On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
The Mojave Desert is a strange and wondrous place, made all the more strange by the fact that a lot of it is in California, which is also strange and wondrous. Guardian Lions in the Mojave! Who knew? Great pics, as usual, and an interesting story, even if we don’t know all of it!
?BillinGlendaleCA
Amboy is a small community on Route 66 in the middle of the Mojove desert. It was one of the few communities along Route 66 (now the National Trails Highway) between Needles on the California/Arizona border and Barstow, CA and hosted a motel/cafe as well as a gas station. When I-40 bypassed Amboy in the early 1970’s the town declined but didn’t die as some of the other towns along Route 66 in the area did like Essex further east. One of the reasons is the large volcanic crater a few miles west of town.
This area was of of interest to me due to being very dark and the crater being a nice foreground element. I visited 2 years ago to get some photos of the Milky Way over the crater and capture the Perseid meteor shower with somewhat disappointing results. I vowed to return. As I looked at Google Maps to plan my return, I noticed designations of the maps east of town along the highway for “Guardian Lion East” and “Guardian Lion West” (these points of interest no longer show up on Google Maps).
Expanding to see if there were photos of the area, I discovered photos of two large Chinese Foo Dog or Guardian Lion statues. These statues guard temples of palaces in China and other parts of east Asia (there are a pair at the entrance to the Chinese Garden at The Huntington). Little is known as to how these statues suddenly appeared in the middle of the desert outside of Amboy about 7 years ago. These statues have a cinder-block base and are about 6 feet tall and made of stone.
The placement of these statues in the middle of the desert took some planning and heavy machinery to accomplish. So these statues provided another reason to visit Amboy and some additional planning (figuring out which direction they are facing and the right time to visit to get the galactic center in the right spot).
It’s about a 3 hour drive (without traffic) from Glendale to Amboy, so I headed out on a Sunday afternoon to time my arrival before sunset since finding the lions were be difficult in the dark. I arrived a bit later that I’d hoped, the sun had set about 15 minutes earlier. Traveling west down Route 66 I kept my eye out of the statues on the left side of the road in the diminishing light. I noticed two motorcycle riders to the left and the first of the lions. I pulled over to get a closer look and check to where I’d set up for my shots. The bikers left and I waited for astronomical twilight to pass to get my shots.
While I was waiting, I walked own the highway about a quarter of a mile to the west and found the other guardian lion. After astronomical twilight I shot the eastern lion (female) and drove west and shot the western lion (male). I headed further down the highway to Amboy and to my delight, the sign at Roy’s motel/cafe was still lit up. I set up my camera, and they turned the lights on the sign off. I still took a picture, which you see here.
I continued west to Amboy Crater. They have a nice picnic area with a view of the crater, but I hiked a bit on the trail until I reached a ridge in the lava field to setup for my photos. I took a set in portrait orientation and then also took a panorama in landscape orientation, but by then the moon had begun to rise. While this made for a more washed out photo of the Milky Way band, it did allow for a moonlit foreground.
Eastern Guardian Lion and the Milky Way. This is the female lion which you can tell by the lion cub under her right paw.
Western Guardian Lion and the Milky Way. This is the male lion with a ball under its left paw.
Male Guarding Lion and the Milky Way with a train in the background to the right.
Roy’s diner and cafe in Amboy. When I arrived the sign was lit, they turned it off just as I was setting up for the shot.
The Milky Way seeming to erupt from Amboy Crater.
This panorama of the Milky Way over Amboy Crater was taken just after the Moon rose in the east.
SiubhanDuinne
As always, your photos are stunning. There aren’t enough superlatives in my vocabulary to convey my awe at the brilliance of the night sky and your skill/artistry in capturing it.
Fascinated by the lions in such a remote(ish) location. It’s amazing that they simply appeared so recently without any contemporary record. Would really love to know more about the whowhenwhy of these sculptures.
rikyrah
ALL of them – just gorgeous??
Baud
What they said.
Mary G
The two beer bottles, frog figurine, and a rock covered in what I hope is red paint at the foot of the lady lion intrigue me. On my first trip to the Grand Canyon my friend and I decided I-40 was just too boring, so we took some back roads and went through Amboy. There is some really desolate country out there.
JPL
I wonder if Todd and Buzz stayed at Roy’s while slowly traveling along Rt. 66. Great pictures!
raven
Nice
raven
When I was a kid we’d drive 66 “from Chicago to LA, almost 2,000 miles all the way. . ” It was pre-AC in cars and we’d stay at the Western Skies in Albuquerque, New Mexico, swim and cool off and leave in the middle of the night to make it across the Mohave at night.We had these canvas water bags you’d hang in front of the radiator.
