Summit Inn, a popular roadside diner, destroyed by wildfire in Cajon Pass

The Blue Cut fire has scorched more than 37,000 acres so far. Satellite imagery captured Thursday shows the extent of the burn area. This "false color" image from NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite uses a combination of color and infrared bands to help distinguish burn scars and hotspots from vegetation.

Matt Hamilton
Los Angeles Times

One casualty of the raging wildfire in San Bernardino County: the Summit Inn, a popular roadside diner at the crest of historic Route 66.

Flames from the Blue Cut fire tore through the historic inn on Tuesday, according to video footage of the inferno.

After opening in 1952 [sic], the diner -- outfitted with red leather booths and walls adorned with memorabilia -- became a familiar spot for those traveling to and from the High Desert.

The Summit Inn, which recently changed ownership, had touted its celebrity clientele, including Pierce Brosnan, Clint Eastwood and Elvis Presley.

In 2014, a drunk driver slammed into the restaurant and plowed into the kitchen, causing an estimated $50,000 worth of damage, the Daily Press reported.

Video: Blue Cut fire consumes the Summit Inn.

Firefighters tightened their grip on the fast-moving Blue Cut fire overnight Friday, capitalizing on humid weather conditions to gain greater control over the 37,020-acre blaze, authorities said Saturday.

The fire, which is 68% contained, has destroyed 105 homes and 213 other structures in San Bernardino County since it broke out Tuesday for reasons investigators are still trying to determine.

The tally for California’s harsh fire season ascended to even grimmer terrain Saturday as officials announced that the Blue Cut fire in the Cajon Pass has destroyed 105 homes and 213 other structures.

As of Saturday night, the Blue Cut fire had burned 37,020 acres near the 15 Freeway in Cajon Pass and was 73% contained.

Highway 395 promoted as Three Flags Highway

Historians work to revive 'Mother Road of the West'

Natasha Lindstrom
Victor Valley Daily Press

It's not nearly as famous as Route 66, but Highway 395 — sometimes called the "Mother Road of the West" — carries its own historical weight.

In the 1930s, Southern Californians dubbed the thoroughfare the Three Flags Highway for linking Mexico, the United States and Canada.

During World War II, Highway 395 provided military convoys with a safe alternative to coastal roads deemed vulnerable to attack.

Even today, the Three Flags Highway offers a scenic ride isolated from the heavy traffic clogging routes through Los Angeles.

The Historic Route 395 Association in Southern California is now trying to revive the Three Flags name as part of an effort to preserve the vintage motor courts, gas stations, restaurants and signs that still dot the old route, which once stretched from the San Diego Bay near the California-Mexico border to the Canadian border in Washington state.

“For the High Desert, it allowed the tourist industry to come up through the Cajon Pass and to explore the Eastern Sierras,” said Jeffrey Harmon, founding member of the 395 association, “and it also provided the only north-to-south route for commercial traffic on the eastern side of the Sierras.”

In June 2008, the California Legislature unanimously approved designating Highway 395 as a historic route from San Diego to the Oregon state line. But legislators left it up to cities and community organizations to pay for putting up historic markers and promoting the designation.

“Everything south of Hesperia has been reassigned to either city streets or completely disappeared all together,” Harmon said. “That history is important to preserve.”

Tracing the thorough fare’s pre-1948 route, the association has already installed about 100 signs in Riverside and San Diego counties, slowly making its way toward San Bernardino County and the Cajon Pass. The group is giving talks at community events to spread the word and accepting donations to put up more signs, which cost about $70 each.

“We’re doing what we can to get people to slow down, get off that interstate, just take a drive on Highway 395,” he said. “It’s just such a beautiful route.”

Meanwhile, locals continue to wait on a Highway 395 realignment that’s been in talks for decades and other improvements to make it safer to travel the local stretch of the 395.

Take a 'monumental' tour of Cajon Pass

Santa Fe and Salt Lake Trail Monument (parks.ca.gov)

Mark Landis, Correspondent
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

For centuries, the Cajon Pass has been a primary corridor into Southern California, and a series of little-known monuments commemorate the pioneers who blazed the trails over the rugged mountain barrier.

There are nine unique monuments set in historic locations throughout the Cajon Pass. Each one tells a story of the hardships and triumphs faced by the pioneers who made the difficult journey.

The routes through the Cajon Pass began as simple footpaths used by Indians traveling from the inland deserts to the coastal regions of Southern California.

The first white explorer to travel through the Cajon Pass was most likely Spanish military Captain Pedro Fages in 1771, who was leading a band of soldiers hunting for deserters.

Other famous explorers including Padre Francisco Garces and mountain man Jedediah Strong Smith followed various routes through the Cajon Pass.

The most prominent group of settlers that traveled through the pass was a party of 500 Mormons who came by wagon train from Utah in June 1851. The task of hauling their heavy wagons down the steep slopes of the Cajon Pass was the final test of their grueling 400-mile journey.

The monuments are spread throughout the Cajon Pass, and all but three are easily accessible by car. Those that are accessible can be seen in an enjoyable afternoon road trip.

Stoddard-Waite Monument: The first monument set in the Cajon Pass was dedicated May 18, 1913 to commemorate the early pioneers who came by horseback and wagon train through the passage. Sheldon Stoddard and Sidney P. Waite, two of the most well-known pioneers who traveled through the pass in 1849 were honored attendees.

This spire-shaped monument, listed as California Historic Marker No. 578, was placed along the former Santa Fe/Salt Lake Trail. It is located in a thick grove of Cottonwood trees near the CHP truck scales on the southbound I-15, about three-quarters of a mile south of Highway 138. The monument is on private property owned by the San Bernardino County Museum, and is only accessible by special permission.

Santa Fe and Salt Lake Trail Monument: A second monument of similar size and shape was erected in 1917 just a few hundred yards northeast of the Stoddard-Waite Monument. A festive ceremony was held to dedicate the monument, once again attended by pioneers who had traveled the early wagon roads.

