A few straight words about this road and this desert, because both deserve your respect. First, the driving: State Route 88 is narrow, it winds, and in places it runs along real drop-offs with not much shoulder and not always a guardrail. So keep your speed down, stay well on your own side of the line, use the pullouts to let faster locals by, and do your sightseeing with the car stopped, not while you're rolling along a cliff edge. It's a slow road by design — let it be slow.
Second, the desert itself. This is a November-through-April tour for a reason: from late spring through the summer, the heat out here turns genuinely dangerous, well over a hundred degrees, and people get into real trouble every year. Even in the cool season, carry plenty of water — more than you think — for everyone in the car. And know about the flash flood: in monsoon season a thunderstorm miles away, up in the mountains, can send a wall of water roaring down a bone-dry wash without a cloud in your own sky. Never drive into a flooded dip or wash — turn around; the water's deeper and stronger than it looks, and that same flooding is exactly what keeps tearing up the far end of this very trail. Respect the heat, respect the water, take the curves easy, and this old road will give you one of the finest days of desert driving there is.
Photo: Dougtone · CC BY-SA 2.0
