Approaching Mojave

You're rolling up the last open stretch of desert before the town of Mojave, and few places in California pack this much history into one dusty crossroads. The town began in 1876 as a Southern Pacific construction camp — a hotel, a station, a scatter of saloons, and a few hundred railroad men laying track over the Tehachapis. When the first passenger train pulled in that August, Mojave became a hinge between the coast and the high desert it still is today.

Look back over your left shoulder, to the south and south-southwest, at the rugged hump of Soledad Mountain. Gold turned up here in 1894, and mines with names like the Golden Queen, Elephant-Eagle, and Yellow Dog boomed and busted for decades. The War Board shut the diggings in World War II, but in 2016 the Golden Queen reopened as one of California's last working gold-and-silver mines, leaching ore from open pits you can sometimes glimpse on the slopes.

From 1884 to 1889, Mojave was the railhead where the famous Twenty Mule Team borax wagons finished their punishing 165-mile haul out of Death Valley's Harmony Borax Works, dumping their loads onto Southern Pacific cars bound for market.

Ahead and to the right, on the east side of town, sits the Mojave Air and Space Port — an old 1935 mining-era airfield turned flight-test legend. Burt Rutan's Voyager — the first plane to circle the globe nonstop without refueling — was built here in Mojave, though it lifted off in December 1986 from the long runway at nearby Edwards Air Force Base. SpaceShipOne won the X Prize above this desert in 2004. Rows of mothballed airliners bake in the dry air, a working boneyard. On the ridges all around, the white blades of the Tehachapi Pass wind farms turn in the same relentless wind that once filled borax-wagon sails of dust.