The Guzzler

Kit foxes fall victim to distemper near new solar site

2012-01-26T00:07:00.000-08:00

State, feds team to find source; construction not affected

A desert kit fox warms itself in the sun near its burrow. California Department of Fish and Game is investigating the deaths of seven desert kit foxes in the past two months near the Genesis solar project near Blythe. The deaths are the first documented cases of canine distemper in wild desert kit foxes. (BLM)

Written by K Kaufmann
The Desert Sun

An outbreak of canine distemper among desert kit foxes near the Genesis solar project off Interstate 10 east of the Coachella Valley has triggered a state and federal investigation to find the cause of the disease and protect the animals near all solar projects in the region.

Since last October, a total of seven kit foxes dead or dying of the disease have been found on or near the Genesis site, said Deana Clifford, a wildlife veterinarian with the California Department of Fish and Game.

The deaths are the first documented cases of canine distemper in wild desert kit foxes, she said.

“What we've seen, they are declining very quickly and don't appear to live very long,” Clifford said.

Two kit foxes suffering from distemper were rushed to The Living Desert in Palm Desert in November and December, respectively, she said.

“The first animal was brought from the Blythe area and died before it got it here,” said Dr. Kevin Leiske, staff veterinarian at The Living Desert, which does not have kit foxes in captivity.

“The second animal was comatose and near death when it arrived and the only humane course of action was to euthanize the animal. Canine distemper is a devastating disease. The only true prevention is vaccination.”

Considered one of the desert's unique species, kit foxes can survive in dry climates because they get all their water from food. The animals are not endangered, but are a focus for wildlife conservation efforts, Fish and Game officials said.

A virus causes canine distemper, which affects both domestic and wild animals. Puppies, if not vaccinated, are particularly vulnerable, Clifford said.

It affects the animals' breathing and digestive system, causing coughing, diarrhea and dehydration, as well as brain swelling and seizures, she said.

It can cycle naturally through wild canine populations, she said, but also can be transmitted to and from domestic animals that come in contact with wildlife.

Trapping, tagging

In response to the outbreak, Fish and Game and the Bureau of Land Management have launched an investigation involving the trapping, tagging and vaccinating 39 kit foxes.

Earlier this month, they trapped foxes at four sites over a 10,000-acre area between NextEra Energy's Genesis — 20 miles west of Blythe — and Desert Sunlight in Desert Center and near the site of the Colorado substation south of I-10.

The outbreak may have briefly slowed construction on both sites as Clifford ordered the developers to halt activity near active kit fox burrows and to create wide buffer zones around them.

It's too early to say if there is any connection between the outbreak and the disruption of the fox habitat by the solar projects, she said.

“Habitat disturbance can cause stress and when animals are stressed, they may be more vulnerable to the disease,” Clifford said.

A nearby I-10 rest stop where people stop and let their dogs run could be another possible source of the virus, she said.

To find out, disease samples from the dead animals has been sent to Cornell University in New York, where experts will try to identify the particular strain of distemper and its possible origin, she said.

Distemper, like other viruses, can have different strains and some may be “hotter,” more virulent, than others, Clifford said.

Meanwhile, onsite biologists at both projects are monitoring 12 kit foxes that now wear radio collars, Clifford said. If an animal stops moving for more than six hours — a sign it may be sick or dead — the collar emits more beeps, she said.

The other 27 foxes were given a distemper vaccine deemed safe for wild animals. More animals would have been tagged, but the radio collars were not available, she said, and with the foxes going into their breeding period — which runs through May — the effort had to be organized quickly.

“We have been very proactive and cooperative working with the BLM and Department of Fish and Game; we have followed the agency directives,” said Steve Stengel, a NextEra spokesman.

Construction on the site is continuing with no major disruptions, he said.

“There are no visual signs of distemper in any of the kit foxes on the Desert Sunlight project site at this point, so we are encouraged by that,” said Alan Bernheimer, a spokesman for First Solar, the Arizona company building that project.

Genesis and Desert Sunlight are the only two solar projects under construction in the Riverside East solar zone, a swath of public land stretching from Joshua Tree National Park to Blythe.

As the investigation continues, Clifford sees the lack of extensive knowledge about desert kit foxes in general as a major challenge.

“We don't have a lot of details about the state of their health, their population, their ecology,” she said.

“I hope this will provide momentum to do some nice work on desert kit foxes.”

Ensuring all domestic canines get distemper vaccinations is also important in helping protect kit foxes and other wild animals.

“Although we do not know if this outbreak was started by an infected domestic animal, it is important for people to vaccinate their pets regularly,” she said.

About kit foxes

The desert kit fox lives in the deserts, though other kit foxes live in arid lands of western North America.

In the U.S., the foxes' habitats can be found from Southern California to western Colorado and western Texas, north into southern Oregon and Idaho.

The mostly nocturnal, burrowing canines, which typically weigh six pounds or less, also live in Mexico and mostly eat small animals. Source: California Department of Fish and Game

Mining Groundwater for Profit: The Cadiz Project

2012-01-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

Cadiz Valley Water Project watershed boundaries (Cadiz Inc.)

Dr. Peter Gleick, Pacific Institute
The Huffington Post

A private company, Cadiz Inc. (Cadiz), has revived plans to mine groundwater underlying land in the delicate Eastern Mojave Desert. This project raises fundamental questions about how we manage our precious water resources, and in particular, whether in the 21st century it is appropriate, or even necessary, to use renewable water resources in a nonrenewable and unsustainable way, for short-term profit.

The idea for the Cadiz project is simple: mine groundwater faster than nature refills it and sell it to urban centers in Southern California for profit. The full proposal seems more complicated - the owners might try to temporarily replace the lost groundwater with extra water from the Colorado River, if it is ever available (which is highly unlikely), but they propose to pump out this water and sell it, too, so the economics of the project really just depend on the water removed through unsustainable groundwater mining. Without that water, the project fails economically.

The project is located in the desert of southern California, east of Los Angeles and San Diego, in an area with very low precipitation. The owners intend to remove at least 50,000 acre-feet of water a year (and if they can get away with it, 75,000 acre-feet per year in the early years) for 50 years and sell it to local water agencies, including the Santa Margarita Water Agency (SMWA), Three Valleys Municipal Water District, Suburban Water System, Golden State Water Company, Jurupa Community Services, and California Water Service Company. Scientists estimate that nature, in contrast, only refills the basin with around 5,000 and 32,000 acre-feet per year, with most independent estimates at the very low end. This means the groundwater levels will drop and drop, like taking more water out of a bathtub than you put in. This is, simply, unsustainable.

If there were no adverse consequences of this kind of water mining, and if all that mattered was money, then perhaps using up this stock of water and turning it into a private good would make sense - at least to the project owners. But there are adverse consequences for other humans and for the local environment. This is cut-and-run water management: take a non-renewable resource that will last a short time, turn it for a profit, and leave a degraded landscape, mimicking the classic boom-and-bust cycles that characterized much of the mining industry in the western U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Here are some of the other consequences:

The water supply is unsustainable - it is not a permanent source of water and new sources would have to be found when it is no longer economical to pump.
The project produces water that is already more expensive than saving the same amount of water through improving urban conservation and efficiency programs.
Other local landowners and businesses believe their water availability or quality will be affected by the project in ways neither fully understood nor mitigated by Cadiz.
There are unresolved questions about the quality of the water and how the project might worsen water quality for other users over time.
And perhaps most important, water in the desert is a rare thing, and the desert pools, ephemeral seeps, natural springs, and playas support delicate ecosystems dependent on the ability of groundwater to reach the surface. This project would draw down that groundwater, leading to the inevitable disappearance of surface water with highly uncertain, poorly understood, but almost certainly negative ecological consequences. And even the project owners admit in their draft Environmental Impact Report (dEIR) that we don't know enough about the science to fully understand the consequence for centuries to come - long after they've left the scene.

In a mathematical sleight of hand, the project argues that water is "saved" by the project because it might reduce evaporative losses when water ponds on the surface during some wet periods. Yet it is precisely this water that local ecosystems rely upon for survival. Another piece of mathematical magic is their claim that the project is actually sustainable because they assume the project life is 100 years long: thus they pump like mad for the first 50 years and take their money and leave, acknowledging that the groundwater might or might not recharge to its original levels over the next 50 years after pumping stops. That's like saying that fossil fuels are renewable, because nature might make them again in the future. Under the lower (and perhaps more accurate) estimates of natural recharge, there is a real risk of permanent damage to the groundwater basin through subsidence of land or contamination of the aquifer with salts, and it may never fully refill. And the draft environmental impact report says nothing at all about how the real risk of climate change might alter the desert hydrology.