The concrete spire, listed as California State Historic Landmark No. 576, is located at the end of Wagon Wheel Road (south of McDonalds), just east of the northbound I-15 CHP truck scales.

Sycamore Grove Monument: This large spire-shaped monument was built in 1927 to mark the site of the 1851 Mormon camp at Sycamore Grove, known today as Glen Helen. The 500 Mormon settlers camped here while the leaders of their party negotiated the purchase of Rancho San Bernardino.

This monument, listed as California Historic Marker No. 573, is located just inside the grounds of Glen Helen Park, on Glen Helen Parkway, .8 mile south of Cajon Boulevard.

Mohave Trail Monument: The Mohave Trail Monument was set on Sept. 19, 1931, on a remote mountaintop northeast of Devore, fittingly named Monument Peak. This small stone and mortar monument was placed by the San Bernardino County Historical Society to commemorate the explorers and frontiersmen who traveled this ancient footpath.

A 4-wheel drive vehicle is required to reach the 5,290-feet elevation Monument Peak site. Take Palm Avenue north from the I-215 until the paved road ends and becomes Bailey Canyon Road. The 5.9-mile trip up the dirt road can be readily found on Google Maps. The monument is located at GPS coordinates: 34 14'43.95"N, 117 21'12.33"W.

Mormon Trail Monument: A modest stone and mortar monument topped by a wagon wheel was built in the West Cajon Valley by the Sons of Mormon Pioneers, and dedicated on May 15, 1937. A small, weathered plaque commemorates the Mormon settlers who passed through this area in 1851. The monument, listed as California Historic Marker No. 577, is located on Highway 138, 4.2 miles west of I-15.

Pioneer Women Monument: On April 16, 1977, this simple concrete and marble monument was placed near the former Mormon campsite of Sycamore Grove to commemorate pioneer women. The plaque is a memorial to the hardships the pioneer women faced as they traveled across the untamed country by ox team and covered wagon.

The monument is located on Glen Helen Parkway at the onramp to the northbound 1-15 freeway.

Mormon Pioneer Trail: This small stone and mortar monument was placed in July 1985 to commemorate the wagon train of 500 Mormon settlers who passed by the site in 1851.

The monument is located on the Old Salt Lake Trail near the 1912 Stoddard-Waite Monument and is accessible only by permission.

Blue Cut: This large concrete monument was erected alongside old Route 66 in a narrow gap of the Cajon Pass known as Blue Cut. The monument, dedicated July 23, 1994, was placed by the Billy Holcomb Chapter of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E. Clampus Vitus. The inlaid brass plaque describes the explorers and immigrants who blazed the trails and roads through the pass, as well as some of the historic events that occurred in the area.

To reach this monument, exit I-15 at Kenwood Avenue and go south to Cajon Boulevard (old Route 66). Turn right onto Cajon Boulevard and go 3.7 miles north. Look for the monument on the left in a wide turnout area, set back among the shade trees.

Summit Train Station Monument: This carved marble monument was placed near the site of the Summit Train Station in 1996 by the Hesperia Recreation and Park District. The weathered text carved into the marble commemorates the site of the Summit Train Station on the Santa Fe Railway, and the nearby site of the Elliot Ranch settled in 1927.

The monument also is near the entrance to Horse Thief Canyon where thousands of stolen horses were driven through this section of the Cajon Pass in the 1800s.

The monument is located in Summit Valley on Highway 138, 4 miles east of I-15 on the north side of the road. It is part of a series of monuments placed by the Hesperia Recreation and Park District to commemorate historic sites in the area.

The Old Spanish Trail, Explained

New Mexico to Southern California

Old Spanish Trail (in red). (National Park Service)

by Nathan Masters
KCET

Although Southern California today is a region teeming with millions, for much of its history it was a remote outpost of the vast Spanish Empire. Nearly 227 years passed between Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo's first exploration of the California coast in 1542 and Gaspar de Portolá's establishment of the Presidio of San Diego in 1769. Then, for another sixty years, Southern California grew in relative isolation from the rest of Hispanic civilization. Finally, in 1829, an intrepid merchant opened a trade route—today known as the Old Spanish Trail—between Los Angeles and Santa Fe, creating Southern California's first overland link with the older Spanish settlements of New Mexico.

From June 2-5, historians, archivists, and representatives from government agencies and the Hispanic and Native American communities will gather in Pomona at the 2011 Old Spanish Trail Association annual conference to explore the history of the trail in California.

In the late nineteenth century, hundreds of miles of unforgiving terrain and harsh climate divided Southern California from New Mexico, but both stood to profit from a direct trade route. Alta California then formed, along with the province of New Mexico, the northern boundary of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The recently-colonized Spanish territory boasted fine natural harbors in San Francisco and San Diego. But with its location at the northern extreme of the Spanish Empire, and surrounded by inhospitable desert to the east and southeast, Southern California was effectively isolated from the political and cultural center of Mexico City to the south.

To the east, the older Spanish province of New Mexico, first settled in 1598, offered California integration with the burgeoning United States and the Mexican heartland via established overland trade routes. For Southern California's rancheros, New Mexico also represented an untapped market for the region's abundant supply of horses and mules. From the point of view of landlocked New Mexico, a trade route to Southern California represented not only a potential market for Santa Fe's serapes and other handmade goods, but also a connection to foreign markets via California's ports.

Almost as soon as the first Spanish settlements arose in California, efforts were made to bridge the chasm and link the two provinces. A team of Franciscan missionaries left Santa Fe for California in 1776, but made it only as far as Utah Lake, near the present-day city of Provo.

In 1826, American fur trapper and explorer Jedediah Smith blazed a trail from present-day Utah to the Mojave Desert. After a clash with hostile Mohave Indians, Smith met two Tongva guides who offered to take his expedition to Mission San Gabriel, near Los Angeles. The guides led Smith along the intermittent Mohave River and over the San Bernardino Mountains near the Cajon Pass. Smith's party arrived at the mission on November 27, where they were warmly received by the missionaries, as depicted in the scene below.

