Pull up Google Maps and ask it to route you from Kanawyers to Independence, California. Watch what happens next. The blue line doesn’t go straight. It doesn’t even go close to straight.
It swings dramatically south through the Central Valley, skirts the edge of the Mojave Desert, loops around the bottom of one of the most formidable mountain ranges in North America, and climbs back north along US Route 395 — arriving at a destination that, on a straight line, was never more than 20 miles away.
The total distance: 350 miles. The total drive time: six hours.
Welcome to one of America’s most quietly astonishing
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