The rain started before I fell asleep and hadn’t let up, even as I sat up in my tent and began to pack up my gear eight hours later. This hadn’t been much of a problem during the night; the sound of each drop hitting the polyester rain fly drowned most of the background noise and helped lull me to sleep. My home for the next three days, an alpine green Gazelle hub tent, kept me dry all night, showing no signs of leakage, and seemed a long way from becoming waterlogged. Though now that it was morning I had to leave my tent behind, hop into a prototype Nissan Frontier Pro-4X and continue along the Mojave Road.
Most of the Mojave Road sits on National Park land known as the Mojave National Preserve, but this wasn’t always the case. Prior to the passage of the California Desert Protection Act in October of 1994, the same act that created both Joshua Tree and Death Valley National Parks, the Mojave Road was vulnerable to destruction and development, and with it the history of this section of America.
A little over thirty years prior, in 1962, a young conservationist and future historian named Dennis Casebier began field work on the Mojave Road, back then known as the 'Old Government Road' on maps. By the mid-eighties he had published several books on the historical importance of the road, the beginning of a conservation effort that would span the rest of his life.
It was one of these books that was responsible for this trip. Found in the basement of the library at the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association’s (MDHCA) headquarters in Goffs, California was a box of thin, red hardcovers, with no markings on them other than the title, embossed in gold: Nissan on the Mojave Road.
In 1983 Casebier guided a group of Nissan employees, a photographer and some journalists from familiar outlets (Autoweek, Motor Trend, and Fourwheeler Magazine, to name a few) along the 130-mile road in 1983½ Nissan 720 pickups. Each truck was armed with CB radios crackling with Casebier’s voice lecturing as they made their way over the trail, a drive through history.
It was in the same spirit that we were on this trip 40 years later, though more than a few things had changed. The voice over the radio wasn’t Casebier’s, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 86, but that of Sean Holman, Director of the MDHCA. And instead of two-door 720s, we were sitting comfortably in the latest generation Frontier Pro-4X preproduction vehicles that Nissan PR managed to save for a bit longer before they inevitably met their crushing end. The trucks were familiar; they were quite literally the same exact trucks I had driven on the launch in Sundance, Utah back in August of 2021. Back then they represented the end of Covid lockdown, my first trip out of the state in over a year. Now, they would be taking me on a whole new adventure.
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