California and Nevada… From The Side of the Road

Roadside photos of the deserts, mountains, coasts, valleys, and cities of California and Nevada, as taken by San Francisco Bay Area photographer Hamish Reid over the past thirty or so years. All images and videos in this gallery © Hamish Reid, Richmond, California unless otherwise noted. About this gallery.

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Near Sheep Hole Pass, California (1993), looking a little like it was done with AI, but actually done with film a few decades before AI was really possible (for me, at least). Real life can be stranger than AI…

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Yard sale, Lenwood Road, Lenwood (near Barstow), California (1999).

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Lenwood Road and Main Street, Lenwood (Barstow area), California (1999). This building (and the associated Christian Motorcyclists Association mural) on the old Route 66 was demolished at least a dozen years ago now.

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Welcome To Barstow! More of the old bridge that took you across the Mojave River as you drove on North 1st and on to Main Street (old Route 66) from Highway 58. It used to lead up to the even creakier old railroad bridge off to the left here. Nowadays you typically come in on one of the new freeway offramps and bypass this completely — and the old railroad bridge has been totally replaced (California, 1999).

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The Mojave River at Barstow, California (March 1999). That glinty little hill next to the river always says "Barstow" to me, especially as you crossed the dry riverbed on the bridge after the long drive to get there. The bridge has been bypassed for a few years now, but it still looks the same even if it's not one of the main ways into town from highway 58 any more.

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Dumont Dunes, California, early 1990's.

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Dumont Dunes, California, early-mid-1990's.

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Off Deep Springs Road (State Route 168), California, March 1996. Near "The Elephant", that ridgeline and hill in the middle distance, and not far from Deep Springs College, and — further down the road — the Nevada state line. Definitely kind of remote…

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Lippincott Road between Saline Valley and The Racetrack, Death Valley National Park, late 1990's. It gets a lot narrower, steeper, and rougher further on up the track, with a precipitous unprotected fall off the right side down into the canyon. It's about the only 4wd trail that's defeated me and my Subaru in three decades of doing this sort of thing. I think it gets graded every now and then, so there are times when the track's probably quite easy even in a Subaru; this wasn't one of those times…

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Ludlow Cemetery, Ludlow, California, February 1995. This place appears in my photos again and again over the decades, for probably-obvious reasons.

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Stoddard Mountain from Sidewinder Road, Barstow (California) area, 1995.

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Kelbaker Road, California, mid-1990's. Over the last month or two I've rediscovered and rescanned a bunch of medium- and large-format film I've had lying around since the 1990's, so you're going to have to put up with a lot of really old stuff I took literally decades ago for the next few months…

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The Calumet Mountains from Sheep Hole Pass, California (2023?).

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One last Siberia (California) pic for a while… (from 1991).

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Siberia, California (1991), again. A fave spot of mine on the old Route 66. To quote Wikipedia, "Siberia was a water stop and a rail siding for the Santa Fe Railroad and a motorist stop on U.S. Route 66 until it faded out after the 1973 opening of Interstate 40, which bypassed the town. Since 2001, all traces of the town have been removed." That last bit isn't quite true — there's still the ruins of at least one building there.

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For Sale, acres of rocky desert sand somewhere in the middle of nowhere between (IIRC) Bagdad and Amboy, California (1991).

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Roy's, Amboy (California, 1991). Back when Roy's was more-or-less a working gas station, cafe, and motel (and Buster Burris still owned it — and the rest of the town), and not (quite) the tourist or hipster bucket list item it is now. But I'm glad it's still around, and if turning it into a slightly-twee and glossy version of what it once was is what it takes to keep it around, I'm fine with that…