Chambless: One Man's Homestead, One Interstate, One Year

The place is said to have taken its name from an early settler named Chambless, at the intersection of Cadiz Road and the old National Trails Highway in the eastern Mojave. There was nothing here except heat, desert pavement, and the Santa Fe rail line running parallel to the road. A service station and cafe grew up there.

When Route Sixty-Six was officially designated in nineteen twenty-six and the Mojave segment was paved through the alphabet towns corridor, Chambless found itself on one of the most consequential roads in the country. The intersection with Cadiz Road made it a natural stop: drivers coming off the dry lake beds from the south, travelers heading west toward Needles and the Colorado River, anyone who needed fuel and water on a stretch of highway where the next town was twenty or thirty miles away and the temperature in July could hit a hundred and twenty degrees.

A more permanent set of structures eventually replaced Chambless's original setup. A gas station with an upswept Googie-style canopy was built in the mid-twentieth century and later ran as the Road Runner's Retreat. The name fit the landscape, which was full of roadrunners, the real birds, scraping across the gravel looking for lizards. The neon sign, mid-century modern against a backdrop of Joshua trees, became one of the more photographed stops on the California segment of Route Sixty-Six.

Interstate Forty bypassed the entire stretch of Route Sixty-Six between Ludlow and Fenner when it opened in nineteen seventy-three. The bypass moved traffic several miles north, up a straight alignment without the dips and curves of the old highway. The Road Runner's Retreat closed in the nineteen seventies. The surrounding structures faded over the decades. A hand-painted sign at the site in two thousand five declared the population at six residents and one dog. It has since been abandoned entirely. The canopy and sign foundations are still there.