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Victorville - Barstow - 1923
From Barstow to Victorville, a distance of thirty-seven miles, the route extends westward in a semi-circle thru the Mojave Desert, paralleling the Mojave River and the Santa Fe and Union Pacific Railroads. This part of the journey is over the desert road which has been thoroughly improved and good time can be made. Excepting a large cement plant at Oro Grande, and two or three small wayside stations on the route, the desert dominates all.
Barstow 1923 California Highways (colorized)
Traveling over the Mojave Desert, the motorist will see scattered groups and single specimens of that gaunt and twisted desert sojourner, the Joshua tree. Flinging its gnarled and scraggly limbs to the waiting silences, it is a type of loneliness and despair. But the Mojave has other and more pleasing sights. In late April and early May, its tawny sands are tessellated with a myriad billion of lovely flowers of more than all colors of the rainbow, carpeting its floors with iridescent tintings, which will prove a revelation of loveliness. Then indeed the desert is made to "blossom as the rose." In their blue and gold, their crimson and white, lavender and magenta, in pink and red, this mosaic of flowering beauty comes to dazzle all beholders.
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1923
