Off the Pavement
Or, the Dodge Raider Years, Part 1
Most of my posts here, in this nontraditional autobiography, have been about my professional life (sometimes mixed with aspects of my life away from the job). But this one has nothing to do with work, except that it’s how I got the money to do these things.
This one’s about one of my life’s greatest joys—getting off the pavement and into the wilderness areas of the American Southwest (and sometimes beyond). I grew up all over the place, and the travel bug has never left me. Exploring new places, or sometimes old favorite spots, is an incredibly fulfilling experience to me. And getting into the harder-to-reach areas (even when it’s just the unpaved parts of our local Veterans Oasis Regional Park) is the best part of it.
When I lived in northern California, I visited places like Yosemite NP, the Gold Country (featured in my novel Blood and Gold: The Legend of Joaquin Murrieta, which I wrote with Peter Murrieta), and various points along the California coast. But in those days, I always had to go where the pavement went. If there wasn’t a road, I couldn’t get there.
That changed after I moved to San Diego. The desert had always called to me, and there, it was only about an hour away at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. It’s California’s largest state park, and it encompasses five hundred miles of roads—very few of them paved. To really get inside the park and away from the crowds, I had to have a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
After a terrible experience test-driving a Suzuki Samurai—going where the salesman told me to go earned me a traffic ticket, and the vehicle felt like I was driving an industrial sink on wheels—I found my dream 4X4: my Dodge Raider.
The Dodge Raider was really a Mitsubishi Montero wearing a Dodge nameplate, but that didn’t matter to me. I spotted this one sitting in a car dealership in San Diego’s Mission Valley, stopped, test drove it, and bought it on the spot. It wasn’t fancy, but it had great ground clearance, and the underside was fully skid-plated, so I could drive over pointy rocks without fear of puncturing something important. It had on-demand four-wheel drive, and it even had an inclinometer, a handy device that tells you when you’re at a dangerous angle that might cause the vehicle to roll over. The photo above was taken at Anza-Borrego on the Raider’s first outing, in March 1988
My friend Rick, who was my most frequent travel partner on these pilgrimages, loved my Raider so much he bought his own, and we often convoyed on longer journeys. This photo of both of them is from a trip to Utah (see below).
I probably have hundreds of photos of Anza-Borrego, taken on many, many visits during my 21 years in San Diego, but for the purposes of this post, I just dug out an album with some from the earliest trips in the Raider. Most of the photos are in their envelopes from the processing lab, and those are in a huge box in the garage or the shed. Maybe someday I’ll put out a book of my best wilderness images, but not today.
Venturing beyond Anza-Borrego, I discovered the Salton Sea and Slab City—the setting for my first original horror novel, The Slab (still available if you want to learn more about that remarkable, psychedelically surreal area). The following images are all from there.
That last image is of Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain, just outside Slab City. Leonard was a dreamer, a recluse, a folk artist, and a religious zealot, about whom you can read more here. He built Salvation Mountain by hand, piece by piece, over the course of many years, mostly with found and donated materials and adobe he made himself out of the desert soil. I didn’t know him well, but I loved him, and I took him paint when I could. When I wrote The Slab, I left Salvation Mountain and Leonard out of it, because a) I didn’t know how to fit it into the story, and b) it was a horror novel, and I didn’t want to minimize Leonard’s decades of work on this project, intended to lift people’s spirits and spread what he believed to be the word of God, by including it in such a book.
The longest trip we ever took in the Raider was a visit to southern Utah’s great national parks—Arches, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Canyonlands. As pictured above, both Raiders went on this one, with Rick and I accompanied by our respective girlfriends.
But Substack is telling me that I’m near my limit for this post, so the Utah trip—and the trip to Nevada’s Great Basin NP, will have to wait. More soon!
Fun!
We have a Toyota 4Runner and will soon be going back to DEVA, but we have talked about going to Anza-Borrego at some point: we’ve never been! Dan never thought I’d love the desert, but on our way home from our huge Utah trip some years back he decided to drive me through one spot in Mojave. It was love at first drive!