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Walking Away: A Monument of Abandoned Footwear in the Mojave
Sole searching in the high California desert.
On a recent road trip from my home in the low Phoenix desert to the high desert of Joshua Tree, I found a little spot that revealed another aspect of what we think of as art.
I hate freeways, so when I found this delightful little road, Route 62, I chose it instead of the usual I10 through Desert Center.
This fascinating little asphalt strip runs west from Parker, Arizona, and traverses the lower Mojave desert. It is well maintained and in some spots straight as a proverbial arrow.
I stopped in Parker for a new cup of diet soda, the good styrofoam kind. The kind that keeps your ice from melting in 12.56 minutes. It’s the desert man.
Grabbing a to-go sandwich and a couple of bottles of water, I headed out over the bridge crossing the mighty, well, once mighty, Colorado River. In Colorado it roars, in Parker, it is tamed into the same flow farmers get from irrigation ditches.
Water will be worth more than gold someday.
Judging by the river that day, it will be soon.
The winter desert has its very own kind of enchantment. Especially on a cool January morning when the light cuts sharp and clean through air so crisp it almost crackles.
The road is little traveled, at least from my experience. I saw very few cars.
There were also a few roads heading off into the desert.
But they seemed rare.
Because the desert is sand.
It was once a huge lake covering all of central California, and the desert floor is entirely made up of soft sand ready to capture the errant Lexus or Land Rover feeling brave enough to take it on.
I spotted it from about a half-mile out. Just another abandoned desert structure, I thought. But desert mirages don’t usually wear shoes.
Thousands of them.
Not a typo.
Thousands of shoes hanging from what used to be a service station now stripped down to just a roof held up by a single pole. A well-stickered pole.
Like some kind of bizarre desert Christmas tree, only instead of snowy ornaments, it’s decorated with everything from ballet slippers to work boots, baby shoes to stripper heels.
Of course… I pulled over.
For the next hour, not a single car passed by. Just me, my camera, and this magnificent monument to footwear gone wild.
The closer I got to the structure, the stranger it became.
A sparkling pair of green high heels caught the morning sun like a ghostly desert disco ball.
Men’s cowboy boots, their leather stamped with delicate flowers, soles long ago worn through swayed gently in a gentle, warming breeze.
In fact, the sound of the breeze and the gentle tones of shoe-on-shoe banging added to the feeling of mystery. More of a gentle thudding or something.
Some shoes looked fresh enough to have been tossed up yesterday. Others had been baking in the Mojave sun for what must have been years.
The central pole told its own story — a chaotic collage of stickers. Rock bands mixed with travel memories and enough marijuana-themed adhesives to stock a head shop. Each one a breadcrumb from some previous visitor.
I walked around it again and again, finding new details with each circuit.
There was no pattern, no obvious plan to the thing.
Just layers upon layers of shoes, each pair presumably with its own story, now part of this larger desert tale.
A few abandoned rail cars sat on a nearby spur, silent witnesses to who knows how many shoes were being added to this peculiar collection.
The soft clouds overhead acted like nature’s softbox, filling in the harsh shadows and letting me reveal both the grandeur and the small details of this roadside wonder.
Some say the desert shows you what you need to see.
Today it showed me that art doesn’t need a reason. Sometimes it just needs a pole, a few thousand shoes, and the vast emptiness of the Mojave to make its point.
Next time I’ll remember to take an old pair of walking shoes to add.
Hi, I’m Don Giannatti, a photographer and mentor for up-and-coming photographers. You can find me on my website, Don Giannatti, and at my Substack site, where I also publish for creative people.
