ROAD TRIPPING THE BAJA PENINSULA
A NEW GENERATION OF ADVENTURERS IS BRAVING THE 1,063-MILE HIGHWAY 1 TO EXPLORE DESERTS AND BEACHES
THE ROAD AHEAD stretches 1,063 miles, beginning at the Mexican border. Outside your car window, you see the cactus-and-boulder expanses of Joshua Tree — but with beaches. Or maybe it’s the Outback of Australia, with taquerias. ¶ It’s the Baja Peninsula’s Highway 1 that I’m talking about. For eight days this winter — just before the latest burst of cartel violence claimed three lives on Mexico’s east coast — I followed the road from the border to its rocky conclusion in Cabo San Lucas. The journey included sixfingered giants, baby whales, tropical fish, dry lakes, half-forgotten missions, sons of pioneers, yacht people, panga people, tricked-out trucks and tenacious cyclists.
I was looking for change. It’s been 50 years since the opening of the first paved road through the badlands connecting Baja’s north and south; 30 years since I drove the whole road for the first time; and 15 years since the surge of cartel violence, mostly on the mainland and in Tijuana, that has shaken Mexicans’ faith in their leaders and kept many Americans away.
This road-trip journal is about who and what I found in Baja’s outback: a new generation of adventurers, spurred by pandemic restlessness, outfitted with tools and toys their parents probably never imagined, often exploring alongside hardy Bajacalifornianos whose ancestors arrived a century ago.
While many Americans stay away, these travelers and their guides range deep into a gorgeous, deadly landscape that has remained essentially unchanged for decades — except for the part that’s utterly transformed.
“The amount of money you see on the road!” said Cruz Santiago, who has been visiting with his wife from Oregon since 1997. “That’s totally changed.”
Since the worst months of the pandemic, Baja tourists have largely resumed lolling in resorts, wintering in RVs, sportfishing, joining off-road races and raising hell in Cabo San Lucas nightclubs. Thanks to the enduring appeal of warm winters, long beaches and stiff drinks — even in the shadow of an epidemic on a peninsula starved for water — Los Cabos tourism reached record levels in 2022.
But now many other Baja visitors arrive from the north in trucks, SUVs, vans and motorcycles rigged for camping and backroad overlanding, a booming pastime that barely existed a decade ago.
Other visitors steer fortified mountain bikes on the Baja Divide, a 1,673-mile dirt route that was charted in 2015-16.
They can pinpoint cave paintings and surf spots by satellite with their phones; cozy up to gray whales for Instagram snaps; snorkel with whale sharks near La Paz; kite-surf at La Ventana; spurn fishing in favor of watching striped marlin attack sardines near Magdalena Bay or mobula rays migrating off the East Cape. They send up drones over the coast, which is longer than those of California, Oregon and Washington combined. (And until January, if you were brave or foolish enough, you could even have gone cage-diving among great white sharks off Baja’s west coast —but Mexican authorities put a stop to that after several safety scares.)
Meanwhile, citing high crime and homicides in Tijuana, the U.S. State Department urges Americans to reconsider travel to northern Baja, to take extra care in the south and to stay entirely away from six other Mexican states on the mainland. (Matamoros, where two Americans and one Mexican were killed in an early March kidnapping attempt, is in Tamaulipas state, about as far from Tijuana as Los Angeles is from Houston.)
With all that in mind, I planned to sidestep Tijuana and spend less than 36 hours in northern Baja. I also hired bilingual guide Nathan Stuart, 41, who lives in Ensenada and co-founded Legends Overlanding in 2020.
Along with Times photographer Brian van der Brug, we rented a truck from San Diegobased Topoterra, which since 2017 has specialized in off-grid vehicle and camping rentals.
“Baja just eats up time,” Stuart warned as we began to plot our itinerary. “There’s a lot to see.”
The first time, in a Toyota 4Runner
From my first trip down this road — back in 1992, with Times photographer Patrick Downs — I knew Stuart was right.
