A Lookin4America spot you'll probably never visit

Amboy Crater National Natural Landmark

You’ll know what I mean when I say that yesterday was one of those wonderful perfect days. The weather was perfect with bright sunshine, deep blue skies, and pleasant warm temperatures—though Rowdy the black Pug found it a trifle warm.

The plan for the day was to drive from Desert Hot Springs to Amboy, CA (approximately 100 miles), a really remote spot along historic Route 66 along the western edge of the Mojave Desert. Why would we go to such a

spot, you ask? Well, the desert is really quite beautiful in its own stark way but especially now as the spring wildflowers bloom. The reports of carpets of flowers in the Amboy area energized us to head out for a look.
The monument plaque is actually a geocache (officially known as an earthcache) that requires you to log your visit online and then send an email to the person who designated it as an earthcache. They respond with an email congratulating you on finding it. It's a little strange, I know.

The second reason to travel to this area is the volcano. That’s right, VOLCANO. Perhaps as recently as only 500 years ago the Amboy volcano was actively erupting here. It’s cinder cone is the most perfectly formed in all of the contiguous 48 states, so it’s a neat thing to see.


Our family actually has a little history with Amboy Crater. I first learned of it in a college geography class in the mid-50’s and, along with some of my desert-camping friends, had visited several times.

After we moved into our new home in Cerritos, CA, in 1969 I took all of us, including the dog, out to the area around the crater where we collected a trunk full of lava rocks to use in building a planter in front of our living room windows.


Yeah, there's a geocache in that wall of lava but we couldn't find it. When all of the rocks look alike, it's really tough to see what is different or doesn't belong there. With such a warm day the thoughts of rattlesnakes and scorpions came to mind so we left this one for someone else.





The final reason would be to revisit a few of the most famous places along the “Mother Road”, old Route 66. Because so many westward migrants and tourists were stopping in the area to see the Amboy Crater, a guy decided a city should grow here to support them. He built a motel, a large gasoline service station and auto repair shop, and other facilities--he even installed the power poles for many miles to bring electricity out here. The U.S. Government followed with a Post Office. As tourists flocked to his businesses “Roy” prospered. That went on from the late 20’s into the 1970’s when President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, and Interstates 40 and 10, were completed and literally discarded Route 66 and all of the folks who lived and worked along it. Whole towns died and collapsed back into the land. It’s kind of the back-story behind the marvelous animated film Cars.

A TV show about two guys traveling in a snazzy red corvette on Route 66 generated a national outcry aimed at saving what was left of the primary route traveled by millions of Americans going west. Some people deliberately left the superhighway to drive the small parts of the “Mother Road” left to them. Even so, there were places so remote that no publicity could save them. Amboy seems to be one of the latter. The family of the original owner and others, right up to this very day, have tried to make a go of this place without success.

A gasoline station still functions beneath the huge neon sign erected In the 50’s – it not longer works – and maintenance is obviously being done on many of the buildings but that’s about it. On the windows of the motel office are signs directing movie location bookers to call a particular number if they want to arrange to film at the sight.

On our perfect day in which everything went exactly as planned and no bad things happened we enjoyed the wonderful wildflowers. There were carpets of yellow and purple all around us, but only right around the volcano. The nearby commercial salt harvesting operation probably had something to do with a lack of flowers elsewhere.

I tested the 1-mile dirt trail to the Volcano and decided not to try it that day on my scooter. The surface of the trail, at the point I stopped, was littered with 5 and 6” diameter lava rocks, any one of which was big enough to stop my scooter. I maybe could have made it by moving some of them but then I have no idea what lay ahead. I turned back only to Judy and Rowdy coming up the trail in search of me.

The final reason we came all of the way out here was to do some more geocaching and boy did we. Here Judy is carefully replacing one of our finds. We didn’t find all of the ones we looked for but found a resounding majority. Roy’s gave us the opportunity to get up close to this historic monument. The “Sole Tree” was fascinating though why people have thrown their shoes up into its branches for so many years is beyond me. Some of them even appeared to be in reasonably good condition. One of the stranger pieces of footwear is a pair of yellow swimfins up near the top on the right. Go figure.

Road Runner’s Rest was a sad statement about broken dreams. We dropped the Red Jeep Travel Bug, the subject of a previous blog article, in Woody’s Travel Bug Motel, an ammunition box located 300 feet off of a dirt road. From that cache we took the travel bug Just Sneakin' Around, a cute little tennis shoe on a key chain, that is bouncing around from cache to cache, aimlessly.

From another cache we picked up a couple of little dinosaurs for Alex and Andrew and saw a lot of really neat desert scenery.

On the way home we drove through the southern half of Joshua Tree National Park as we had heard the wildflowers were in full bloom near the Cottonwood Visitor Center. Well, they sure are but by the time we got there all of the canyons we drove through were in deep shade and the sunset shortly after we merged onto I-10, heading for home. We’ll probably go back in a few days to catch those flowers in daylight.

Okay, that was not great. It would have been a lot better had we gotten there while it was still light out but, given all of the other successes of the day, it was still JUST PERFECT.