Three years later, Santa Fe merchant Antonio Armijo led the first successful caravan from Santa Fe to Southern California, combining Smith's route with portions of the Franciscans' 1776 path to Utah to open what would later be called the Old Spanish Trail. In doing so, Armijo had established an important link between California and New Mexico, now the northern flanks of the newly-independent Mexican Republic.

Elizabeth von Till Warren, a historian of the Old Spanish Trail, writes of the new route's effect:

News of the opening of trade with California resulted in immediate commerce between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. With a few exceptions, pack trains made annual treks between New Mexico and California, bringing woven Mexican products to California, which lacked sheep, and bartering them for horses and mules, scarce in New Mexico.

The trail carried mule-trains over the Cajon Pass, then west through Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, and El Monte, to the region's major settlements at Mission San Gabriel and Los Angeles. There the traders unloaded their goods, many of which were sold at the Los Angeles Plaza.

The increased commerce hid a dark and ugly side to the trail's establishment, according to von Till Warren:

Raids for Indian slaves became common, with victims sold at either end of the trail despite official condemnation of the practice. The traffic in human beings reverberated among the peoples who lived along the trail for many years longer than the caravans plied their trade.

The trail remained an important trade route for several years until, shortly after the American conquest of California, several competing routes comprised of wagon roads were opened. The Old Spanish Trail, which allowed only for pack animals, soon fell into disuse.

Today, monuments mark the trail's path through the Southland. In Upland, the Madonna of the Trail statue overlooks the route once taken by Santa Fe-bound traders. The monument, dedicated by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1929, was one of twelve placed along the National Old Trails Road, which stretched from New York City to Los Angeles. In the Cajon Pass, an obelisk-shaped monument, dedicated in 1917, commemorates the early pioneers who traveled between Southern California and points east.

The trail's historical significance was further recognized in 2002, when an act of Congress, passed unanimously by both houses and signed by President George W. Bush, designated the corridor as the Old Spanish National Historic Trail and placed the historic route under the supervision of the National Park Service.

A Look Back: Route 66 still remembered fondly

The original Summit Inn in the Cajon Pass around 1928 on Route 66.

(The Press-Enterprise)

By NITA HILTNER
Special to The Press-Enterprise

Historic Route 66 has been honored by festivals, TV, movies and song since its inception on Nov.11, 1926, and still exists in the memories of those who traveled this Main Street of America or the Mother Road to come west.

In 1857, by order of the War Department, Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a Naval officer in the service of the U.S. Army Topographical Corps, built a government-funded wagon road across the 35th Parallel, which later became part of U.S. Route 66.

Also known as the Will Rogers Highway by 1940, named after the humorist, the highway linked Chicago to Los Angeles over 2,448 miles. The route crossed through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, eventually ending in Santa Monica.

The road planners meant for the route to connect main streets of the cities and rural areas because until then, most small towns had no access to major national thoroughfares. The highway became a major route for the Dust Bowl 1930s migrants to follow west. As the road grew in popularity, businesses such as restaurants, filling or gas stations and neon-lit motels popped up along the route, making traveling easier for the public.

From the 1930s to through the 1960s, the road was well-traveled by millions of people heading west for opportunity to those taking their children to California for a vacation to Disneyland or the beach.

In 1956, the Interstate Highway System was instituted by the Federal Highway Act, more popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956.

The interstates effectively replaced the need for Route 66 and other routes. In 1984, Route 66 was officially deactivated.

The deactivation stirred nostalgic people to honor the route, and many state and local associations were formed to celebrate Route 66 with festivals, fairs, antique car meets, conventions and parades.

One of those festivals is held annually in San Bernardino to celebrate the highway and that era when it was popularly used. A TV show, Route 66, featured two men and a Corvette traveling the route and encountering adventure.

The song about the highway has the words, "Get your kicks on Route 66." In the movie "Grapes of Wrath" from the book by John Steinbeck, the family travels the "Mother Road" to California for work.

Nick Cataldo, local historian, special education teacher and past president and member of the San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society, recently gave a presentation and talk to the society about the history of Route 66 through San Bernardino County and his own experiences traveling it as his family moved to California in 1966.

"I remember the trip from New Jersey. You'd see New Jersey plates on other cars and wave to the people. There was a camaraderie on that road," said Cataldo. "You'd stop at a cafe and see the same people on the road with you."

He said that today's response to constantly running into and seeing the same people on a freeway might have a different consequence.

"They'd probably shoot you!" he said.

He said the I-40 and I-15 obliterated the need for Route 66, but there are still memorable cafes and motels along the route.

Cataldo said Juan Pollo owner Albert Okura bought Roy's Cafe in Amboy and hopes to open it once again for those nostalgic for that era. Main Street in Barstow and D Street in Victorville were once part of the route. Over the Cajon Pass into San Bernardino, Route 66 followed today's Cajon Blvd. to Mt.Vernon Ave. south to 5th St. and then Foothill Blvd. from San Bernardino to the Los Angeles County line.

Along the route, old restaurants, motels and gas stations, most abandoned or razed, served travellers.

Cataldo said the Summit Inn at the top of Cajon Pass, one of those places, still serves the traveler and has a lot of Route 66 flavor, with old signs and gas pumps. Mitla Cafe, a Mexican restaurant opened in 1937 at Mt. Vernon Avenue and 6th St. in San Bernardino, the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino and the Sycamore Inn in Rancho Cucamonga opened in 1921, are all survivors and serve travelers today.

The 21st Annual Route 66 Rendezvous will be held in San Bernardino Sept. 16 through 19 this year.

Freight trains make big comeback in nation's transportation network

Warren Buffett's recent purchase of Burlington Northern Santa Fe shows the renewed importance of railroads in the global supply chain.