Finally, there are natural springs in nearby valleys that may be connected to the groundwater basin in Cadiz. In a remarkable grammatical sleight-of-hand, the draft environmental impact report states that a field survey done by their consultants concluded that "there is no information demonstrating a physical connection of the identified springs in the local mountains to [Cadiz] groundwater." Note the wording: "there is no information." They use that to discount any risks to local springs. But absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence. An honest assessment of the science would conclude that, at best, we don't know if there is a connection. And in fact the hydrologic assessment does show that if there is any connection, the mining of groundwater would ultimately affect the springs, perhaps long after pumping began. This means that if there is a connection, once it is ultimately noticed, it would be too late to prevent the springs from drying up.

We need new thinking about water in California and new innovative solutions. We must modify how we use water, and we must find new sources of supply. But the Cadiz Project is old thinking, based on the pillage-and-run philosophy of the past centuries, where water was seen as a resource to be mined and consumed, not managed in a sustainable way. This project is an insult to the notion of sustainability, to the efforts to protect the Eastern Mojave's beauty and unique nature, and to the idea that resource development should respect more than just narrow economic gain. The good news is there are excellent alternatives, including recycling and reuse of water, improved efficiency of use by our cities and farms, smarter and renewable groundwater use and recharge projects, and even desalination of brackish waters or the ocean if the economics and environmental challenges can be properly overcome. Cadiz might have made some sense a century ago when we didn't know better, but today it is neither appropriate for California nor necessary, and it should be cancelled.

A public comment hearing on Cadiz will be held, Tuesday, January 24 at 6:00 p.m. at SMWD, 26111 Antonio Parkway, Rancho Santa Margarita. Another will be held Wednesday, February 1 at 6:00 p.m. at the Joshua Tree Community Center.

Mojave Tortoise Doesn't Need Hunting Limits

2011-12-30T15:42:00.000-08:00

By Travis Sanford
Courthouse News Service

WASHINGTON (CN) - The National Park Service does not have to protect desert tortoises with special hunting rules in the Mojave National Preserve, a federal judge ruled.

Finding that the agency took the requisite "hard look" at the how a lack of special hunting regulations would impact the species, U.S. District Judge Hellen Huvelle said its decision was not arbitrary or capricious and dismissed the suit filed by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

The Mojave population of desert tortoises has been protected as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act since 1995. Hunting or intentional interference with the species is prohibited in its designated critical habitat and on federal lands.

PEER said that the restrictions were necessary to protect the tortoises from the impact of hunting other species in the preserve, which allegedly increased the chances that tortoises would be crushed by cars, startled by gun fire or accidentally shot. The group further argued that the small-game hunting reduced the aesthetic experience of observing tortoises in their natural habitat.

When the Park Service developed its original management plant to protect tortoises in the 1.6 million acre preserve, it included a moratorium during the tortoises' most active period between March and September on any hunting besides big game.

Though the federal law that created the Mojave Preserve requires buy in from the California Department of Fish and Game, the department declined to adopt the moratorium and the Park Service implemented the management plan without it.

PEER petitioned the service in June of 2002 to reinstate the originally proposed hunting restrictions. The Park Service finally denied the petition in October 2010, leading PEER filed suit for an unreasonable eight-year delay.

The service recognized that it had changed its position on the hunting regulations but argued that no evidence had emerged to show that the tortoises had been harmed by small-game hunting in the preserve in the years since the threatened listing.

It also said that the original recommendations were based on inferences made by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about the potential impact of hunting rather than on any scientific studies specific to the tortoises in the preserve.

Appealing the denial of its petition, PEERS moved for summary judgment to implement the restrictions. It claimed that the service's decision constituted an arbitrary and capricious decision in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act and the National Environmental Protection Act.

Huvelle dismissed both claims, however, saying that the PEER suit rested on the assumption that the Park Service's previous inclusion of hunting restrictions in the original management plan showed that it believed the environmental impact of hunting was indeed significant.

"However, the portions cited do not demonstrate that NPS [the National Park Service] in fact found significant environmental impacts, as plaintiff contends, but rather reflect defendants' policy judgment in response to inconclusive data," Huvelle wrote, referring to PEER's citation of the original management plan.

"The problem is that, in 1994, there was little evidence that small game hunting was in fact a significant threat to tortoise mortality and, today, despite efforts to improve monitoring and survey techniques, there is still a paucity of data showing that small game hunting impacts desert tortoises," she added.

Park Service made a "reasoned" response to PEER's petition, consulting extensive records consulted on the maiming or injury of every tortoise in the preserve, the court found.

"Ultimately, the record shows that defendants have satisfied their burden; they have taken a 'hard look' at the impact of not enacting the special hunting regulations and have made a determination, which is supported by the record, that this decision will not have a significant environmental impact," Huvelle wrote.

Zombie Water Projects (Just when you thought they were really dead...)

2011-12-07T16:22:00.000-08:00

The Cadiz groundwater mining project

Peter Gleick, Contributor
CEO Pacific Institute
Forbes

Zombies are big business, in more ways than one. Zombie books, movies, costumes, make-up, computer games, and more are probably worth billions to our economy, not to mention the value of extra sales of axes, chainsaws, and shotguns to people who never hunt or cut down trees.

But not all zombies are fictional, and some are potentially really dangerous – at least to our pocketbooks and environment. These include zombie water projects: large, costly water projects that are proposed, killed for one reason or another, and are brought back to life, even if the project itself is socially, politically, economically, and environmentally unjustified.

The Cadiz groundwater mining project is one zombie water project that has been beaten down for a variety of reasons but keeps rearing its ugly head.

An effort to turn a public water resource into a private good is the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project (or the Cadiz groundwater mining project). This project is the brainchild of another private investment group and hopes to mine groundwater from an aquifer located in the eastern Mojave Desert in San Bernardino County.

This project is unsustainable: it takes more groundwater out than nature recharges. Over time, this will result in disappearance of surface springs and ephemeral water in desert lake beds, and a declining groundwater level. In other words, the project exchanges public goods for private gain.

An earlier version of the project, not much different from the current one, was killed by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California because of environmental and economic concerns, but like a water zombie, Cadiz has come back to life.

A new draft Environmental Impact Statement has just been released, but beware: it is 305 megabytes in size, which makes it pretty much impossible for normal citizens to download it and read it to find out if it needs to be tackled with an axe or a chainsaw.

There are many smart water investments to be made, in industrial and agricultural water-efficiency technologies, better wastewater treatment plants capable of producing the highest quality waters, improved piping and distribution systems, lower energy desalination systems, improved monitoring tools, low-water-using crop types, and much more. But wasting precious time and scarce money on a water zombie will not lead to a sustainable water future.

Keep those chainsaws lubed and fueled.

Desert preservationist Hughes dies

2011-12-05T12:11:00.000-08:00

Pioneering Inland-area environmentalist Elden Hughes outstretches his arms while saying, "What a beautiful day" in 2009. (FILE PHOTO)

David Danelski
Press-Enterprise

Elden Hughes, dubbed by many the “John Muir of the desert” for his work to preserve wild lands, has died after a battle with cancer. He was 80.

Mr. Hughes spent years exploring and documenting the wonders of the Mojave Desert and other pristine areas, convincing policy makers that such places should be preserved forever.

His work spurred passage of the California Desert Protection Act of 1994, which created the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve in San Bernardino County. It was a key part of his work that earned the comparison with Muir, the naturalist whose work helped establish the Yosemite and Sequoia national parks.

“Elden Hughes dedicated his life to the protection and revival of our great Mojave Desert and its tortoises,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, in a prepared statement.

“I'll never forget when he brought a couple of tortoises to a large constituent breakfast and the amazed and glowing faces of youngsters when he told them they live for decades, “ added Feinstein, who sponsored the legislation.

“He was just a lover of life, smart and witty, and a great singer and guitar player,” said David Myer, a friend of Mr. Hughes and executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy, based in Oak Glen. “He just had a zest for life that was even endearing for his opponents, and that zest was a great asset for his promoting the environment.”

Mr. Hughes’ wife Patty said Monday that Mr. Hughes had been battling prostate cancer and recently suffered from severe back pain. He died early Sunday at their home in Joshua Tree.

“I take joy in knowing that he is no longer suffering,” she said.

In a 2009 interview, Mr. Hughes took insisted on taking a reporter to the remote Sheephole Pass in the hills east of Twentynine Palms. He gestured in the gusting wind toward his legacy that stretched as far as the eye could see.

Beyond a vast valley and bright-white Bristol Dry Lake, the jagged horizon was defined by the successive peaks of the Marble, Clipper and Providence mountains — ranges now preserved in the federal legislation he fought for.

“It's just glorious,” said the large man with a white beard wearing a red polo shirt. “You can see the bare bones of the earth sticking through, and it is huge.”

Appreciating the desert takes a certain mindset, Mr. Hughes said later that day.

“You must get past the color green,” said Mr. Hughes, quoting the late writer Wallace Stegner. “And you must get used to an inhuman scale.”

Mr. Hughes was first moved by the desert in the late 1930s, when his mother, Ruby, took him camping in Palm Canyon near Palm Springs and to Death Valley, he said in 2009.

