{"id":9142,"date":"2026-02-22T00:32:41","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T00:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/?p=9142"},"modified":"2026-02-22T00:32:41","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T00:32:41","slug":"corridor-identification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/corridor-identification\/","title":{"rendered":"Corridor Identification"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A) The Mojave River spine (Colorado River \u2192 eastern Mojave springs \u2192 Mojave River corridor \u2192 Cajon Pass \u2192 San Bernardino\/LA)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mojave Indian Trail; Mojave River Trail; Mojave Road; Old Spanish Trail (where it drops into\/uses Mojave River and related desert crossings); Beale\u2019s Wagon Road (in its CA desert segment); Brown\u2019s Toll Road (as the Cajon gateway upgrade); plus the generic \u201cWagon Roads\u201d label when you\u2019re talking about the 19th-century wagonable evolution of the same line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea is simple: reliable water spacing and a workable pass dictated the alignment. The Mohave Trail conceptually underlies the later Mojave Road, and the NPS explicitly treats the Mojave Road through Mojave National Preserve as a branch of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail. Beale\u2019s route description also ties his Mojave Desert segment to the Mojave Trail\/Old Spanish Trail network, then notes the junction with the Mormon Road at the Mojave River. Brown\u2019s Toll Road is best understood as \u201cthe Cajon Pass switch\u201d that made the desert\u2013coast connection more serviceable (toll\/improvement era), not a whole new long-distance corridor by itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

B) The LA ↔ Salt Lake \u201csouthern route\u201d family (good-roads era branding laid over older travel)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salt Lake Road; Old Spanish Trail (northern route pieces); Arrowhead Trails Highway; and again \u201cWagon Roads\u201d as the pre-auto baseline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the family that turns into the famous LA\u2013Las Vegas\u2013Salt Lake motor corridor in the auto-trails era. The BLM\u2019s Arrowhead Trails Highway page is blunt about the lineage: the proposed\/marketed auto route followed the late-19th-century \u201cOld Mormon Road\u201d and the earlier Old Spanish Trail. The Arrowhead Trail\u2019s \u201cassociation\/branding layer\u201d starts in 1916 (organized\/incorporated that year) and is essentially a named-trail wrapper on that corridor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

C) \u201cGood Roads\u201d transcontinental overlays (names that often ride on top of existing roads, then feed into numbered highways)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

National Old Trails; Midland Trail; Route 66 (as the numbered successor in the Southwest); and sometimes Arrowhead Trails Highway where it shares pavement with the NOTR in Southern California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key point: these aren\u2019t necessarily new alignments end-to-end; they\u2019re promotional\/organizational systems that sign and improve what counties and states already had. FHWA and other summaries describe the National Old Trails Road Association as one of the early major named-trail movements (founded 1912). In the West, big stretches of the NOTR were later folded into US 66, which was established\/commissioned in 1926 (signing followed). The Midland Trail is another early signed transcontinental auto trail (signed by 1913) that overlaps conceptually with the named-trails era rather than replacing everything on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D) The Sierra\/Eastern Sierra north\u2013south family (LA ↔ Mojave ↔ Owens Valley and beyond)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sierra Highway \/ El Camino Sierra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This one is its own long corridor family, and it intersects the desert east\u2013west systems at junction towns rather than duplicating them. It\u2019s commonly framed as an early 20th-century promoted route (established\/advertised early, with later highway rebuilds) connecting Los Angeles into the Eastern Sierra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

E) The Tejon\/Tehachapi gateway family (LA Basin ↔ San Joaquin Valley crossings)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fort Tejon Road; Ridge Route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think \u201cnorthbound exit from the LA Basin\u201d rather than \u201cMojave crossing.\u201d The Los Angeles\u2013Fort Tejon Road is described as a successful wagon road solution over\/near the Tehachapi barrier, completed in 1855. The Ridge Route is the early engineered state highway-era answer (opened 1915) that finally made that link paved and direct in the automobile age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

F) San Bernardino\/San Gabriel mountain connectors (coast ↔ mountain communities, not trans-desert corridors)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rim of the World Drive; Angeles Crest Scenic Drive (Angeles Crest Highway); Van Dusen Road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are \u201cmountain access projects\u201d more than \u201cinterregional desert crossings.\u201d Rim of the World Drive is documented as opening in 1915 to connect San Bernardino with Big Bear through the range. Angeles Crest Highway construction begins in 1929 and the completed through-route opens much later (mid-20th century). Van Dusen Road sits here as an earlier wagon-road era Big Bear\/Holcomb access line tied to the 1860\u201361 gold rush logistics (often described as a wagon road built in 1861).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

G) Death Valley\u2013Panamint access network (mining roads, toll-road tourism era, park-era backroads)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

West Side Road (Death Valley); Road to Panamint; Eichbaum\u2019s Toll Road (same as \u201cEichbaum Toll Road\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This family is its own ecosystem: borax-era freight roads, mining camp supply lines, then purpose-built access to resorts\/tourism. NPS frames the borax era as transport over \u201cprimitive roads\u201d (1883\u20131889). The Eichbaum Toll Road is well-documented as a 1925\u201326 build from near Darwin to Stovepipe Wells (i.e., a deliberate west-side entry improvement). \u201cRoad to Panamint\u201d is best treated as the umbrella for the Panamint Valley\/Skidoo\/Rhyolite road-pushing phase in the 1906\u20131907 window and its successors; NPS history material and HAER\/other documentation talk explicitly about wagon-road development and the Rhyolite\u2013Skidoo road beginning in 1906 and being in use by 1907. West Side Road is the park backroad line on the valley floor\u2019s west side (modern status aside), squarely in the \u201cDeath Valley internal access\u201d bucket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A) The Mojave River spine (Colorado River \u2192 eastern Mojave springs \u2192 Mojave River corridor \u2192 Cajon Pass \u2192 San Bernardino\/LA) Mojave Indian Trail; Mojave River Trail; Mojave Road; Old Spanish Trail (where it drops into\/uses Mojave River and related desert crossings); Beale\u2019s Wagon Road (in its CA desert segment); Brown\u2019s Toll Road (as the … Continue reading “Corridor Identification”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1651,215],"tags":[2622,2620,2617,2616,2609,2610,152,2621,2625,2612,2618,2614,511,2615,766,2608,67,1118,2607,2606,214,593,79,1959,2127,765,128,231,2619,2542,2624,138,56,71,2613,2626,2627,2611,2623],"class_list":["post-9142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-articles","tag-angeles-crest-highway","tag-angeles-crest-scenic-drive","tag-arrowhead-trails-highway","tag-auto-trails","tag-beales-wagon-road-2","tag-browns-toll-road-2","tag-cajon-pass","tag-death-valley-roads","tag-desert-crossings","tag-eichbaums-toll-road","tag-el-camino-sierra","tag-emigrant-roads","tag-fort-tejon-road","tag-good-roads-movement","tag-historic-highways","tag-los-angeles-salt-lake-road","tag-midland-trail","tag-military-roads","tag-mohave-trail","tag-mojave-indian-trail","tag-mojave-river","tag-mojave-river-trail","tag-mojave-road","tag-mormon-road","tag-mountain-passes","tag-national-old-trails-road","tag-old-spanish-trail","tag-panamint-valley","tag-ridge-route","tag-rim-of-the-world-drive","tag-road-to-panamint","tag-route-66","tag-salt-lake-road","tag-sierra-highway","tag-stage-roads","tag-toll-roads","tag-transcontinental-routes","tag-wagon-roads","tag-west-side-road-death-valley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9144,"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142\/revisions\/9144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digital-desert.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}