I ironically first heard of that movie last year just days before flying to San Francisco to buy a car and drive it back. The first couple days of my trip was basically the reverse of Kowalski's journey from Denver to San Francisco.
The opening and closing scenes were filmed in Cisco, UT, which is now pretty much a ghost town. The Shell station from those scenes is still kinda standing though. Here's a picture from the movie and a picture I took of it a year ago.
"You can beat the police, you can beat the road, and you can even beat the clock, but you can't beat the desert. Nobody can. You just cannot."