A BNSF train makes its way through the freight yard in Barstow. Warren Buffett paid $34 billion for the railroad giant in November, calling his investment an “all-in wager on the economic future of the United States.” (Don Bartletti, Los Angeles Times / September 30, 2009)

By Alana Semuels
Los Angeles Times

More than 4,000 miles of train tracks stretch through California, winding up the blustery Cajon Pass and snaking through the desert surrounding Barstow.

Those tracks could be seeing a lot more traffic in the next few years as trains loaded with Chinese-made toys, electronics and clothing roll eastward, connecting West Coast ports with cities across the U.S.

Warren Buffett is a believer. In November, the world's second-richest man paid $34 billion for railroad giant Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., despite a deep downturn in the railroad industry. Buffett characterized his investment as an "all-in wager on the economic future of the United States." But it's also a bet on globalization and the renewed importance of rail in the nation's transportation network.

Southern California is a key hub in his new empire. About 40% of all goods that the U.S. receives in containers from overseas enter the country through the seaports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. That freight must then move overland to retailers across the country.

Fort Worth-based BNSF has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to beef up its Southern California operations to grab a bigger share of that business.

"Within our 28-state network, California is incredibly important to us," BNSF Chief Executive Matthew K. Rose said. "A lot of trade comes through there, a lot gets consumed in California, and a lot gets handled and repackaged there."

China's rise has given a new push to U.S. railroads, which have chugged their way back into the nation's transportation future after losing ground for decades to the trucking industry.

The sheer volume of inbound cargo from Asia to North America -- more than 40 million container loads last year -- has made it cost-prohibitive to haul all those goods over congested U.S. highways.

Rail companies have strengthened their networks and upgraded their equipment to handle the ubiquitous metal shipping containers to provide a nearly seamless transition from cargo ship to freight train to truck or any combination in between. This so-called intermodal traffic has been the fastest-growing segment of the industry for about a decade.

In 2008, international and domestic intermodal cargo accounted for nearly a third of BNSF's revenue, a figure that's expected to grow when the U.S. economy gets back on track.

Although factory jobs have been lost to Asia, international trade is now a pillar of the Southern California economy, accounting for more than 300,000 jobs. Chains such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. depend on the nation's trains running on time.

"There wouldn't be big-box retail and globalization if you had to truck in all those containers -- it wouldn't be worth the cost," said Anthony Hatch, a rail consultant in New York.

Over the last 20 years, ton-miles of freight hauled by the nation's biggest railroads doubled, from 876,984 ton-miles in 1985 to 1,770,545 in 2007, according to the most recent government figures. Paul Bingham, managing director of world trade and transportation markets at research firm IHS Global Insight Inc., projects that number will grow 14% within a decade.

Environmental concerns are also helping to fuel rail's comeback. Railroads can move a ton of freight an average of 457 miles on a gallon of fuel, according to the Assn. of American Railroads.

Freight rail's resurgence has been stunning for even some of its most die-hard devotees. Pittsburgh rail entrepreneur Henry Posner III recalls the mid-1970s, when railroads were tumbling into bankruptcy after losing market share to big rigs and air freight. He credits deregulation in the 1980s, and the brutal downsizing and cost-cutting that followed, for the industry's survival.

Posner's company, Railroad Development Corp., owns a piece of what was once the famed Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, as well as some lines in Latin America.

"Growing up, I was told that the age of the train was just around the corner, and in fact I have lived to see it," Posner said.

He said Buffett's big bet on rail was a "reflection of the position of the rail industry as an important part of our national transportation infrastructure."

One of the linchpins of this global supply chain can be found in the industrial cities of Vernon and Commerce, home to BNSF's Hobart rail yard. The massive facility, on 245 acres near the 710 Freeway, is one of the biggest operations of its kind in the world. Workers toil 24 hours a day, seven days a week, offloading shipping containers ferried by big rigs arriving straight from the ports. They pluck the uniform boxes from the backs of the 18-wheelers and stack them neatly on lines of train cars, some stretching two miles.

Other containers are offloaded directly from cargo ships to trains inside the ports.

On a recent morning at the Port of Los Angeles, BNSF conductor Dennis Marquez and engineer Armando Nevarez prepared to leave for Clovis, N.M., hauling 282 double-stacked shipping containers filled with assorted freight. This run required four locomotives, hitched one behind the other, to haul 6,000 tons of freight up mountain passes.

Walking through the bright-orange railway vehicles, the engineers inspected fuel levels, checked the air brakes and stored food in an onboard refrigerator. Outside, the horn of another train blew nearby.

Upon arriving in New Mexico, the cars of shipping containers would be attached to other locomotives headed for destinations across the country.

Ten years ago, the journey out of Los Angeles would have taken hours, the trains forced to navigate dozens of crossings over congested city streets. No longer, thanks to the Alameda Corridor, a 20-mile freight rail expressway leading out of the ports.

Completed in 2002, the $3.4-billion public-private partnership includes a 10-mile dedicated underground tunnel that allows BNSF and its West Coast rival, Union Pacific, to avoid L.A. traffic and speed their cargo to the rest of the nation.

Activity has slowed with the global downturn. U.S. freight rail traffic in 2009 was down about 16% from 2008. Traffic in the Alameda Corridor was down 20% in the first 11 months of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008. Some of that business might not return even when imports rebound.

That's because seaports in Mexico and Canada are becoming less expensive than Los Angeles and Long Beach, analysts said. A project to deepen the Panama Canal, expected to be completed in 2014, could make it more economical for massive ships from Asia to head directly to ports on the East Coast.

Other factors could hurt too. A bill pending in Congress seeks to partially re-regulate railroads. California's tough environmental restrictions could add to operating costs. And if the U.S. weans itself off coal for electricity production, railroads would lose a big chunk of their revenue because they haul much of that fuel to the nation's power plants.

Still, West Coast railroads aren't yet ready to surrender the advantage they've gained as globalization has brought more trade through their ports. They're making big capital investments to make trains even faster and more environmentally friendly.