On that journey we rented a Toyota 4Runner, slept in hotels, relied on my sketchy Spanish, paid about $1.75 a gallon for gas and had to get towed out of trouble on a steep slope in Mulegé.
This time, with Stuart driving and translating, we would buckle into a RAM 2500 truck with heated seats, 37-inch tires, a crew cab and a GoFast camper shell with a retractable tent on top. This was a $100,000 rig, rented for $239 a day.
Almost immediately, we knew, it would be cloaked in dust and mud, like most longhaul Baja vehicles. Apart from our highway time, we would log about 350 miles on dirt roads built for anglers, miners and ranchers.
For communication we had Starlink, a subscription service that allows satellite internet access from just about anywhere. For entertainment, we would have Billie, Stuart’s border collie.
Most nights, we would camp on remote beaches and ranch land with owners’ permission. And without a doubt, we’d need to improvise here and there.
Though many Alta Californians don’t realize it, the Baja peninsula is twice the size of Ireland and is divided into two states. The state of Baja California begins at Tijuana and ends about 450 miles south at the 28th parallel of latitude.
Below that point, you’re in Baja California Sur, which has its own time zone and one of Mexico’s lowest crime rates.
Whether you’re north or south, “Connecting with a local is what makes you safe,” Stuart said.
Mile 69 Beneath the Valle de Guadalupe
By 11 a.m. on Day 1 we were in the dark. This was in the Guadalupe Valley, just outside Ensenada.
Step by step, we descended into an underground room dominated by a petrified oak tree, 35 feet high and 200 years old. I thought Doctor Who might materialize from another dimension at any moment. Instead somebody popped open a bottle of wine.
This was the tasting room of the Bruma winery (open since 2016), one of more than 150 wineries and dozens of lodgings in the valley now, a number that grew fast for a decade, then stalled during the pandemic.
“We give a lot of value and symbolism to nature,” said attendant Heraclio Ojeda, 29, f luent in English, Spanish and the argot of wine professionals everywhere. Ojeda poured and told us about Bruma winemaker Lulu Martinez Ojeda and the 200-acre winery, which includes the popular Fauna restaurant.
As if the valley’s growing winery count weren’t enough, here’s another measure of change: Fauna’s celebrated chef, trained in Copenhagen and New York, is Ensenadaborn David Castro Hussong,
part of the same GermanMexican family that founded Hussong’s Cantina in 1892.
In a setting nothing like that raucous bar (which lives on in Ensenada), we sat at a long table on Fauna’s patio and attacked the lettuce-withmackerel starter, the broccoli with chiltepin peppers, the cabbage with chilhuacle peppers and the lamb. First meal of the trip. And the best.
Then it was time to join Highway 1, creep through trafficchoked Ensenada and turn from luxe to rustic.
As Ensenada faded in the rearview mirror and civilization began to fall away, it got easier to picture 1973, when Highway 1 became the first paved road to connect the peninsula’s northern and southern halves.
“The result could be a modern paradise or a tourist slum,” wrote Philip Fradkin of The Times back then. Many Bajasavvy
American off-roaders, surfers, anglers and conservationists, Fradkin added, “wring their hands in despair at the thought of the road being completed. Mexicans look forward to such basics as electricity, telephones, freezers, television, fresh foods, more jobs and a share in the new wealth.”
Mile 250 Mama’s people in El Rosario
If outback Baja’s pioneers had a royal family, Anita Grosso Espinoza, better known as Mama, might be part of it. She was one of several children born to a Pima Indian mother and a father who came from Italy in 1880.
Beginning in the 1930s, Mama Espinoza ran a restaurant, lodging and gas station near the blacktop’s end in El Rosario, about 220 miles south of the border.
By the time the highway opened, Mama Espinoza was famous in the region, a bilingual wife, mother, entrepreneur and philanthropist known for her lobster tacos and a ledger book signed by Steve McQueen and James Garner.
“Bad roads, heavy-duty people,” she liked to say. “Good roads, all kind of people.”
