At first, there was no road at all, just a series of springs where the water table breached the earth’s crust.

At the end of the last Ice Age (about 15,000 years ago), there had been many interconnected lakes, rivers, and springs here in the Mojave Desert. Since then, these extensive waterways have mostly dried up, leaving just two intermittent rivers (the Mojave and the Amargosa) and one permanent river (the Colorado). Yet the desert, where the average rainfall is less …