Three Flags Highway Guide

A fellow named Cameron Kaiser has put together an incredibly detailed guide to Highway 395, or what used to be called the “Three Flags Highway”. The guide starts way down in San Diego, where the Hwy 395 doesn’t even exist anymore. He has to explore old surface streets to find where the old route used to run in the 1960s. Then the highway starts for real outside Victorville, in the Mojave Desert, and he follows it from there all the way up to the Canadian border. The amount of work he put into this project is insane. He split up the road up into about 30 segments, each one representing a stretch between county lines, or between two landmarks. Then he gave each segment its own page, and posted at least a dozen pictures of each stretch. Mostly they’re pictures of highway signs and mile markers, since he’s a “roadgeek”, as he calls himself, and he’s interested in things like signage and alignments and numbering. He really has a field day trying to wrap his mind around the whole US 395/I-580 thing going on with the Carson City and Reno Freeways. But he also sprinkles in historical backgrounds on each of the areas the road travels through, and gives you a sense of the scenery and sights you’re going to see along the way. I’ve been driving 395 between here and Orange County for over 20 years, and even I learned a few things flipping through this site.

Most of what he writes about is in California, Oregon and Washington, all of which are kind of outside the scope of this website. But since 395 dips into Nevada, and rolls right through downtown Minden, Carson and Reno, our area does gets its fair share of coverage. Five pages, to be exact, and since our freeway project has been going on for something like 40 years there’s plenty for him to talk about. The five segments he covers are:

If you’ve got even a little bit of roadgeek lurking inside of you, his site is worth checking out.


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