He grew up on a cattle ranch in Whittier and took horseback rides between his home and Huntington Beach and he saw urban sprawl slowly consume the hills and fields.

In the late 1940s, he drove on dirt roads to visit what is now Joshua Tree National Park. In his younger days, he was an avid river rafter, caver and camper.

By the 1980s, as he pursued a career as a computer systems designer and salesman, he was chairman of Sierra Club’s California/Nevada Desert Committee and working hard to preserve pristine public lands.

In 1987, he and his wife embarked on one their most influential projects: a two-year campaign to have documented in photographs 116 desert areas they and their cohorts believed should be protected. The effort produced a series of photo albums presented to decision-makers in Congress.

After years of hearings and debate, the California Desert Protection Act, protecting more than 6 million areas of California desert, squeaked through Congress in the fall of 1994. He and his wife took five baby desert tortoises to the Oval Office when President Bill Clinton signed the bill.

In recent years, Mr. Hughes spoke up against placing a large-scale solar energy project on Mojave Desert lands providing habitat for the desert tortoise, an iconic species listed as threatened with extinction. There is just as much sunshine for such a project on played-out farms and other less pristine properties throughout the region, he argued.

Mr. Hughes is also survived by his sons, Mark, Paul, and Charles, and three grandchildren. A memorial service is pending.

Myer said Mr. Hughes had asked him to scatter his ashes on top of Navajo Mountain in Utah, a task that will involve traveling 50 miles via boat and 10 more miles on foot.

Finding a fix for dying Salton Sea

2011-11-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

After years of inaction by state, lawmaker wants to put regional group at helm

Pelicans fly to Mullet Island, one of the four Salton Buttes, small volcanoes on the southern San Andreas Fault, after sunset on July 2 near Calipatria. Scientists say Mullet Island, the only place for many thousands of island-nesting birds to breed at the Salton Sea, will become vulnerable to attacks by predators such as raccoons and coyotes if the water level drops just a couple more feet. (David McNew/Getty Images)

Marcel Honoré
The Desert Sun

NORTH SHORE — As state lawmakers held their first summit in more than four years on the looming death of the Salton Sea, Sonia Herbert gazed out the window at the North Shore Beach & Yacht Club marina, where squawking seabirds swooped across the glassy sea surface, fishing for tilapia.

Like most of the 60 people who attended Monday's hearing, Herbert, who has lived in Bombay Beach since the 1970s, fears the worst: that time is running out on efforts to repair the sea and sustain its wildlife, and that overwhelming public health and economic crises will follow.

“All we've seen is studies, studies, studies and nothing has been done,” a visibly frustrated Herbert told Assemblyman V. Manuel Pérez and two Assembly budget committee members. “What's going to happen if we don't do something?”

The state remains broke, and its preferred $9 billion sea restoration plan has languished since 2007.

Sticker shock over the restoration cost has led to political paralysis, but Pérez, a Coachella Democrat whose district includes the sea, has called its restoration his top priority for the rest of his legislative tenure.

At the hearing, which Pérez's office organized, he listened to county supervisors, residents and environmental advocates call for the state to relinquish control and to let locals settle on the best plan to restore the sea and the best way to pay for it.

“The sea needs help and it needs it now. The answer isn't big brother riding to the rescue, because he's not coming. There is no rescue,” Imperial County Supervisor Gary Wyatt told Pérez and two other Assembly members, Republican Brian Jones of Santee and Democrat Richard Gordon of Menlo Park.

“We need to drive this train,” said Wyatt, quoting longtime Riverside County Supervisor Roy Wilson, who died in 2009.

Wyatt and others pushed public-private partnerships on new geothermal and solar energy projects at the sea as a realistic way to tap dollars for Salton Sea restoration.

Wyatt proposed taking a 7,000-acre former military test site at the sea's south shore, now controlled by the federal Bureau of Land Management, and converting it into a renewable energy depot that he said could provide 700 megawatts of power and produce at least $40 million a year in restoration funds.

Unlike redevelopment funds, that money would be exempt from state seizure, Wyatt said after the meeting.

“The interest is here, not there,” Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit said, referring to Sacramento. “What we need is the authority. If we fix this sea… the economic advantages to this area (are) nearly unlimited.”

Pérez said he hoped the hearing would help drum up support in the Legislature for his AB 939 bill, a proposal to switch the authority from the state's Salton Sea Restoration Council — a body that has never met — and place it in the hands of the local Salton Sea Authority, a joint-powers authority of the local counties and local water districts, along with some state presence.

“I'm optimistic that we can find a way if we work together and there's a political will from all levels of government including grassroots,” Pérez said. “Part of the reason why we have not been able to move forward is we're all moving in so many different directions. We need to find consensus to what the issues of the Salton Sea are.”

As runoff from irrigation and other water transfers evaporate, the Salton Sea's salinity has risen while its mass has shrunk. By the end of this decade, its retreat will be even more dramatic.

Created by flooding in 1905 and without a new source of water to replenish it, California's largest lake will grow uninhabitable to fish and the thousands of migratory birds that feed on them.

The exposed lakebed and the dust it generates could be disastrous in an area that already has one of the nation's highest rates for youth asthma, officials say. It also would damage agriculture and tourism.

State budget analysts at the hearing Monday reported that tens of millions of dollars in state bond funds from Propositions 50 and 84 have been spent on proposals for the sea's multi-billion-dollar fix, though exactly where the money went wasn't made clear.

“We've spent more than half our bond money … We don't have much to show for it, frankly,” said Kimberley Delfino, California program director of the national nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife.

“This is shameful and frightening,” Delfino said. “When you've lost 95 to 98 percent of the wetlands in California, the birds don't have any other place to go. The situation at the Salton Sea is grim and the stakes are high. We need a new governance structure, now. There isn't a lot of time left.”

As for the immediate next step, Pérez said he hopes for a meeting between Defenders of Wildlife, the Salton Sea Authority, the state's Legislative Analyst's Office, and other stakeholders.

“The sea still has its strong supporters, fighters and believers,” Wyatt said. “There are ways to make the revenues happen.”

Interior Reverses Course: No Shooting Restrictions

2011-11-23T00:30:00.000-08:00

Paul Bedard
Washington Whispers

In a major victory for gun owners, hunters, and conservationists, the Interior Department today reversed course and junked its plan to tighten shooting restrictions on western lands, which could have put areas long used for target practice off limits.

Bowing to complaints from a special advisory committee made up of conservation and hunting groups like Ducks Unlimited, Cabela's, and the National Wildlife Foundation, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today told the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres of mostly wild western land, to stop drafting shooting rules.

"Based on feedback that members of the [advisory committee] have provided the BLM on the draft policy guidance, I am directing that the BLM take no further action to develop or implement the policy," wrote Salazar, himself a hunter and shooter and former Colorado senator and game official. [Check out new Debate Club about whether Congress needs to overhaul gun trafficking laws.]

Instead, he said in a letter to BLM, "The BLM shall continue to manage recreational shooting on public lands under the status quo in accordance with resource management and public safety considerations under existing authorities." Just the title alone of his letter made his point to BLM officials and the public: "Protecting Recreational Shooting Opportunities on Public Lands."

The issue of pushing shooters off some public lands where they have traditionally shot targets was a sensational one to gun rights groups and hunters. When Whispers first broke the story about the draft BLM plans, the story was headlined on the Drudge Report and Fox Nation. Officials conceded that the resulting pressure from gun owners who saw the Drudge and Fox report prompted them to clarify, and today end their efforts.

"BLM is not moving forward with the issue you wrote about," said an official. Instead, BLM land managers and not Washington will continue to use their existing authorities to work with communities and create land use plans where closure to shooting is a last resort. [Read about the subpoena issued as a result of Operation Fast and Furious.]

The issue of target practice put the BLM in the middle of traditional American gun rights and the rapid urbanization of once open public lands. Officials from BLM told Whispers that people moving in from more urban areas would "freak out" when walking in woods and hearing shots. Apparently, they also feared for their safety and BLM was working to draft a policy that soothed their concerns and also pleased hunters. Officials suggested that the end result would have been shooters being pushed a bit further away from urbanized areas near BLM lands, even provided with a guide to where they could shoot. They also assured hunters that access to public hunting lands would not be limited even under the draft rules.

But hunters and shooting groups saw it as a federal bid to clamp down on guns and shooting and they resisted. The advisory group, for example, assailed the draft policy.

In the end, they won. In his letter today, Salazar called hunting and shooting on public lands a national priority. He wrote: "It is a priority of the Department of the Interior to support opportunities for hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting on America's public lands. By facilitating access, multiple use, and safe activities on public lands, the Bureau of Land Management helps ensure that the vast majority of the 245 million acres it oversees are open and remain open to recreational shooting."

