The East Mojave Heritage Trail (EMHT) was developed by Dennis Casebier in the 1980s as an alternate overland route to the better known - and much shorter - Mojave Road. Even back in the 1980s, the Mojave Road was seeing a reasonable amount of vehicle traffic, and Casebier's goal with the EMHT was to try and disperse the concentrated vehicle traffic through the East Mojave region, while also introducing people to the lesser visited areas of the East Mojave Desert.
As he did with the Mojave Road, Casebier created a series of guide books - one for each of the 4 segments of the EMHT - that contained detailed information about the history of the region, mining history, railroads and other industrial developments, geology, flora and fauna, and tons of quirky stories.
Unfortunately, with the implementation of the 1994 Desert Protection Act, which established the Mojave National Preserve and designated Wilderness Areas, the trail was closed in at least 13 places impacting a minimum of 75 miles - thus rendering the guidebooks useless as navigational aids.
More recently, Billy Creech - an avid desert rat and president of the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association - took it upon himself to write a series of supplements that can be used with the original guidebooks to once again travel the EMHT.
