Near Black Tank Wash, we explore lava fields west of the main volcanic cone area. At ground level, the contrast is immediate. Basalt interrupts the lighter desert surface, and the terrain becomes rougher and more broken. After looking at mine workings created by people earlier in the route, this section shifts the story to processes that operated on a completely different timescale.

Sandy track at Black Tank Wash

The broader Cima Volcanic Field covers roughly 25,600 acres and contains cinder cones with associated basaltic lava flows. The volcanic history here extends for roughly 7.5 million years, an unusually long period for this type of volcanic field, with the youngest volcanic activity in the Mojave occurring approximately 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. Geological mapping in the southwestern portion of the field identifies both smoother pahoehoe lava and rougher a'a-style basalt surfaces.

Short hike up the face of Cima Lava Field

That is one of the reasons I like traveling through the Mojave this way. At highway speed, the dark ground might register as another change in color outside the window. On a dirt track, it becomes something we are moving directly through. The texture, broken rock, flow surfaces, and nearby cinder cones begin to explain what formed the landscape rather than simply providing a backdrop.

Crossing Cuddeback Dry Lake

From the lava fields, the route eventually opens onto Cuddeback Dry Lake. The change in scale is almost the opposite of Black Tank Wash. In the volcanic field, the terrain draws your attention downward to rough rock and texture. On Cuddeback, the foreground largely disappears. The open playa stretches toward distant mountains, and without trees, buildings, or other nearby objects for reference, judging distance becomes difficult.

Cuddeback Dry Lake Bed

Cuddeback lies within an interior-drainage landscape. Water moving across the surrounding desert does not ultimately reach the ocean. Drainages terminate in closed basins and playas such as Cuddeback Lake, carrying sediment toward the low ground before water evaporates or sinks into the surface. Geological mapping of the area also shows that the shape and orientation of these basins reflect tectonic structure as well as long-term sediment movement. What looks at first like an almost featureless surface is actually the collecting point for processes operating across the surrounding landscape.

Contemplating the crossing at Cuddeback Dry Lake

Crossing it also reinforces the scale of the larger trip. By this point we are well into the Mojave, but reaching Cuddeback does not mean we are approaching Las Vegas. There is still a considerable amount of desert between us and the Nevada line. Dry lake conditions can also change significantly after rain, and access rules vary by location. Our crossing represents the route and conditions encountered during this trip, not a guarantee that the same surface will be suitable for travel at another time.

The Husky Memorial

Leaving the open lakebed, we continue toward a very different kind of desert landmark. The Husky Memorial is not a mine, volcanic feature, or settlement. It is a place created gradually by the people who have spent decades riding motorcycles across the Mojave.

The memorial began in 1987 after desert racer Jim Erickson died. Members of the Desert Zebras Motorcycle Club placed his Husqvarna motorcycle into concrete at the remote site as a memorial. Other tributes followed. Over time, the location grew into a much larger collection of plaques, motorcycle parts, personal objects, photographs, stones, and individual markers honoring people connected to desert riding.

Husky Motorcycle Memorial in the Mojave Desert

That accumulation is what gives the site its character. It is easy to describe the Husky Memorial simply as a monument to fallen motorcycle riders, but the story is broader than that. People remembered there died for many different reasons, including accidents, illness, age, violence, and other causes. What connects the memorials is not one type of death. It is the community that formed around riding in this desert.

As an endpoint for Part 1, the Husky Memorial shifts the scale of the trip again. Evening Star Mine showed evidence of people coming into the Mojave to work. Cima and Black Tank Wash put us into landscapes shaped by ecology and volcanism. Cuddeback reduced the Jeep to a small point on a broad playa. At the Husky Memorial, the focus comes back to individuals and the relationships people have built with this place.

The Mojave Still Ahead

We have covered a lot of ground, but the Husky Memorial is only the end of the first part of the crossing. Las Vegas is still well to the east.

Kia Telluride and Seltos Tackling the Dirt Track

In Part 2, the route changes again as we continue toward Afton Canyon, deep sand and dunes, unusual desert monuments, Nipton and Goodsprings, and eventually the mountain tracks leading toward the Las Vegas Strip. The Mojave does not present itself as one continuous type of terrain, and that is becoming the larger story of this crossing. Every few hours, the road seems to introduce another reason this desert looks the way it does.

Watch Mojave Desert Crossing, Part 1

The video follows the first half of the crossing from Evening Star Mine through Cima, the Black Tank Wash lava fields, Cuddeback Dry Lake, and the Husky Memorial.

Watch the full video on YouTube:https://youtu.be/jZYDPibwphw

Part 2 will continue the route east through the Mojave toward Nevada and Las Vegas.