Cross shows up mysteriously, but briefly, on Mojave rock

2011-11-16T16:22:00.000-08:00

By Henry Brean
Las Vegas Review-Journal

Mojave National Preserve - A white cross rose again this week over Sunrise Rock in California's Mojave National Preserve, briefly resurrecting a constitutional controversy over religious symbols on federal land.

It's unclear who put up the new cross, made of plastic pipe, or when, but the National Park Service removed it Tuesday from the rock 75 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

Linda Slater, spokeswoman for the preserve, said park personnel had no choice but to take it down.

"We're under a court order prohibiting us from displaying a cross at Sunrise Rock," she said.

The legal fight dates back a decade now. The original cross goes back considerably further than that -- clear back to 1934, when a group of World War I veterans mounted a welded steel symbol atop Sunrise Rock as a memorial to fallen soldiers.

For decades, it served as a site for Easter Sunday services and the occasional veterans event. A handful of volunteers maintained -- and occasionally replaced -- the cross, which was damaged from time to time by vandals and the desert wind.

The Mojave Memorial Cross, as it came to be known, was still there in 1994 when the federal government declared the 1.6 million acres surrounding it a national preserve.

And the cross was still there in 1997 when a retired park service employee lodged a complaint about it because he considered it a government endorsement of Christianity.

A pair of lawsuits ensued, and the cross was cast into darkness, spending several years covered by boards like a roadside sign with no writing on it.

One of the lawsuits made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where in a 5-4 decision last year the justices ruled the symbol could stay while a lower court reconsidered the case.

Two weeks later, the original cross was stolen by still-unidentified vandals.

It was replaced days later by a replica cross, but the service quickly removed that one because the Supreme Court ruling applied only to the original disputed cross.

Wyn Hornbuckle, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said the PVC pipe cross that showed up this week on Sunrise Rock was taken down for the same reason.

"The National Park Service removed the newly erected cross yesterday to comply with the court's existing injunction," he said in a statement.

Not everyone is satisfied with that answer.

Southern California resident William McDonald visits Mojave National Preserve several times a year and writes a blog about the desert under the name Morongo Bill.

He noticed the return of the cross on Monday and was watching from a distance as it was removed on Tuesday.

As far as he is concerned, this isn't about the separation of church and state; it's about the desecration of a war memorial that has been around for more than three quarters of a century.

"I'm a veteran, and I believe we don't know where we're going if we don't know where we've been," he said. "I feel so strongly about this (that) I think they should do an Occupy Sunrise Rock-type thing."

Hornbuckle said settlement talks are under way that could finally bring the legal fight over the cross to an end.

On Tuesday, the same day the latest replica cross was removed, a federal judge granted the parties involved in both lawsuits until Feb. 15 to hammer out a deal.

The most likely option is for the federal government to transfer ownership of Sunrise Rock to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in exchange for private land elsewhere in or around the preserve. Once the rock is in private hands, there would be nothing to prevent the placement of a memorial cross there.

As it now stands, erecting a cross or other religious symbol on Sunrise Rock is "technically illegal," Slater said.

Asked what would happen to the latest cross removed by the service, she said: "We'll put it in the evidence locker with the other one. What else would we do with it?"

County unveils new Route 66 historical markers

2011-11-12T13:05:00.000-08:00

Route 66 Ambassador Terry Kafides, foreground applauds as 1st District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt unveils new San Bernardino County Route 66 signs along National Trails Highway. The county has the longest continuous paved stretch of the original highway in the country, and is beginning a project to post it with county highway signs. (JAMES QUIGG, DAILY PRESS)

Staff Reports
Victor Valley Daily Press

ORO GRANDE • In an effort to draw attention to the High Desert’s claim to the legendary Route 66, San Bernardino County is moving forward with a new historical sign marker program.

Friday marked the 85th anniversary of the storied thoroughfare, and 1st District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt used the occasion to unveil the first sign marker at a dedication ceremony on National Trails Highway in Oro Grande, just north of the Mojave River Bridge.

“Marking County Route 66 is one of several steps I am planning to celebrate, promote and protect this road and to make county highways more user-friendly,” Mitzelfelt said in a statement.

More than 250 miles of the iconic highway runs the length of San Bernardino County from Needles through Upland. More signs will be placed at various intervals along the route, starting with heading north of Oro Grande onto Main Street in Barstow. The sign program will then head east on Interstate 40, north on Nebo Street near Barstow, east on National Trails Highway and north on Goffs Road to its junction with Highway 95.

Cultural and historic sites along this alignment include the City of Barstow and the communities of Daggett, Newberry Springs, Ludlow, Amboy, Cadiz, Chambless, Essex and Goffs, as well as the Mojave National Preserve. This alignment can be expanded to include additional portions of or the entire Route 66 at a later date. The remainder of the signs on this first leg will be installed by the end of December.

Mitzelfelt is contributing $45,000 for the program through some of the last of his office’s discretionary funds, with that pot of money no longer unavailable to supervisors. Mitzelfelt said he initiated the marker program after seeing its effectiveness in other counties.

The county’s Route Marker Program is the first to be added in the state since 1983, according to Mitzelfelt’s office. The California County Route Marker Program was established in 1958 to mark county routes of major importance and public interest that are constructed and marked to sufficient safety standards. San Bernardino County is the 43rd of California’s 58 counties to participate in the program.

BLM testing camouflage to hide new energy structures

2011-11-09T12:19:00.000-08:00

$90,000 design paid for with federal stimulus funds

A camoflage pattern that the BLM tested this fall, simulated on a natural gas compressor station near Parachute, Colorado. (Guy Cramer)

By Mary Catherine O'Connor
SmartPlanet

In an effort to reduce our reliance on non-renewable and foreign energy sources, the government wants the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to boost the amount of renewable energy development it permits on public lands. That means we’ll be seeing more wind turbines and solar panels as we ply the nation’s wide swaths of public lands, especially in the mountain west.

There’s not much that can be done to lessen the visual impact these energy generators will make on the landscape. But the BLM is trying to lessen the visual punch that the many maintenance buildings and other ancillary structures, used to support these power stations, will pack, reports High Country News.

Near Rifle, Colorado, the BLM recently completed a series of tests to gauge the effectiveness of different paint applications to camouflage these outbuildings. To help create the designs, the agency turned to landscape architects, an engineering and design firm and camouflage-design experts who usually help the Department of Defense conceal its soldiers and buildings.

The desired aesthetic isn’t a huge jump from the BLM’s existing color scheme of green grays and browns–well, except that the agency has to completely reverse its approach of using monotones and instead use a series of layered hues, applied through stenciling. The secret sauce is in blending the palette in a manner that blends into the surrounding fauna, which can actually range widely, from “mountain meadow, sub-alpine conifer woodland and sub-alpine aspen, to sagebrush steppe, scrub oak and piñon-juniper,” writes HCN’s Kimberly Hirai.

The trick to good camo, she writes, is not just visual, but also pshycologiocal [sic]. The patterns that the BLM tested combine large and smaller designs in differing hues. The design needs natural geometric shapes that echo those in the background in order to trick the eye. Our brains register these shapes in the background and have already “catalogued” them by the time the camouflage enters our field of vision.

Funding for the camo project — specifically the $90,000 needed to hire the design engineering firm — came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Reducing the scenic impact of buildings associated with renewable energy development on public lands is just one part of a larger mitigation effort to reduce the negative effects of such programs. And it’s also rather simple compared to trying to resolve issues such as solar panel farms harming desert tortoise populations or turbines linked to avian mortality.

Highway 395 promoted as Three Flags Highway

2011-11-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

Historians work to revive 'Mother Road of the West'

Natasha Lindstrom
Victor Valley Daily Press

It's not nearly as famous as Route 66, but Highway 395 — sometimes called the "Mother Road of the West" — carries its own historical weight.

In the 1930s, Southern Californians dubbed the thoroughfare the Three Flags Highway for linking Mexico, the United States and Canada.

During World War II, Highway 395 provided military convoys with a safe alternative to coastal roads deemed vulnerable to attack.

Even today, the Three Flags Highway offers a scenic ride isolated from the heavy traffic clogging routes through Los Angeles.

The Historic Route 395 Association in Southern California is now trying to revive the Three Flags name as part of an effort to preserve the vintage motor courts, gas stations, restaurants and signs that still dot the old route, which once stretched from the San Diego Bay near the California-Mexico border to the Canadian border in Washington state.

“For the High Desert, it allowed the tourist industry to come up through the Cajon Pass and to explore the Eastern Sierras,” said Jeffrey Harmon, founding member of the 395 association, “and it also provided the only north-to-south route for commercial traffic on the eastern side of the Sierras.”

In June 2008, the California Legislature unanimously approved designating Highway 395 as a historic route from San Diego to the Oregon state line. But legislators left it up to cities and community organizations to pay for putting up historic markers and promoting the designation.

“Everything south of Hesperia has been reassigned to either city streets or completely disappeared all together,” Harmon said. “That history is important to preserve.”