BNSF is double-tracking its entire transcontinental line and in November 2008 finished laying a third track over the Cajon Pass. It has also been straightening curves and polishing the steel track to lower resistance and save fuel, said Bingham, the research analyst. It worked with the government to develop a hydrogen fuel cell locomotive, which it brought to Los Angeles, and is lobbying to create a rail yard closer to the ports to handle increased container traffic.

Whether in Los Angeles or Omaha, analysts agree that the increased dependence on rail makes Buffett's bet on BNSF a smart one. Railroads may be down in this recession, but this time they won't be left for dead, as long as the U.S. economy one day recovers too.

"We're very bullish on most of the railroads," said Jeffrey Kaufman, managing director of the brokerage firm Sterne, Agee and Leach. "These are good franchises. They're going to be around for a long time."

Meet the expert on the Cajon Pass

John Hockaday digs into history to trace pioneer trails

Author John Hockaday has studied the history of travel through Cajon Pass for 40 years. His book on the subject has been recently published. (Greg Vojtko / The Press-Enterprise)

By MARK MUCKENFUSS
The Press-Enterprise


CAJON PASS - Thousands of hikers pass through this section of the Pacific Crest Trail each year. Probably very few realize they are treading in the footsteps of early pioneers and ancient people.

This narrow cut that shoots off to the east just south of the truck scales on northbound Interstate 15 has been known as Coyote Canyon, East Cajon Canyon and Crowder Canyon. For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years it was a main American Indian thoroughfare between the desert and the San Bernardino Valley.

On his exploratory expedition for the Mormons in 1849, Jefferson Hunt and his small caravan struggled through the creek bed of the canyon on their way to the coast. And when commerce was established, John Brown blasted the first graded road, his toll road, through here. Remnants of the pavement laid over that original toll road still remain.

John Hockaday is quick to point out where the wagon road and, later, motor road entered the canyon.

"The road came along that ledge there," says Hockaday, pointing to the south side of the canyon where the concrete support for a long-gone bridge remains. The pavement peeking out from the dirt path, he says, "is some of the original road, a nine-foot wagon road built in '09."

Then he points to pavement of a lighter color, overlaying some of the darker asphalt.

"This is the evolution of the blacktop," he says. "By 1914, they were using a crushed limestone aggregate," which shows up as a medium gray against the black.

It's these kinds of layers that Hockaday peels back on a brief tour of the roads that run through the pass. His deeply lined face and wispy white beard give Hockaday, 74, the appearance of an old prospector. But the only treasures he's pulled from this region are historical nuggets. For decades he has explored the routes that connected the desert and the valley and the people that used them, producing two books on the subject. His most recent is "Trails and Tales of the Cajon Pass" (Buckthorn Publishing, $39.95), a book 15 years in the making.

Although fascinated with the archaeological history of the region, Hockaday has no formal training. He says he's just a former construction worker who loves history and became interested when a neighbor told him the original wagon road into the San Bernardino Valley crossed the property Hockaday lives on at the mouth of Lytle Creek Canyon.

He did some research. After he found out that the wagon road actually followed what had been the Mojave Indian trail into the region, he says, "I just kept going."

He and his late wife, Sandy, dug through collections as far away as UC Berkeley, gathering copies of documents and historical photographs. He gathered material from swap meets, garage sales and donations from friends. He took his own photographs, including a series of aerial views, some of which reveal not only the modern Interstate 15, but also its predecessors from Route 66 to the first wagon road.

At various stops in the canyon, Hockaday looks up and points to spots at the top of canyon walls and hills where he's taken photos in the past. He's hiked to just about every vista in the pass, he says.

Desert historian Cliff Walker says Hockaday is the expert on Cajon Pass.

"I don't know how you could get anybody that knows more about it," says Walker. "He's had it as a passion for 20 years."

Walker says Hockaday's book has added to the local historical record.

"We didn't know some of those things that he has compiled," he says, "He's uncovered some important documents."

Hockaday can even show you the routes when there were no roads. When Jefferson Hunt's expedition came through, it was following Indian footpaths. It had to navigate the rocky creek bed in Crowder Canyon.

"They said this was the toughest section of road anywhere between here and Salt Lake," Hockaday says. "When Jefferson Hunt tried to come through with wagons, they got in trouble and had to disassemble the wagons."

The wagon bodies were dragged through the creek and the wheels were put back on at a site that became known as the Willows, a lush area just on the other side of Interstate 15 from Crowder Canyon.

For the Mormon wagon trains and those that followed, this was the first watering spot after leaving the Mojave River at what is now Oro Grande. Prior to the white settlers, the small oasis was host to American Indians for centuries.

"There's thousands of artifacts here," Hockaday says, noting that the area provided not only water but food and materials the Indians needed for tools and houses. "This was their Home Depot, their Stater Bros. It was all right here."

Now owned by the San Bernardino County Museum, the area is closed off for renovation. An interpretive center is planned for the site.

This was a focal point for just about every pre-Route-66 road coming through the pass, and there were plenty of them.

"Cajon Pass is actually a box canyon with a series of notches," says Hockaday. "I can come up with eight ways to get out of Cajon Pass using some of those notches. The roads evolved by way of least resistance."

As technology developed, however, that was no longer the case.

Standing on the shoulder of the road in a section of old Route 66 known as Blue Cut, Hockaday points to a line of trees on the east side of the road. The trees follow the original bed of Cajon Creek. The early paved wagon road ran between the trees and the steep hillside behind them.

Highway engineers for Route 66 decided that rather than build two bridges to cross the creek in this area - there wasn't enough room to simply widen the existing road - they would reroute the creek itself.

Half a mile north, Hockaday points out the erosion that has revealed layers of asphalt. The lower layer is the 1916 road, the upper layer the 1931 widening project.

Those who travel through the pass on a regular basis can easily relate to such changes. Cal Trans recently finished a widening project near the intersection of interstates 15 and 215. And a new rail line is soon to be added.

