The Plank Road Across the Imperial Dunes

The Imperial Sand Dunes stretch for miles just east of here, and for early motorists heading between California and Arizona, they were a nearly impassable barrier. The answer was one of the most unusual roads ever built in the American West: a seven-mile plank road laid directly across the dunes.

Each portable panel measured eight feet by twelve feet and was built from wooden planks bolted together. When the ever-shifting sand buried one stretch, workers and a team of horses would lift the sections free and re-lay them on top. The road opened around nineteen fifteen and served travelers through the nineteen twenties, when a paved highway finally replaced it.

A short preserved section of the original planks still exists near Grays Well, protected as a historic site. The road was narrow enough for only one vehicle at a time, so travelers had to pull into turnouts and wait for oncoming traffic, negotiating the desert by a kind of pioneer courtesy.