Tracing the thorough fare’s pre-1948 route, the association has already installed about 100 signs in Riverside and San Diego counties, slowly making its way toward San Bernardino County and the Cajon Pass. The group is giving talks at community events to spread the word and accepting donations to put up more signs, which cost about $70 each.

“We’re doing what we can to get people to slow down, get off that interstate, just take a drive on Highway 395,” he said. “It’s just such a beautiful route.”

Meanwhile, locals continue to wait on a Highway 395 realignment that’s been in talks for decades and other improvements to make it safer to travel the local stretch of the 395.

Oasis or mirage? Company wants to tap Mojave water

2011-11-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

Conservationists worry about the impact of mining the aquifer

Seth Shteir, a California Desert Field Representative for the National Parks Conservation Association, points out features in the Mojave National Preserve near Kelso, Calif., on Oct. 19. By tapping into an aquifer the size of Rhode Island under a 35,000-acre Cadiz ranch, proponents say they can supply 400,000 people with drinking water in only a few years. Conservationists, however, are concerned. (Chris Carlson / AP)

By GARANCE BURKE, NOAKI SCHWARTZ
The Associated Press and MSNBC

CADIZ, Calif. — Off historic Route 66 in the heart of the California desert the barren landscape of dry scrub and rock abruptly gives way to an oasis of tall green trees heavy with lemons and grape vines awaiting next month's harvest.

Some believe this lush farm in the unlikeliest of places also sits atop a partial solution to Southern California's water woes.

By tapping into an aquifer the size of Rhode Island under the 35,000-acre Cadiz ranch, proponents say they can supply 400,000 people with drinking water in only a few years.

If the plan sounds familiar, it is. A decade ago, Los Angeles' Metropolitan Water District narrowly rejected it when it faced widespread environmental opposition. A scaled back version has resurfaced with a greener pitch, momentum from five water agencies and what the company claims is better science to win over skeptics.

"Do we need additional water supplies? Yes. Do we need groundwater storage? Yes," said Winston Hickox, a Cadiz board member who headed the California Environmental Protection Agency. "The question is 'OK, environmental community, what are your remaining concerns?' I don't know."

But conservationists including the Sierra Club remain worried. Critics say the company has misrepresented the size of the aquifer and that mining it could harm the threatened desert tortoise, bighorn sheep, as well as the nearby Mojave National Preserve which has some of the densest and oldest Joshua tree forests in the world. Concerns over rare desert species were also echoed by state Department of Fish and Game biologists in March.

Conservationists also worry tampering with an aquifer in a place where water is so scarce could cause dust storms.

"There's a lot of unknowns here but we think this project has the potential to adversely affect air quality, draw down water resources and alter the flow of groundwater beneath the Mojave Preserve," said Seth Shteir with the National Parks and Conservation Association, which plans to scrutinize an environmental review of the project, expected to be released this month.

Groundwater has long played a part in the West's age-old water wars, which are increasingly being waged underground. These large unseen reserves of underground water nourish a place that would appear to most observers as dead.

California has few regulations when it comes to groundwater pumping, according to Carolyn Remick, who heads the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California. Consequently it is often weaker local agencies that largely oversee such extraction, leading to a raft of problems ranging from groundwater contamination to over-pumping and ground sinking.

Last year a conservation group sued the state water board in an effort to force the agency to regulate groundwater pumping that has depleted Northern California's Scott River, threatening salmon populations. In arid Kern County, north of the Mojave Preserve, a local water utility filed suit against wealthy farming interests claiming their enormous withdrawals of water lowered the water table and caused service disruptions.

Cadiz officials say they are aware of the concerns and promise an extensive monitoring system. The water in question begins in springs high atop desert mountains and travels under the Cadiz ranch before it resurfaces in dusty lake beds dozens of miles away where it evaporates.

The plan could cost as much as $225 million to sink 34 wells into the desert and build a 44-mile pipeline along a railroad right-of-way that intersects with the Colorado River Aqueduct.

In dry years, water would be pumped to burgeoning communities in Southern California. During years with above-average rainfall, Colorado River water could be pumped to the aquifer for storage. Proponents say the water would offer a much-needed alternative to boost supplies in a region hard hit with water cutbacks during the state's recent three-year drought.

For years the project was led by a colorful British businessman, Los Angeles-based Cadiz founder Keith Brackpool, who has since taken a more behind-the-scenes role. Brackpool, who also heads the California Racing Board, has deep political connections, contributing to past gubernatorial candidates, serving as a water consultant to former Gov. Gray Davis and whose company once employed Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as a consultant.

Brackpool, however, became something of a distraction when it was revealed by the Los Angeles Times that years earlier he pleaded guilty in London to criminal charges that included dealing in securities without a license and that his expertise before becoming the governor's water consultant was overseeing a food company. His company reports having $145 million in assets, but generated revenue of just $1 million last year. It also is being investigated by shareholders unhappy with recent executive bonuses.

Brackpool, through a company spokesman, refused repeated requests for an interview with The Associated Press. Cadiz ranch is the company's only water project.

The Cadiz proposal was rejected in early 2000 by the Metropolitan Water District in part after conservationists raised concerns over possible environmental damage. A scaled-back version resurfaced in 2008 with a new spokesman, Scott Slater, a new greener pitch that they were conserving water that would otherwise evaporate and new studies that showed how much water they could safely pump.

"We're not taking water from anyone," Slater said. "It sincerely is depriving only the atmosphere of water that would actually evaporate."

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called the proposal "a path-breaking, new, sustainable groundwater conservation and storage project." But Sen. Dianne Feinstein called it a "serious threat to the desert" in a 2008 letter to the Department of the Interior, potentially depleting water supplies which plants and wildlife rely upon for survival

Since 2010, the Santa Margarita Water District, Three Valleys Water District, Golden State Water Company, Suburban Water Systems and Jurupa Community Services District entered into agreements with Cadiz to receive water. These agencies supply water to parts of Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County and eastern San Gabriel Valley.

The company has invested $7 million in hiring top-flight consultants to study the science behind the project and in drilling wells. Cadiz also put together a panel of experts who reviewed the project and recently deemed it safe.

A comprehensive environmental report is expected to be released this month and if the project clears all required permits, the districts hope to get water within two years.

And if voters approve a $11 billion water bond measure intended to rebuild California's crumbling water system and fund new dams, water districts may apply for public funds available for new infrastructure to save up the precious resource for dry years. Schwarzenegger signed the bond bill in 2009, but it won't become law unless voters approve it a year from now next November.

John Schatz, Santa Margarita's general manager, calls the new vision a "conservation project," but he acknowledged potential hurdles in selling the greener pitch.

"We don't have any illusions that there may be some issues with environmental groups and what's happened in the past," he said.

Windmilling, a Dying Art, Hangs on in Texas

2011-10-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

Mike Crowell, a third-generation windmiller, works on a windmill near Claude in the Texas Panhandle. (photo by: Axel Gerdau)

by Kate Galbraith
The Texas Tribune

CLAUDE — Working 35 feet above the flat earth of the Panhandle, a young man in a baseball cap loosened the bolts attaching a windmill to a steel tower.

“Ready?” came the shout from the ground. “Yeah, go ahead,” he hollered back. Slowly, the 500-pound windmill was lowered to the ground. A four-man crew expertly dismantled the wheel and replaced the motor, which had stopped working after it ran out of oil, and within an hour the windmill was hoisted back up and ready to spin.

“This is kind of hard to do when it’s windy,” said Mike Crowell, the crew’s 59-year-old boss, who said his crews sometimes work on as many as nine windmills each day.

Only a few dozen outfits like Crowell’s still exist in the Texas Panhandle, practicing the dying art of “windmilling” — fixing the old-style whirligigs that pump water from the aquifers. Windmills were crucial to 19th-century settlers of West Texas and the Great Plains because little surface water existed. Now, thousands of them — far smaller than the giant electricity-producing turbines that have sprouted around West Texas in recent years — still twirl in remote pastures. The windmills go where electricity cannot reach and cattle need to drink, though cheaper solar pumps are starting to push them out.

“Obama wants everybody to go green,” said Bob Bracher, the president of Aermotor Windmill, a company that has manufactured windmills for more than 100 years and still makes a few thousand of them each year in a warehouse in San Angelo. “Well, hell, we’ve been green since 1888.”

Much has changed since then. Now, some of Bracher’s sales go to what he calls the “enthusiasts’ market,” meaning people who want a windmill simply for its iconic look.

But the windmiller profession, celebrated by novelists like Larry McMurtry and Annie Proulx, still hangs on in remote corners of Texas. Crowell’s family has been working on windmills since 1896, when his grandfather traded 60 horses for a rig to drill wells. He learned the trade from his father and uncle, and now his two sons, both in their 20s, have joined the business. He has high hopes for his five grandsons, who occasionally come to watch the work.

