Highway 58

I have been driving down to Big Bear Lake, California, for a long time. I settled here in Oregon, moving from Japan, in 1987, and very soon after that drove down Interstate 5, southbound. I-5, if you stay on it, and it used to be the road to stay on, takes you down to Buttonwillow, in the San Joaquin Valley, central California, where you can cut over to California 58, an old truckers short-cut that keeps you away from Los Angeles and everything south of the mountains around the LA basin. It takes a pretty direct line across the High Desert, and meets I-15 in Barstow, and from there Las Vegas is only a couple of hours away.

58’s always been kind of a bastard highway. Long sections of it used to be two lane divided highway – the kind you wanna have lots of passing power for, or lots of patience, as you slog behind some semi going barely the speed limit… for trucks.

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Then, all of a sudden, you’ll come on a four-lane Interstate Highway, widely separated from traffic going the other way, and all sorts of room to pass. A few miles of that, and you’d find yourself on a four lane desert highway, the other traffic RIGHT there, and no exits, no turn offs for miles.

They call it the High Desert because of it’s altitude; it’s generally above 3000 feet. It gets snow, sometimes, a fierce, brutal Desert storm of it, and so snow is much better than rain, because of wide-spread flash-flooding. The winds roar though the desert too, especially in the pass at Tehatchipi, the southernmost extension of the High Sierras.

There have been windmills here most all of my life; the wind is pretty constant here, varying from a desert zephyr to a full on hurricane.

I’ve always thought it was eminently sensible to use the wind, which is always there ANYWAY, to pull useful energy out of it.

They make, on a windy day, a kind of curious sound, more a vibration, really, than a sound, that fills the air around here with a ghostly noise, less heard than "felt".

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58 goes right past Edwards Air Force Base; I’ve seen some interesting things flying through the desert air, all of which around here, almost all the way to Salt Lake City, is Military airspace. Before my parents died in 77, my dad’s brother and his family lived in the High Desert; I guess I’ve been passing this way most of fifty years.

It’s pretty much my favorite part of the 1000 mile drive to and from Big Bear.

It never really did rain on me there in California. Oh, it did, in places at times, but it wasn’t until the next day, when I passed into Oregon that I drove in the rain all 307 miles to my home in Portland.

Big Bear didn’t get any snow out of this storm either. 5000 people live there year-round; it’s the 100,000 people up for skiing some weekends that really support the town, and no snow means no "flat-landers" bringing money to the mountains.

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58 has long been a favorite road of mine: long stretches of Nothing, and no real reason not to go as fast as you wanted; nothing to damage if you drove off the road. It’s a 65mph zone most of the way, and some parts of it are marked for 70. When I was a kid, long ago in the 60’s, I remember seeing signs that said "NO SPEED LIMIT".

Ha. I set myself up for gas mizering my way to Oregon, and drove at not more than 62 mph most all of the way. This tank of gas – 200 miles or so, less than half a tank, really, got me 33 miles per gallon, fill to fill, but the next section, up California 99, over flat San Joaquin Valley, got me 36.83 mpg, tank to tank.

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Last stats of that trip:

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>2086 miles, total.

73.301 gallons of gas used, 28.56 mpg overall. Two tanks in that average were 36 plus mpg – really good for one of my cars. Best ever, almost.

The blue 08 Caliber that I had, with a 1.8L engine and a five-speed, made the trip with a couple of 37 mpg segments.

Different route route though; that was in 2008.

A tale of adventure from that drive

 

 

 

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