As a bonus my first wedding was in the Foo Dog Garden at Allerton Park.
arrieve
Stunning pics as always. I think the first one is my favorite — the almost spooky Foo Dog and that amazing backdrop.
gkoutnik
@raven:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Browne_(album)#/media/File:Jacksonbrownedebut.jpg
raven
@gkoutnik: I forgot. I also didn’t know he wrote “These Days”!
gkoutnik
I can still remember traveling through the Mojave when I was much younger – a Northeast kid – and realizing, “Good lord, the desert is beautiful!” Then, traveling across during most of my trips West, mostly in the winter, I got a kick out of driving in the Mojave Desert with the heat on!
mad citizen
Fantastic photos as always, and great dedication to your craft to drive six hours for these specific photos. Thanks to Raven I learned my one new thing for the day, the cool canvas (linen) bags.
Pinterest is the spider web of the internet.
gkoutnik
Oh – sorry – forgot to say “Awesome pics!” Beautiful, unearthly. And fascinating. Definitely a detour next time – lions, a crater and Roy’s!
gkoutnik
@raven: He has a funny story about a song he didn’t write – got a request for “Tequila Sunrise” (some fan probably mixing it up with “Take it Easy”) and he said that he thought, “Sure! What the hell? Now – can I remember the words?”
raven
@mad citizen: This is the car we drove and we towed a U Haul.
raven
And me and my sis the winter before we moved to LA!
raven
@gkoutnik: I hate the fucking Eagles!
opiejeanne
Bill, your photos are wonderful as usual. The Foo dogs are a strange sight out there. I wonder what the story is
@JPL: I don’t know who Todd and Buzz are, but my family stayed there when I was a kid, probably 1957. I don’t remember much about it except the price of the room was extremely high, but Dad was tired and it was late.
Amboy was the first of the “alphabets” with Zzyzx being the last. A college friend got a summer job with CalTrans in 1969 and was staying in Ludlow; his phone number was Ludlow 9.
raven
@opiejeanne: 57 was the year we moved out there.
JPL
@opiejeanne: I’m showing my age, because it’s a reference to an old TV series. Route 66 As a tween, I was in love with both characters.
Jerry
Every morning I hope to see my photos featured here and every morning I am happy to see all the others, especially Bill’s. My favorite of Bill’s photos is that I get to see the milky way again, something that I saw every clear night while growing up in northern Michigan. Too much light pollution here in North Carolina to see our galaxy now. /sad trombone
catatonia
Mojave National Preserve is a greatly underrated park. Surrounded by Joshua Tree to the south and Death Valley to the NW, it gets overlooked. My wife and I accessed it through the little town of Fenner off I-40. (The description of Amboy sounds a lot like Fenner; calling Fenner a “town” is being generous.) We kept riffing off the name of the town as we drove in the Preserve. (Very slow going in a rental car, but doable.) It would not have sounded the least bit funny to anyone else, but we had each other in hysterics. Sharing a goofy sense of humor goes a long way. I had to look up what trail we hiked: the Teutonia Peak trail to Cima Dome. Absolutely gorgeous. We caught the sunset from the ridge. I have pics stashed somewhere. (This was before the age of decent cellphone cameras.) Still sticks in my memory in a trip that included the Sequoias, Kings, and the Grand Canyon. Would have gone for Death Valley as well but it’s still pretty hot there in early October. What a glorious trip that was.
opiejeanne
@raven: I was 7 in 1957. I remember those water bags that hung in front of the radiator. We didn’t have one.
There were also a few AC units that hung on the passenger side window, and we didn’t have one of those either
That was a long, hot drive. Dad liked to get us on the road at 4am to avoid some of the heat, and look for a motel with a pool around 3 pm.
opiejeanne
@JPL: I remember that show but only faintly. Kookie, lend me your comb.
Dmbeaster
The Mojave Desert is full of weird and wondrous places. As a teenager, my Dad and I went rockhounding all over its expanse, but in particular in what is now the Mojave Preserve. Now I mostly just go to Death Valley National Park – love that place.
The star show is great. This time of year, the bright core of the galaxy rests on the western horizon after sunset, which makes mountain features just below it seem to be erupting.
WaterGirl
@Jerry: You and your blue ridge mountains are coming up on Friday
I have a crush on someone in your photos.
WaterGirl
@raven: I have been thinking ahead to what might come next when we leave Paris After Dark.
I have been thinking it might be fun to do of photos from when we were kids. Your links today have prompted me to put it out there and see what people think.
Anybody think that might be fun?
raven
@opiejeanne: I was born 11/ 49.
raven
@WaterGirl: Except people get all freak about that kind off stuff. Obviously it doesn’t bother me.
cope
Really, really GOOD pictures. Also, too nice reminiscences about long distance car travel back in the day (’60s). 5 kids, 2 parents, 1 Ford station wagon and a pop-up Apache camper behind was our M.O.. Not only did we not have AC but my folks wouldn’t even spring for radio. Summers, because my step dad was a teacher and my mom didn’t have a career, we would head west from north of Chicago, westbound on I-80 some years, I-70 others. We never went down into California but did spend time lots of time in Colorado/Wyoming/Utah with one memorable summer on Vancouver Island. One consequence of all this time out west was a 1970 family move to western Colorado where both my brothers and both my sisters and their families still live.