“Some of the best features of being a windmill man is we go out on places that only a cowboy will see once in awhile,” said

Crowell, who sometimes works in the scenic Palo Duro Canyon as well as on vast ranches that have 80 or more windmills apiece.

But windmilling can be difficult and dangerous. Crowell needed stitches after another worker atop a windmill dropped a hammer on his head. Work goes on year-round, despite occasionally ferocious winds and ice storms, because if a windmill has stopped pumping water, cattle can die.

“It takes a certain kind of person to be able to stand that type of work environment,” Crowell said.

This year, the weather has brought extreme heat and drought — which has meant boom times for both Aermotor and Crowell Water Well Service, Crowell’s company. Desperate for new sources of water, Texas ranchers have drilled more wells and ordered more windmills.

“We have been very busy this summer because there’s no surface water, and the cattle sure need to drink somewhere,” Mr. Crowell said.

Now, however, things have gotten so bad that ranchers have sold huge numbers of cattle, so business is likely to slow during the winter.

“When there’s no grass and no cattle, there’s no need for water out of windmills,” Bracher of Aermotor said.

Windmills also face a competitive threat from solar pumps, which have recently made significant inroads. Crowell says he spends about 70 percent of his time on windmills but also works on solar pumps, which he began seeing in the Panhandle in the late 1990s.

“Nearly every rancher I know is contemplating going solar,” said Delbert Trew, who ranches on rolling prairie about 40 miles east of Claude, Crowell’s base. He got rid of three windmills about five years ago — they were too expensive to maintain, he said — and bought a solar-powered pump from an Oklahoma company called Robison Solar Systems.

Bill Hoots, a sales executive at Robison, said that things have been “extremely, extremely busy” until recently, though they are now slowing as in the windmill business as ranchers sell off cattle. Dan Prangsgaard, a spokesman for Grundfos, a Danish pump manufacturer, said that growth in the solar pump business has almost tripled in the last two to three years.

Windmills last about 60 years, longer than solar pumps, according to Brian Vick, the lead scientist for renewable energy at a federal agricultural research laboratory in the Panhandle community of Bushland. But windmills need more maintenance and the solar pumps — which are cheaper up front — are better matched to the summertime needs of cattle, he said, because August and September tend to have little wind and lots of sun.

“You have to haul some water out to the cattle during that period sometimes, especially if the winds are low,” Vick said.

Ranchers putting in windmills and solar pumps can get substantial subsidies via the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a branch of the federal Department of Agriculture. Under the N.R.C.S.’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Texas ranchers have recently been eligible for payments of about $6,000 for a solar pump installation atop a well that’s more than 300 feet deep, according to Troy Headings, a civil engineer in Amarillo with the N.R.C.S. The payment runs about $7,260 for a 10-foot diameter windmill, and the rationale, he said, is to make sure cattle graze the entire pasture, "rather than concentrating around one water source and completely denuding that area of grass."

The federal program can cover about 40 to 60 percent of the installed cost of a windmill or solar pump, according to Mr. Crowell.

Will solar pumps ever eclipse windmills in West Texas? Vick, of the Bushland agricultural research laboratory, said that the windmills have “still got a pretty good future for another 20 or 30 years or so.”

Plenty of ranchers still swear by the machines, whose design has changed little in a century.

Rocky Farrar, a rancher near Canadian, has about 15 windmills on his land, and although he installed a solar pump a few months ago, he still hasn’t turned it on.

“I’m just not ready to do that,” Farrar said. “I don’t know why.” He said he loves the sound of the windmills, which have given him little maintenance trouble over the years.

“I think as long as you have any old-school people left,” Farrar said, “you’re going to have windmills.”

Huge solar power plants are blooming in California's southern deserts

2011-10-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

By Dana Hull
San Jose Mercury News

MOJAVE DESERT -- At first glance, California's vast Mojave Desert seems barren: mile after mile of dust, sand and scrubby creosote bush under a blistering sun. But the huge desert, which spans an area larger than West Virginia, is becoming speckled with gigantic solar power plants that are creating hundreds of construction jobs and, when complete, will generate electricity for millions of homes.

California's solar Gold Rush is under way, fueled by billions of dollars of federal stimulus funding and a new state law that requires utilities to buy a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. While the collapse of Fremont solar manufacturer Solyndra has dominated the news in recent weeks because it received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, several other solar companies that received loan guarantees appear to be thriving.

The project furthest along is BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, which has been under construction for one full year and is currently being built on federal land near the California-Nevada border with the help of a $1.6 billion loan guarantee. BrightSource, which is based in Oakland, uses mirrors to concentrate the sun and turn turbines that generate electricity. When complete in 2013, Ivanpah will be the largest solar thermal power plant in the world, generating enough electricity for 140,000 homes.

Currently, more than 800 construction workers are on the sprawling 3,600-acre site, which covers an area half the size of Los Gatos. The steel shell of a massive tower that eventually will be taller than coastal redwood trees is rising from the dust near a parking lot filled with cars, trucks and construction vehicles. Most of the workers arrive before dawn to beat the searing late-afternoon heat, and engineering managers pore over plans in air-conditioned trailers.

Ivanpah is one of nine solar thermal power plants approved by the California Energy Commission last year. In addition, scores of other solar projects are in the pipeline. In August, the federal Bureau of Land Management was processing applications for 17 solar power plants in California's deserts.

Solar currently accounts for less than 1 percent of the state's electricity, most of which comes from natural gas, two nuclear power plants and hydropower. But advocates -- including Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown -- want solar to play a key role in the state's energy future, in part because each project generates hundreds of construction jobs. Brown hopes to add 20,000 megawatts of renewable generation -- about one-third of the state's current power needs -- to California's electric grid by the end of the decade.

"We use a lot of energy in California, and we have aspirations to electrify our vehicle fleet, our ports and to develop high-speed rail," said Commissioner Karen Douglas of the California Energy Commission. "We need significant amounts of utility-scale renewable electricity."

Public land at risk?

However, critics and grass-roots organizations such as Solar Done Right fear the West's last remaining tracts of pristine public lands are being industrialized by "Big Solar" in the name of clean energy, bringing irreparable harm to native plants and threatened species. They want "smart from the start" planning that allows renewable energy development in some parts of the desert while protecting the rest as conservation land. They want residents in the Bay Area and elsewhere to know that California's deserts are as beloved to some residents as its beaches, parks and redwood trees are to others.

"There's plenty of desert out there -- just put it in the right place," said Jim Lyons, senior director for renewable energy at Defenders of Wildlife, a national organization that opposes the proposed 4,613-acre Calico Solar Project east of Barstow because of its effects on desert tortoises, burrowing owls and bighorn sheep. "It's a lot like real estate: location, location, location."

Solar's potential

The Ivanpah facility embodies many of the hopes and fears of solar power plants in the desert. It will generate 370 megawatts of electricity, which BrightSource says will displace 13.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the plant's 30-year life. Google (GOOG) has invested $168 million in the project, while PG&E and Southern California Edison have signed long-term contracts to purchase the electricity.

"Solar thermal technology projects like Ivanpah are playing a vital role in helping us meet our state renewable goals while providing for a secure and sustainable energy future," Fong Wan, senior vice president for energy procurement at PG&E, said in a statement.

Unlike rooftop solar panels that directly convert sunlight into electricity, solar thermal plants concentrate the sun's rays with mirrors or lenses to boil water to create steam; the steam then turns turbines that generate electricity. Ivanpah consists of three separate power plants, each with a 459-foot-tall "power tower" and tens of thousands of mirrorlike "heliostats" -- 173,500 in all. While land has been cleared for the construction site, BrightSource has taken pains to leave much of the native vegetation intact. Thousands of pylons protrude from the ground amid vegetation that has been trimmed, but not plowed.

"This has the lowest environmental impact of any project in solar," BrightSource CEO John Woolard said in remarks to media members who toured the project. "We're using a minimal amount of water, and there is low impact on the soil and terrain."

But Jim Andre, a botanist and plant ecologist at UC Riverside, says native plants will not survive under the newly created shade.

"You're altering the conditions that the species have evolved in," he said. "It goes against conservation biology 101."

Concern about tortoise

The biggest environmental controversy at Ivanpah is the endangered desert tortoise. Though BrightSource expects to spend at least $45 million on everything from salaries for biologists to the purchase of thousands of acres of conservation habitat, activists worried about the tortoise protested outside the company's Oakland headquarters.

While alienating some environmentalists, Big Solar has many supporters among the ranks of the state's unemployed. Ivanpah is a welcome source of jobs in San Bernardino County, which has been hit hard by the housing crash.

Iraq War veterans Ross Bowlin and Kenneth Platten carpool more than 200 miles from their homes near Riverside to get to Ivanpah, and they share an inexpensive hotel room in Nevada during the workweek. Both obtained their jobs via "Helmets to Hardhats," an apprentice program that helps veterans transition to careers in the construction trades.

