Plank road across California's dunes

Bureau of Land Management

If you have a yen for weird history, then you may be taken by the upcoming centennial of the Old Plank Road in Southern California's dune country. 1915 marked construction of an east-west road over the Algodones Dunes. Never heard of them? Think of that sandy locale where C-3PO and R2-D2 where shanghaied by Jawa Sandcrawlers in "Star Wars." Need to go back farther? These dunes were the setting for "Flight of the Phoenix," with Jimmy Stewart. You get the picture: Lots of blowing, drifting sand. Imagine trying to herd your motorhome over those dunes.

It was actually a matter of civic rivalry: Which Southern California city would become "the hub"? Los Angeles or San Diego? At the time, road racing while all the rage, and the two cities decided to work out who was best with a little road racing contest. Launch an automobile from each city with Phoenix as the end-point. An L.A. paper, the Examiner, sent their unit off, and San Diego sent Ed Fletcher, a prominent businessman.

Fletcher sallied forth with a 20 horse-power air-cooled Franklin. When he reached the great sand dunes, he let a bit of air out of his tires, and with the aid of a six-horse team, made it nearly five miles through hubs deep sand. Late in the night he reached the Colorado River, but the ferry was shut down for the night. Fletcher somehow managed to take his car over a the railroad trestle that crossed the river. In the end, Fletcher's Franklin chugged into Phoenix, 19 hours after leaving San Diego.

And the Los Angeles challenger? It broke down in Blythe, California and never made it to Phoenix.

Fletcher, excited by his win, began promoting a new road to Phoenix. Recognizing that pulling vehicles across the dunes with a horse team wasn't particularly feasible, Fletcher's plan included a plank road across the dunes. Two parallel plank tracks, 25 inches wide each, spiked down to wood cross-pieces would be his road, some six and a half miles across the dunes. Volunteer crews converted 13,000 planks into the roadway in just over a month and a half. A year later, prefabbed wood sections formed an eight foot wide roadway.

Maintaining the plank roadway against the wind, sand, and sun was a huge task. The narrow roadway was 'rough as a cob,' and users would have to pull out to allow oncoming traffic to pass. By 1926, a new roadway built with concrete and asphalt replaced the old plank roadway. But even 100 years later, there are still some traces of the old plank roadway remaining. Uncle Sam's Bureau of Land Management is gearing up for great interest as the roadway's centennial arrives.

You can see remnants of the old Plank Road south Interstate 8 at Gray's Well Road; an interpretive marker is roughly three miles west of the Sand Hills Interchange.