The Mojave Road

There aren’t many cycling adventures left that nobody has attempted before, so when I googled “iconic ohv routes” in a search for somewhere untraveled, one result intrigued me. Close to two decades of chasing the setting sun has left few California landscapes for me to see for the first time, but there are some big chunks of the more distant reaches of the state missing from my personal Strava heatmap. The Mojave was one of those.

Sure, I had driven through it many times, on the way to Vegas and beyond—ski trips to SLC, mountain biking in Moab, and along its southern fringe to the Grand Canyon and the piney plateaus of northern Arizona. And the high desert pays us a visit annually when the Indian Summer sundowner winds blow hot and strong down coastal Southern California canyons. Thanks to one Mr. Dennis Casebier and the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association, I can now claim a more intimate connection with the endless washes, Joshua Trees, and drifting sand.

From the Colorado River to Camp Cady near present-day Barstow, the Mojave Road is one hundred and forty miles of history: centuries of Mojave Indians traveling from spring to distant spring, a few short decades when wagon trains traversing the vastness bought supplies from California to mines in Arizona, a ranching backwater, and World War II desert warfare training ground. Not coincidentally, the route links life-sustaining desert springs spaced a day’s travel by foot apart: thirty mile intervals, more or less, if the springs are flowing and accessible, that is. The railroad rendered the doubletrack surplus, and Dennis Casebier painstakingly resurrected it as a motorized recreation trail in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

In my research for this project, I found sparse accounts from bikepackers traveling through the Mojave National Preserve, but, as far as I can tell, nobody had attempted to pedal it unsupported in a single push, crossing the desert reliant only on the springs. I did learn that outside of my pedal-powered bubble the Mojave Road may be off the figurative beaten path, but it is a well-established route among the 4x4 campers presently branded as “overlanding”. It intrigues me that so little cross-pollination had occurred between these overlapping groups of outdoorspeople; it seems there is a lot of opportunity to experience interesting landscapes by mountain- and gravel bike, since the average speeds are similar and we seek out the same terrain, solitude, historical sightseeing.

The full tally of sandy miles was just too far to safely travel in a one day, even for a professional, but I think the 122 miles I completed from Fort Mojave to Afton Canyon are a realistic challenge for a fit and well-supported rider on a mountain bike equipped to tackle the sand. I cannot in good conscience recommend attempting the route self-supported as I did; the distances between springs are not insignificant and the supposed year-round water sources may be nothing more than a worthless trickle. I carried three and a half liters of water between springs and should have had five, which meant two long stretches of fairly serious dehydration between water stops. This ride wasn’t a race, rather it was a water-limited adventure, a logistical challenge, and a dawn-to-dusk tracking of the sun’s arc across the desert sky.

___________________________________________________________________________ https://www.desertusa.com/desert-trails/dennis-casebier.html https://www.nps.gov/moja/planyourvisit/mojave-road.htm

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Ride Report and Logistics

If you are considering attempting this ride, start out by purchasing the Mojave Road Guide by Dennis Casebier. It is a highly detailed mile-by-mile route guide describing every turn on the Mojave Road, and is complete with a multitude of historical insights. However, it is not written from a human-powered perspective, and that's where I come in as your intrepid guinea pig.



Piute Spring felt too early to refill water, though it took me nearly three hours to climb the twelve mile long sandy wash from the riverbank, briefly descend, and then ascend once more to the rocky ruins of the old fort at the mouth of the canyon just short of mile 24 on the route. Time and a Wilderness designation makes the visit to Fort Piute a spur on the otherwise continuous Mojave Road, but it is worth a visit and would have been worth my time to walk down to the spring to top off the pack and bottles, had I known what was to come. Between two bottles and a pack, I was carrying about 3.5 liters of water, normally enough to travel just over fifty total miles to the second water source at Rock Spring.

The climb up into the high desert