"Before this job I had no construction experience at all, and I was on unemployment for a while," said Bowlin, a former Marine who served two stints in Iraq. "But this job reminds me of being in the military, in that we have a job that's bigger than ourselves. We're facing an energy crisis."

Platten, who served in the Army, misses the adrenaline rush of war but says the sheer scale of Ivanpah gives him a different kind of thrill. The good wages -- about $35 an hour -- help make up for the long drive. In addition, he's used to the desert heat: The deserts of Iraq are even hotter than the Mojave.

"We're building the biggest solar thermal power plant in the world," he said, as he surveyed the power tower. "To see this going up is amazing. I can look out and know that I hauled some of that iron, and that's cool."

Sprouting like weeds

Ivanpah is not BrightSource's only project. The company has filed applications with the California Energy Commission to build two other large solar power plants: the 500-megawatt Hidden Hills project, in California's Inyo County, and the 750-megawatt Rio Mesa project in Riverside County.

"There's so many companies submitting plans and filing for permits that it's hard to keep track," said Laura Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch, a volunteer group fighting "energy sprawl."

"You basically have a few dozen activists trying to protect this huge desert," she said. "Each solar project is on a different type of ecosystem, and there hasn't been a lot of planning. It's been, 'There's sun, let's build a power plant.' "

Cunningham grew up in the Bay Area and moved to a rural mining town in southern Nevada 10 years ago. A biologist and reptile expert, she has grown to love the desert, and the sense of calm and wonder it inspires.

"You can go into the desert and feel like you are the only person in the world," she said. "And yet it's teeming with life: jack rabbits, burrowing owls, rattlesnakes. In the spring, we have the most spectacular wildflowers, and the whole desert erupts in blossoms."

Conservation plan

In an effort to resolve conflicts between solar companies and conservationists, California is developing a Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan to decide which parts of the desert will be open for renewable energy development and which parts will be protected.

"Initially, all of these big solar projects were being crammed down our throats," said Ileene Anderson, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity who is active in the conservation plan's process. "But now the state is realizing that you can't just bully projects into being -- you have to take a close look at where they are sited. Climate change is real, and we have to transition to renewable energy. But let's do it without driving species to extinction."

Haenszel became 'the source' on San Bernardino County's past

2011-10-22T17:11:00.000-07:00

Nick Cataldo, Columnist
San Bernardino Sun

During my years researching San Bernardino County's colorful past, more than a few historians have helped me out immensely. But without question the scholar who made local history the most exciting for me, not only through her own amazing work, but also through the encouragement she gave me, was the late Arda M. Haenszel.

Born on Sept. 24, 1910, in Ebenezer, N.Y., the only child of Dr. Allen and Arda C. Haenszel became fascinated with history early on when she moved with her parents to the semi-abandoned Nevada desert mining town of Searchlight in 1919. Dr. Haenszel was the company physician for the Santa Fe Railway as well as the lone town doctor. In fact, he was the only doctor for miles around.

The region's mining boom was over by nearly a decade, so young Arda grew up around the ghostly reminders of abandoned buildings, mine shafts, and rock dumps. This unique environment may have sparked her interest in the past.

The Haenszel family left Searchlight in 1922 and moved to San Bernardino, which is where Arda called home for most of the rest of her life, until moving to Redlands' Plymouth Village, where she resided during her last years.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Arda launched a 33-year elementary school teaching career in San Bernardino. No doubt, her kids learned a thing of two about our region's "olden days" during her tenure.

After her retirement in 1966, she often was honored as the No. 1 consultant on our county's rich heritage. A longtime associate of the San Bernardino County Museum, she amassed a famous set of files - an unbelievably extensive historical collection on any and every topic regarding San Bernardino County as well as parts of Southern Nevada - that have provided material for countless other researchers (including yours truly) in their quest of exploring this region. She efficiently and willingly shared information on local Indian tribes, old trails, pioneers, historic sites, nearly forgotten towns, the Mojave Desert ... the list goes on and on.

Arda also had a strong interest in archaeology and, although not blessed with great health, was no "couch potato" writer. Up until about 10 years before her passing, she always was driving her Jeep out into the most remote areas of the desert, photographing abandoned sites, documenting her findings, and analyzing ancient petroglyphs.

Over the years Arda wrote numerous articles pertaining to archaeology, paleontology, anthropology and history for the San Bernardino County Museum Association. She also wrote many articles for the San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society's publications, "Heritage Tales" and "Odyssey," an amazing accomplishment considering her busy schedule volunteering with the County Museum and San Bernardino Public Library. Even more remarkable was that this was mostly done while she was practically deaf and her vision was failing.

Arda was well known for her book donations; she is responsible for the creation of the California Room at San Bernardino's Feldheym Library.

For decades Arda Haenszel had been the "the source" for local history and when she passed away on Jan. 9, 2002, the 91-year-old San Bernardino County resident became part of that story she loved to research and write about.

Her estate included a very generous donation of $749,000 to the City of San Bernardino Library Endowment Fund. On Dec. 13, 2007, the San Bernardino Library Board of Trustees unanimously approved the naming of the California Room as the Arda Haenszel California Room.

David Myrick passes away at 93

2011-09-28T06:24:00.000-07:00

David F. Myrick in Ojai in 2007. (The Guzzler)

A Talented and Extraordinary Man Passes On

James Buckley
Montecito Journal

Over the past weekend, Montecito lost a writer of renown, a native-born historian of unparalleled accomplishment, and most of all, a friend, supporter, and defender of all that is valuable in Montecito. David Myrick, whose two books on our area – Montecito and Santa Barbara: From Farms to Estates, and The Days of the Great Estates – stand as the deﬁnitive tomes on the establishment, expansion, and development of Santa Barbara and, especially and distinctly, Montecito.

Dana Newquist, with whom I had planned to visit David at Casa Dorinda on Sunday morning, September 25, called with the sad news the day before we were planning to stop by. Dana had been visiting David almost daily for the past six months and had noted that over the previous three days 93-year-old David Myrick had “dramatically declined.” He passed away at 10 am, Saturday morning, September 24. David’s nephew, Scott Allen, prepared the following obituary:

Santa Barbara News-Press
Obituary

David F. Myrick was born in Santa Barbara's Cottage Hospital on June 17, 1918. His parents were Donald and Charlotte Porter Myrick. He was educated in local schools, the last being Crane Country Day School, until he transferred to Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He then attended Santa Barbara State College for 2 years before going to Boston to attend Babson College where he earned his degree in business administration.

In 1940 he worked for Convair in San Diego in various clerical positions. Then in August of 1944 he began his long career working in the president's office of Southern Pacific Company at their headquarters in San Francisco. He put his business acumen to work composing letters to stockholders; representing the company in financial matters before various commissions; and researching potential mergers and acquisitions.

During his life he also found time to pen 17 books and approximately 140 published articles and book reviews. His special focus was writing about different locales, including Telegraph Hill (where he lived for 29 years during his career with Southern Pacific) and Montecito, CA (where he purchased his retirement home before moving there in 1981).

He also wrote extensively on the history of American railroads and mining camps in Eastern California, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, including the most populated mining camp in the Western hemisphere located in Potosi, Bolivia.

Mr. Myrick was also on the board of directors for many associations--a few of them were the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, the Nevada Historical Society, Telegraph Hill Dwellers (two times) and the Montecito Association.

He eventually moved into Casa Dorinda Retirement Community in November of 2003 while retaining ownership of his Montecito home.

His was a member of the Bohemian Club and Birnham Wood Country Club.

Mr. Myrick is survived by his brother Richard Myrick; his sister Julia Allen; and her three sons Peter, Scott, and Edward Allen.

No one knew Western Railroad History better. He was a pleasant and generous correspondent. For the inhabitants and fans of the East Mojave Desert, from Tonopah to Parker, Oro Grande to Las Vegas, David Myrick's 1963 Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California: Volume II, The Southern Roads is the singular history on the region's railroads, referenced by all local historians after him. In this wonderful book can be found the detailed histories of the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, Southern Pacific, Santa Fe (now BNSF), The Salt Lake Route, Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad, Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, Nevada Southern Railway, Ludlow and Southern Railway, Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad, and the Guzzler's favorite, the Searles Lake monorail of the Epsom Salts Railroad. The heritage of the Desert West has been greatly enriched by the life and work of David Myrick. - The Guzzler

San Bernardino County: Board considers new boundaries

2011-09-15T22:00:00.000-07:00

Proposed San Bernardino County redistrict map. (San Bernardino County)

by Imran Ghori
Press-Enterprise

San Bernardino County -- Supervisors will take up a redistricting ordinance today but remain split on the plan, which has drawn criticism from some mountain and Latino residents.

The board approved a draft proposal on a 3-2 vote last month at its fourth meeting since May on how to draw the county's supervisorial district boundaries.

The new map shifts parts of the San Bernardino Mountains -- from Lake Arrowhead to Running Springs -- from the 3rd District to the 2nd District.