Good time, great times.
Again, these pictures are wonderful, Bill.
cope
@raven: 5/50 here, raven, you beat me by 6 months.
cope
@WaterGirl: I would participate. You could post the kid pictures and make a contest of “Match the BJers” to their young selves.
opiejeanne
@opiejeanne: Oh wait! Kookie was on 77 Sunset Strip.
opiejeanne
@raven: March, 1950.
StringOnAStick
I have no childhood photos of any kind; my mom threw them all out when she had a dementia fit and decided that having kids ruined her life (I’m pretty sure the alcohol deserved most of her blame). Our dad didn’t think it was worth fighting with her about it, so he just took out the trash and went back to his office.
I’m really glad there’s effective birth control now so that people who never wanted kids can keep it that way; I’m certainly in that camp.
WaterGirl
@cope: It wouldn’t even need to be pictures of us, though it could be.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne: The Lions, they be a mystery…it’s kind of more interesting that way, isn’t it?
@Baud:
@rikyrah: Thanks.
@Mary G: (Pixel peeping, it doesn’t look like red paint.) I think those are offerings to the Foo Dog. What I found interesting is they were only by the Lion at the east.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JPL: Thanks.
@raven:
@raven: Thanks, it gets toasty in the Mojave, I think it was about 100, just after sunset. But it’s a dry heat.
@arrieve: Thanks, I should have put some light directly behind the statue; I’m still learning the lighting thing.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@gkoutnik: As hot as it gets in the summer, it can get downright cold in the winter with the higher elevations getting snow.
@mad citizen: A couple of years ago, my wife asked why I had to drive to take pictures, I answered, “cause it ain’t dark here”. Its about a minimum 2 hour r/t drive to get any nightscape images.
@gkoutnik: Thanks, there’s other stuff in the area, Joshua Tree is about 50 miles to the south, and Kelso and the Kelso dunes are about 30 to 40 miles to the north.
Elizabelle
Wonderful photos. Love the foo
lionsdogs (now know what they are called).Thank you for taking on all the driving again, for our benefit.
Some links: Atlas Obscura recommends; does not know from whence the foo dogs came.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: They were Randy Newman’s session band for a couple of his albums in the late 70’s.
@opiejeanne: You are correct, Amboy is the first of “the alphabets” headed east along the railroad (Louis Kingman named them), however Zyzzx is not one of ‘the alphabets” it’s to the north by a pretty fair distance and was named much later.
@Jerry: I can relate, we can’t seem many star here in LA(though I’ve managed to photograph the Milky Way here when the humidity is really low and it’s it’s clear), but dark places are a couple of hours away. The east coast doesn’t have places as dark as we do in the west, but there are places that are sufficiently dark. Dark Sky Map. I’ve shot in areas that are yellow and green with good results.
@catatonia: Quite a bit of interesting things to see out there, I wanted to go to “Hole in the Wall” this year, but it’ll have to wait for another time.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Dmbeaster: I timed this so the Milky Way would be due south at sunset so it would be behind the lions and then to the southwest by the time I got to the crater. I’ve not been to Death Valley since I was a kid, the wife wants to go and I want to return.
@cope: Thanks, most of our road trips when I was a kid were along the west coast, but I-5 though the Central Valley was brutal in the summer.
@Elizabelle: Thanks, the lions go by a number of names.
Prometheus Shrugged
For anyone interested in the history of metazoan life and Precambrian climate, there’s a fascinating sedimentary sequence exposed just to the east of Amboy near the “town” of Cadiz. Rich trilobite-bearing beds have yielded some excellent complete specimens. And it’s BLM land, so you can wander around and collect whatever you find, though the easily accessible fossil beds have been pretty thoroughly picked over by now. I actually find the Precambrian rocks (deposited prior to trilobites) more interesting, but the whole area is great.
Photos are excellent, as always.
J R in WV
@cope:
I’m 12/50, so there’s a little cluster of us. I knew Raven was about a year older than I, he was drafted/compulsorily inducted a year before I was.
Billin, great photos of the home galaxy, as usual. Would like to see Amboy crater in daylight, may try Google Earth for that.
Keep up the good work!!
JustRuss
Nice pics as always, love surreal oddities like the foo dogs.
BigJimSlade
Very nice!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Prometheus Shrugged: Thanks, actually Route 66 was closed off at Kelbaker Road heading east, so no way to get to Cadiz right now.
@J R in WV: Thanks, the shots of the crater were from the trail that goes to the crater, I might try the hike there in cooler weather. I actually like the cinder cone at Fossil Falls in Coso a bit better. That’s right next to US-395 north of Ridgecrest(a little bird tells me there may be pics from there next week).
@JustRuss: They’re a pretty odd sight even without the Milky Way. Thanks.
@BigJimSlade: I’ve got to perfect the lighting a bit, I need to get at a more perpendicular angle to the camera and maybe get a lum cube to light up the back.