The Sidetrack Adventures channel — which has produced a lot of good content to interest Route 66 buffs — recently created a new video that explains how the U.S. government considered the use of nuclear bombs to build a new alignment of Route 66 through California’s Mojave Desert.
Yes, this proposal sounds stupefyingly dumb even to the layman. But during the early 1960s, it was a serious thing to carve a new path through the Bristol Mountains.
It even had a name — Project Carryall. (I first heard about it through Earl Swift’s excellent 2012 book “The Big Roads” (Amazon link). The Route 66 News review of the book is here.)
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and the nukes-for-roads idea never was carried out. Sidetrack Adventures has more details about the Project Carryall project:
A monument to the aborted Project Carryall project sits to the side of the Ludlow Cafe in the Route 66 town of Ludlow, California.
In another piece of Route 66 content, Sidetrack Adventures spends a part of the video at Roy’s Cafe & Motel complex — a Mother Road landmark in Amboy, California. The nuclear fallout from Project Carryall probably would have made the village uninhabitable.
(Screen-capture image from Sidetrack Adventures video of the Project Carryall map)
There was a similar proposal to blast through the San Bernardino Mountains to build what is now I-15 from the Ontario/Upland area to the Cajon Pass