Siberia: The Coldest Name in the Hottest Desert

The Mojave Desert stretches along old Route Sixty-Six past Bagdad and Ludlow, and somewhere out there of cracked alkali and Joshua trees, the Santa Fe Railroad established a siding it named Siberia.

The name is the kind of irony that railroad workers arrived at after too many summer shifts. The Mojave is one of the hottest places in North America. Summer temperatures at this elevation can climb past a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. The soil is sand and cinders. The air is almost entirely without humidity. Whatever made the railroad men think of Siberia when they named this stop, it was not the weather. Some sources suggest the name reflects the punishing winter winds that rake the grade between Ash Hill and Amboy when the desert does turn cold, and the Mojave does have cold winters, temperatures below freezing at night, winds that cut through anything. But the association with Siberia is probably also just the dark humor of men working the most remote stretch of a long, hard rail line.

The siding became a small community. In the nineteen thirties and forties, Route Sixty-Six brought tourists and migrants through, and a few cafes and motor courts operated here to catch the traffic. The stop was particularly important for steam engines climbing the long grade from Amboy toward Ash Hill; they needed water, and Siberia had a tank.

What happened to Siberia was the same thing that happened to most of the Mojave wayside settlements: Interstate Forty opened in nineteen seventy-three, routed away from the old alignment, and the traffic that had sustained Siberia disappeared within months. The cafes closed. The cabins emptied.

By two thousand one, all physical traces of the settlement had been removed. The name persists on historical maps and in the memory of Route Sixty-Six documentation projects. There is nothing to see at this location. Which is, in its own way, as accurate a picture of this place as any.