Hockaday says he doesn't like to think about the changes yet to take place and what Cajon Pass might look like in another 100 years.

"I like to go back instead of forward," he says. "Going forward is kind of scary."

Tracing History
Here are two spots where you can see some historical trails and roads in Cajon Pass:

Crowder Canyon

Exit northbound Interstate 15 at Highway 138. Turn right and immediately turn right again onto Wagon Train Road, which is old Route 66. Pass the McDonald's and drive to the end of the road. You will find a historical marker erected in 1917 and dedicated to the pioneers of the Santa Fe and Salt Lake Trail.

Across the road, notice the wooden sign identifying the Pacific Crest Trail, which is cut into the north side of the narrow canyon. The original Indian footpath from the desert to the Cajon Pass was in or near the creekbed below and it is along this creekbed that Jefferson Hunt entered the region on two separate expeditions.

About 50 yards up the trail are the remains of the concrete support for a bridge built in 1914. You'll also notice two types of asphalt on the trail. The darker underlying layer was put down in 1909 as a 9-foot-wide wagon road. The road was widened in 1914 to 16 feet and the lighter colored asphalt is the remainder of that road. Both overlaid the original dirt toll road built by John Brown in 1861.

Brown's first tollhouse sat about halfway up the canyon.


Blue Cut

Exit southbound Interstate 15 at Cleghorn Road and turn right onto Cajon Road, again old Route 66, and head south. After about a mile, the road diverges from the interstate, heading west toward a large bend known as Blue Cut. Drive past the picnic area, and look for a safety wall constructed of rock.

This wall was built in 1931 as part of a two-lane widening project for Route 66. At the southern end of the rock wall, erosion has revealed areas where two layers of blacktop can be seen. The top is from the 1931 road, the lower layer is from a section of road built in 1916. Look across the creek and you will see an arched railroad underpass with the numbers 654 over it.

John Brown's second tollhouse sat just south of this underpass, on the far side of the creek. A sloping line rising along the hill to the north is the original wagon road. Looking across Route 66 and to the south, you can see a line of trees.

These mark the course of Cajon Creek before it was rerouted for the 1931 road project.

An Asphalt Odyssey

You can get your kicks and a big dose of kitsch on Route 66, where nostalgia and reality meet.

Eastbound Route 66, Goffs, California (Chris S. Ervin)

Reed Johnson
Los Angeles Times

DANBY, Calif. — Many miles to the west in the thickening twilight lies Roy's Cafe, a rustic high-desert hangout for weary Route 66 pilgrims, including Ronald Reagan and Harrison Ford (or so the guidebook says). Alas, it's already closed for the night.

Dead ahead, huge lightning bolts crack the sky, casting an eerie pallor over the surrounding moonscape. Suddenly, I feel like Janet Leigh in "Psycho," eyes scanning the rearview mirror, ears straining for those slashing Bernard Hermann chords. As a sheet of rain clatters violently across the windshield, an ominous thought hijacks the brain: Wasn't that a flash-flood warning sign a mile or two back?

This wasn't exactly the Route 66 I'd come looking for, the Route 66 of Howdy Doody-era diners and irresistibly cheesy souvenir stands, a nostalgic slice of pure Americana frozen in amber like some prehistoric insect. Certainly it didn't much resemble the Route 66 depicted in the colorful Automobile Club of Southern California map spread out on the passenger seat beside me, a "greatest hits" anthology of wigwam motels, meteor craters, auto museums and folksier-than-thou truck stops.

No, this lonely, bewitching, exhilarating stretch of asphalt was more akin to what greeted Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930s, who crossed the Colorado River from Arizona, just up the road. After traveling hundreds of miles and enduring heat, cold, hunger, exhaustion and marauding goon squads bent on turning them back, those desperate migrants knew Route 66 as a harshly exotic highway, tinted with beauty and danger, promise and menace. It was "the connection between wherever people were and wherever they wanted to be," as Paul Snyder, director of the newly opened Route 66 Museum in Kingman, Ariz., puts it.

It's this Route 66, a gritty mental Polaroid framed by Walker Evans, that still grips the imagination of thousands of visitors who come here from around the globe every year. And it was this Route 66 that now flashed hypnotically across the stormy landscape, with hardly another human being in sight.

Such trance-inducing solitude may be tougher to find in the coming months. Seventeen years after its last broken fragments were decommissioned by the federal government and left for scavengers, Route 66 has become America's best-known comeback trail. Since the mid-1980s, dozens of books, videos, TV specials and travelogues have celebrated its motley heritage. This year, the 2,448-mile artery stretching from Illinois to Southern California is being feted with barbecues, biker rallies, mariachi concerts, car shows, arts and crafts festivals, rodeos, foot races and tractor pulls, right up to and beyond its official 75th birthday on Nov. 11. Not surprisingly, automobile clubs and major car manufacturers are backing some of the misty-eyed appreciations.

But the Route 66 revival can't be written off merely as manufactured nostalgia. Once a tattered road that time forgot, the highway is now part of a growing movement that reflects shifting cultural values. Route 66 preservation groups have sprung up in all eight states the road traverses, and under the Historic Route 66 Corridor Act, signed into law by President Clinton, $10 million in federal funds will be used over the next decade to help restore businesses and tourist attractions along the way.

To its boosters and interpreters, Route 66 has become the Moby Dick of American roadways, a convenient catch-all symbol of the frontier spirit, middle-class Manifest Destiny or, at the other extreme, Kerouacian free-spiritedness. If it didn't already exist, American pop culture probably would have to invent it. Which, in a sense, is what it's been doing for the past seven decades, as became clear during a recent 1,300-mile odyssey from the San Bernardino foothills to the New Mexico border and back.

At one time, Route 66 linked Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago with the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, making it the world's longest drive-thru metaphor. Although photographs showing the road ending at the Santa Monica Pier have been revealed as fakes, it was invested with a sea-to-shining-sea unity and a brawny New Deal populism. It even had its own soundtrack, courtesy of the late Encino resident Bobby Troup, who had been "getting his kicks" (and, one hopes, his royalty checks) from "Route 66" for more than half a century.