Though Mama died in 2016 (estimated age: 105), her restaurant endures. Inside, sipping coffee beneath her portrait, I found Hector Espinoza, 64, a relative of Mama, retired commercial diver and former mayor of El Rosario.
He showed me around the artifact room and told me to savor the Valle de los Cirios, just ahead.
“There’s nothing like it in the world,” Espinoza said.
This is where the highway turns away from the Pacific, entering a world defined by sand, boulders, spines, thorns and only-in-Mexico specimens like the cirio tree, which is tapered like a candle and topped by a blossom of f laming yellow.
Instead of the Joshua trees and saguaro cactuses of Alta California and Arizona, the valley teems with yuccas and cardon cactuses — an almost parallel universe, almost empty of people. Some of the cardons reach 60 feet, f lanking the narrow highway like toll gates, making the road look narrower than it is.
But it really is narrow. For most of the next 400 miles, the two-lane highway is 20 feet wide with no shoulder and very few turnouts. This leaves truckers and bus drivers inches to spare, even before they start thinking about meandering cows and donkeys. For good reason, Bajacalifornianos urge all drivers to travel during daylight.
Also, once you pass the El Rosario Pemex station heading south, it’s 200 miles to the next proper gas station.
“The road is very dangerous,” Espinoza said, recalling the government’s promises to widen the road soon after its completion. “In 50 years they’ve done nothing.”
Mile 326 Cataviña dawn and a bed of coals
We camped outside Cataviña, about two miles off the highway. In the morning, like a tortoise emerging from its portable home, I looked out from my rooftop tent as first light fell on the desert.
Of the 120 species of cactuses said to be on the peninsula, about 118 seemed to have gathered to hear our snoring. Once we had coffee in us, Stuart nodded toward a gap between 20-foot-high boulders and we stepped in. Ancient handprints. Dark hashmarks.
This amazed me — until about an hour later, when we reached another cave, this one crawling with black, red and orange hashmarks, circles and a sun with radiating lines.
“That sun?” said local guide Nathan Velasco, 34. “When you count, there are 13 rays, and there are 13 lunar cycles. … It’s all original.”
Velasco had joined us for lunch at his family’s Café la Enramada in Cataviña.
We talked about rock art and the Yuman, Cochimi, Monqui, Guaycura and Pericú people who lived in Baja up to 10,000 years ago. We also talked about Mama Espinoza — because
Velasco also is related to her.
That’s when Emily Smith and Nick Tornambe rolled up and stepped in.
Smith, 27, had come from Georgia; Tornambe, 26, from Pennsylvania. They had been pedaling their long-haul mountain bikes for 16 days on the Baja Divide trail. With luck they’d reach La Paz in a month.
“Our favorite campsite was two nights ago, in this wash. We had to cross the riverbed with our bicycles and it was getting dusk,” Smith said. “The moon was rising. We decided to stop. And Nick built this massive fire…”
“And then we let the coals die down,” Tornambe continued, “and covered it back up, and slept on top of that. So it was like this heated bed. Quite nice.”
Mile 362 Fast cars and smuggled parrots in Laguna Chapala
Not far beyond Cataviña, the highway reaches Laguna Chapala, a dry lake bed that people drove on before the highway opened. Now the road skirts the lake, but you can still take your car or bike out on the f lats, stomp on the gas and kick up dust. Some overlanders and off-roaders spend hours roaring back and forth, Stuart told us, with drones scrambled above to capture the scene.
So of course we had to try that. And we needed to meet Eugenio Grosso Peralta, 66, who has been running a ranch, store and restaurant by the dry lake for decades, as his father did before him, and as his son is doing now at the Nueva Chapala restaurant next door.
Of course Eugenio Grosso is related to Mama Espinoza. He’s her nephew. And his father, Arturo Grosso, brother of Mama E., was a renowned road builder and raconteur.
Standing before a set of family portraits and using a f lyswatter as a pointer, Grosso gave us the story.
His father was facing punishment in 1925 for desertion from the Mexican military,
“Baja just eats up time. There’s a lot to see.” — NATHAN STUART Legends Overlanding tour guide