Today, huge swaths of the road have been interred beneath interstates, or cut and pasted into charmless frontage roads and spotty commercial strips, like the one that escorts motorists through Fontana and San Bernardino before plunging on through the Cajon Pass.

There, on L.A.'s suburban fringes, nature takes a back seat to chain restaurants, gun and ammo shops and the Adult Fantasy 66 Book and Video store. Fifty yards or so to the east, the Wigwam Village Motel, a vestige of better times, urges guests to "Do It in a Tee Pee." Easy to see why Frank Lloyd Wright concluded that, "Route 66 is a giant chute down which everything loose in this country is sliding into Southern California."

But around Victorville, where the metropolis finally dissolves into the desert, the spirit of the road takes over, tugging motorists past fossilized trailer parks and crumbling Mexican restaurants. Twenty miles east of Barstow, in the blink-and-you'll-miss-it hamlet of Newberry Springs, a truck pulls into the Bagdad Cafe, which, like much else on Route 66, partly owes its survival to the power of Hollywood myth-making.

Inside, Phil Dickson, the 22-year-old cook, labors over a deep fryer while his wife Jessica fields orders behind the counter. "Are your buffalo burgers really buffalo?" one trucker wants to know. Jessica shrugs.

The cafe is a classic instance of fictional greasy spoon imitates life imitates greasy spoon. A dozen years ago, the down-and-out diner formerly called The Sidewinder was cast as itself in the cult film "Bagdad Cafe," about the odd-couple friendship that develops between a German woman stranded in the California desert and the black woman who runs the local hash house. The movie was only a minor stateside hit, though it later spun off a CBS comedy series starring Whoopi Goldberg and Jean Stapleton. But "Bagdad Cafe" struck certain Continental viewers as a charming American parable of eccentricity and tolerance, setting off a stunning Euro-tourism boom.

Today, the real Bagdad Cafe, which sells videocassettes of the movie, is listed in Japanese, French and German guidebooks, and its guest log is filled with comments like, " Fantastique! Comme le film !" Slowly, the cafe is even catching on with jaded Californians. "Huell Howser's come through here, Peter Fonda came through here," Dickson says. "There's a lot of Europeans who base their whole visit to the U.S. on making this one of their pit stops."

No ordinary Hollywood auteur, however, could've dreamed up the cafe's star attraction, General Bob, a T-shirted, ponytailed Baron Munchausen who claims he once spoke 9,000 languages (including fluent hyperbole) and now diverts travelers with tales of his globe-trotting escapades. Peering through wraparound sunglasses, General Bob leans over his roast-beef sandwich and mutters conspiratorially that no one in town, not even the seemingly happy-go-lucky Dickson, can be trusted. "I've had 600 people in this town trying to kill me," he says. "Six-, 8-year-olds, they're the spies, they're the lookouts."

Just then, a young Parisian couple enters the diner and orders up chocolate milkshakes. Yes, the man says eagerly, they'd seen "Bagdad Cafe" years ago and decided to stop by en route from Las Vegas to L.A. At the cash register, Dickson discreetly offers some advice about General Bob. Apparently, several European TV news crews have reported his stories as gospel truth. "Don't believe everything he tells you," Dickson adds redundantly.

"Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley, who lived for more than 25 years in Southern California, once wrote that the shimmering light of the desert can bestow either clarity or madness on its inhabitants. Which condition best described General Bob? Which, for that matter, best describes Route 66 and its two-lane, split personality? Before World War II the road offered desperate people an exit from poverty and ruin. Afterward it came to epitomize affluence, recreation, family, the good life. How could those disparate paths be reconciled? And what did either have to do with the flotilla of SUVs and 18-wheelers roaring by on I-40, a few dozen yards away?

"Try us, you'll like us," promised the sign at the Best Motel in Needles, which fronts on Route 66. But a $22 room there featured dead bugs in the bedsheets and an air conditioner whose preset dials kept the temperature barely below sweat lodge conditions, making sleep possible only in fitful snatches.

Next morning, at the Hungry Bear Diner, a booth covered in Route 66-pattern fabric supplied the ideal spot for plotting a passage to Oatman, Ariz. A fraying, Hollywood movie-set vision of a frontier town, tucked inside the hair-raising curves of the Black Mountains, Oatman has two distinct claims to fame. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard honeymooned there in 1939, and a population of wild burros left over from mining days still roams the streets, soliciting edible donations from tourists. Tin-roofed shacks and gardens constructed from found objects offset tchotchke boutiques and the Oatman Hotel. Weekends are reserved for staged gunfights.

But the town's real attraction, looming on all sides, is a landscape of surpassing beauty and strangeness: teetering rock fortresses, cars held together by rust, wind-scoured chasms that drop away hundreds of feet into nothingness. According to a posted sign, so terrifying were the area's snaking roads, especially the infamous Sitgreaves Pass, that many Okies and Arkies would hire locals to tow their Model A's and T's through to safety. Ansel Adams would've loved this place. Or Mad Max.

A marker designating "Historic Route 66" (as the road's remains now are called) leads out of Oatman, down through a valley and on into Kingman, Ariz., a sprawling town of 21,000 that somehow feels much larger. At the impressive new Route 66 Museum, which opened last May in a converted powerhouse, director Paul Snyder says this artery's origins go back way before the Great Depression.

For centuries, Native Americans had been using local trails as trade routes connecting the Southwest and Mexico with the Pacific Coast. By 1851, the U.S. Army was mapping out a road along the 35th parallel, an ancestor of the legendary highway. Toward the end of the 19th century, railroads were bringing immigrants and tourists into the area. Fred Harvey furthered the cause with his turn-of-the-century empire of hotels and restaurants laid out along rail lines. "There was a whole culture built up along this road," Snyder says.

The guts of the museum's permanent exhibition is a series of black-and-white documentary-style photos of migrant families. These stark images of hollow-cheeked children flopped on filthy mattresses, and grim-faced police inspectors at the California state line, are underscored by a famous passage from John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": "And they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight."

Snyder shakes his head. "There's plenty of people buried out by the roadside," he says. "You wouldn't know it, but they didn't make the trip."

The exhibition's final third is devoted to a re-creation of a Route 66 small-town Main Street, complete with a beautifully restored banana-yellow 1950 Studebaker. A wall plaque describing the road's postwar heyday comes spiked with a liberal dose of conservative perspective: "Closets were for clothes, not for 'coming out of.' Gay meant joyful, bunnies were small rabbits .... 'Made In Japan' meant junk."

Downstairs, a gift shop operated by volunteers from the Historic Route 66 Assn. of Arizona offers every conceivable item capable of bearing the Route 66 logo: shot glasses, salt and pepper shakers, golf balls, steering wheel covers, jigsaw puzzles, tote bags, bar stools. Among the shoppers are a Hawaiian couple, Clint Bidwell and Debbie Chun, who bought a neon clock, some die-metal cars, and patio party lights for an upcoming birthday party in L.A. "There's a car theme going on at the party," Chun explains, "so we thought, Route 66."

Like the old road markers that have long since been torn down or stolen, Route 66 hails from an age when America seemed infused with a monochromatic directness, a black-and-white starkness. It permeated not only movies and television but attitudes about race, religion, sexuality, the future.

That may be one reason why the 98-mile segment of Route 66 between Kingman and Seligman astounds with its Technicolor variety and vitality. Driving this gorgeous slice of mesquite-covered hills, broken every few miles by a restaurant or solitary general store, is like driving through a hand-colored still photograph, circa 1945. Or like reading Steinbeck's best prose: by turns majestic and humble, coolly workmanlike and wildly romantic, even sentimental. The landscape, beyond merely stirring, feels sacred.

That connection runs deep for the people of the Hualapai Tribe, whose reservation rises on a brow of Route 66 in Peach Springs. But times have been tough since the interstate was built. Nowadays, virtually the only local employment option is conducting helicopter or rafting tours of the Grand Canyon, says Michelle LaPointe, a planning clerk at the tribal office. Most guidebooks make no mention of the reservation, a clutch of identical earth-toned homes, many abandoned, with boarded-up windows and trash-strewn yards. On one back porch a group of young children practices firing a pellet gun.

Beyond a great wall of mountains, the tiny railroad town of Seligman (population 1,000) meanders into view. Visiting Seligman without stopping by Angel Delgadillo's barber shop is like visiting Buckingham Palace without meeting the Queen Mum. Many regard the 74-year-old haircutter, whose older brother Juan runs the next-door Snow Cap Drive-In, as the savior of Route 66 in the Southwest. When I-40 bypassed Seligman in September, 1978, Delgadillo began organizing business owners into an association to promote the historic road.

"Here in America we all clamor for something bigger, better, brighter.

You talk to people from Germany, Holland, their countries have been torn up by wars. We do it with our tractors," says Delgadillo. An avuncular presence, he retired from haircutting four years ago but will whip out his clippers on demand if a visitor requests a trim.

Nowadays there's virtually a nonstop parade of European and Japanese sightseers through the barbershop and adjoining gift store, both of which are lined top to bottom with business cards, license plates and other mementos. "They want to take a little bit of us," Delgadillo says, "and they want to leave a little bit of themselves."

Past Seligman, Route 66 dawdles, pauses, nearly grinds to a complete halt. Then it loops back into I-40 west of trendy Flagstaff, where the hippie-chic skiing and rock-climbing crowd cruises the downtown espresso bars, but many locals prefer the Museum Club, a boot-scootin' country music saloon with trees planted in the middle of the dance floor.

Fifty years ago, before the theme-parking of America, such a sight might've stopped a traveler in his tracks. But as the miles fly by, no man-made object on Route 66 retains the power to amaze. Not the guitar-player statue standing on a corner in Winslow, Ariz., immortalized by the Eagles in their '70s pop hit "Take It Easy." Not the famous giant Twin Arrows that rise above the ruins of a once-booming truck stop, where a half-dozen big-riggers usually can be found idling, as if expecting a ghostly waitress to sidle up and murmur, "Coffee, hon?"

Not the town of Joseph City, site of both the oldest Mormon community in Arizona and the equally revered Jack Rabbit Trading Post, which, besides offering the usual Kachina dolls and Minnetonka moccasins, lures passersby with a unique homemade brew.

"Cherry cider is our big thing. I guess you could call it the gimmick," says Phil Blansett, who ran the Jack Rabbit for 25 years with his wife, Pat, before turning it over to their daughter and son-in-law.

He says there's "less riffraff" now that this corner of Route 66 has been supplanted by a shiny concrete ribbon.

Not even the geodesic "country store"/gas station that abuts the mile-wide, 570-feet-deep Meteor Crater, "This Planet's Most Penetrating Natural Attraction."

"Did you ever see 'Starman,' the John Carpenter movie, with Jeff Bridges?" asks the female attendant. "Good movie. Came out around the same time as 'Star Wars' so it kind of got lost. Shot it right here. He plays an alien who crashed in Wisconsin and takes the body of a woman's deceased husband. In the movie, he goes into a cafe and the cook brings him some cherry cobbler, and he doesn't know what it is. Sat right there and ate it. Good movie."

Maybe that's it, I thought: How can a bumpy, inconvenient old country lane hope to compete with the exciting new Virtual America?

Turning south into the Petrified Forest, the diesel fumes and golden arches began to melt away. Even Route 66 yields to the ancient floodplain, where crystalline logs lie scattered like giant necklaces and time hangs in suspension.

Stripped of nostalgia by the desert's primal simplicity, Route 66 was, at last, more place than myth. The trip was ended. Two roads led home. The quiet one made the most sense.