The proposed map would also move Barstow, Lucerne Valley and Twentynine Palms from the 1st District to the 3rd District and half of Upland from the 2nd District to the 4th District.

The county's consultant, National Demographics Corp., recommended the option out of five maps considered as the best able to meet different county criteria.

Changing demographics from the 2010 census required the county to decrease the size of the High Desert 1st District, which saw the largest population increase, while adding to the 4th District, which needed to grow the most to ensure the districts are equally balanced, according to county spokesman David Wert.

Supervisor Neil Derry, who represents the 3rd District, voted against the plan along with 1st District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt. Both remain opposed.

Derry had proposed two alternatives that would move all of the San Bernardino Mountains into his district -- an option supported by a large group of mountain residents who spoke at the public hearings of wanting to unify the area under one district.

"The public has come out and spoken and been routinely ignored," Derry said of the plan favored by the board majority.

Board Chairwoman Josie Gonzales, who represents the 5th District, said she is satisfied that the plan is as fair as it can be given the different regulations governing redistricting.

"We go into the redistricting process knowing we're not going to make everybody happy; that includes ourselves, the supervisors," she said.

Gonzales said she believes the mountain area is better served by two representatives on the board instead of just one.

The plan also came under fire earlier this month from Rep. Joe Baca, D-Rialto, who joined a Latino advocacy group in accusing the county of refusing to create a second Latino majority district.

County numbers, however, show that Hispanics would have a majority in two districts in the proposed plan -- 57 percent in the 4th District and 69 percent in the 5th District.

The group, the League of United Latin American Citizens Inland Empire chapter, held a news conference to criticize the county plan but did not contact county officials, Wert and Gonzales said.

"I'm at a loss as to why they've not contacted me or the CEO," Gonzales said. "We'd be happy to listen to them."

Gonzales sent a letter last week to Joe Olague, president of the group's Inland Empire chapter, inviting him to submit the group's proposed maps. In his response, Olague reiterated the group's criticisms but did not offer its maps.

Wert said the figures cited by the group in criticizing the Latino population represented in the districts are false.

The board meets at noon at the County Government Center at 385 N. Arrowhead Ave. in San Bernardino.

BLM rapped for silencing citizens

2011-09-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

by David Danelski
Press-Enterprise

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has decided to allow members of the public to speak during meetings held to gather public comments.

A brouhaha developed after an Aug. 31 meeting in Primm, Nev. The point of the meeting was to gather public input on environmental concerns related to a planned solar development. But people, some of whom drove hundreds of miles to express their views, were not allowed to speak and instead were told to write their thoughts on pieces of paper and submit them.

On Tuesday, after public criticism and media calls, BLM leadership decided to return to a process that lets people "listen to what each other has to say," said David Briery, a spokesman for the agency's California Desert District, headquartered in Moreno Valley.

"We thought we had a process that worked, but it didn't," he said by telephone.

At the Aug. 31 meeting, the BLM sought public input -- as required by federal law -- to identify topics to cover in environmental reviews of a planned 2,000-acre solar project on public land in northeast San Bernardino County.

But after representatives of Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar gave a presentation about their plans, no one in the audience of about 50 people was allowed a turn at the microphone.

Instead, BLM officials told people they could fill out a form that gave them space for about 75 words of handwritten comments, said Chris Clarke, a Palm Springs resident and member of a group called Solar Done Right. He was among those who attended the meeting, at Primm Valley Golf Club.

Some audience members were flabbergasted and shouted at BLM officials. Dozens of people left frustrated, witnesses said.

"I had some people come from as far as Long Beach, and that's two tanks of gas," said David Lamfrom, California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. "They gave the impression that a decision (on approving the project) was predetermined."

The meeting spurred official letters of complaint and critical Internet postings on media websites. First Solar responded to the flap by scheduling a meeting for Monday in Barstow to give people "an opportunity to provide input and ask questions about the project in an open forum discussion," according to a company email. The meeting is at 6 p.m. at the Hampton Inn, 2710 Lenwood Road.

The meeting format that last month irritated members of the public is not new.

In recent years, BLM officials considering solar and wind energy developments and military officials wanting to expand the Marine Corps training center at Twentynine Palms also have avoided giving the public a forum. People could walk from table to table to meet individually with various officials and were allowed to submit written comments. The meetings did not give people a chance to pick up a microphone and address an audience.

Briery, the BLM spokesman, said the Desert District officials adopted that meeting format because they had to get through numerous public meetings, a result of the dozens of wind and solar energy projects proposed on public land.

"We were looking for the most efficient way to get substantive comments from the public, and that's why we had gone to written comments only," Briery said.

Rob Mrowka, a former U.S. Forest Service manager who is now a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said some federal officials have been concerned that allowing people to speak at meetings might lead to grandstanding by those who could then encourage a crowd to become unruly.

But Mrowka, who attended the Aug. 31 meeting, faulted the BLM for not even letting people ask questions about the project.

"A large number of participants traveled great distances to the middle of nowhere for the meeting and deserved the right to have questions answered," he said in an email to BLM officials.

Clarke and other meeting participants said the BLM's meeting format suppressed public discourse, because no one could hear what other citizens had to say. The situation made it difficult for like-minded people to find each other and for those who may disagree about the project to find common ground, he said.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said citizens should be given a choice of speaking or submitting written comments.

"Sometimes freedom speech can be a little bit messy, but it benefits us in ways that outweigh the cost," he said.

Take a 'monumental' tour of Cajon Pass

2011-09-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

Santa Fe and Salt Lake Trail Monument (parks.ca.gov)

Mark Landis, Correspondent
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

For centuries, the Cajon Pass has been a primary corridor into Southern California, and a series of little-known monuments commemorate the pioneers who blazed the trails over the rugged mountain barrier.

There are nine unique monuments set in historic locations throughout the Cajon Pass. Each one tells a story of the hardships and triumphs faced by the pioneers who made the difficult journey.

The routes through the Cajon Pass began as simple footpaths used by Indians traveling from the inland deserts to the coastal regions of Southern California.

The first white explorer to travel through the Cajon Pass was most likely Spanish military Captain Pedro Fages in 1771, who was leading a band of soldiers hunting for deserters.

Other famous explorers including Padre Francisco Garces and mountain man Jedediah Strong Smith followed various routes through the Cajon Pass.

The most prominent group of settlers that traveled through the pass was a party of 500 Mormons who came by wagon train from Utah in June 1851. The task of hauling their heavy wagons down the steep slopes of the Cajon Pass was the final test of their grueling 400-mile journey.

The monuments are spread throughout the Cajon Pass, and all but three are easily accessible by car. Those that are accessible can be seen in an enjoyable afternoon road trip.

Stoddard-Waite Monument: The first monument set in the Cajon Pass was dedicated May 18, 1913 to commemorate the early pioneers who came by horseback and wagon train through the passage. Sheldon Stoddard and Sidney P. Waite, two of the most well-known pioneers who traveled through the pass in 1849 were honored attendees.

This spire-shaped monument, listed as California Historic Marker No. 578, was placed along the former Santa Fe/Salt Lake Trail. It is located in a thick grove of Cottonwood trees near the CHP truck scales on the southbound I-15, about three-quarters of a mile south of Highway 138. The monument is on private property owned by the San Bernardino County Museum, and is only accessible by special permission.

Santa Fe and Salt Lake Trail Monument: A second monument of similar size and shape was erected in 1917 just a few hundred yards northeast of the Stoddard-Waite Monument. A festive ceremony was held to dedicate the monument, once again attended by pioneers who had traveled the early wagon roads.

The concrete spire, listed as California State Historic Landmark No. 576, is located at the end of Wagon Wheel Road (south of McDonalds), just east of the northbound I-15 CHP truck scales.

Sycamore Grove Monument: This large spire-shaped monument was built in 1927 to mark the site of the 1851 Mormon camp at Sycamore Grove, known today as Glen Helen. The 500 Mormon settlers camped here while the leaders of their party negotiated the purchase of Rancho San Bernardino.

This monument, listed as California Historic Marker No. 573, is located just inside the grounds of Glen Helen Park, on Glen Helen Parkway, .8 mile south of Cajon Boulevard.

Mohave Trail Monument: The Mohave Trail Monument was set on Sept. 19, 1931, on a remote mountaintop northeast of Devore, fittingly named Monument Peak. This small stone and mortar monument was placed by the San Bernardino County Historical Society to commemorate the explorers and frontiersmen who traveled this ancient footpath.

A 4-wheel drive vehicle is required to reach the 5,290-feet elevation Monument Peak site. Take Palm Avenue north from the I-215 until the paved road ends and becomes Bailey Canyon Road. The 5.9-mile trip up the dirt road can be readily found on Google Maps. The monument is located at GPS coordinates: 34 14'43.95"N, 117 21'12.33"W.

Mormon Trail Monument: A modest stone and mortar monument topped by a wagon wheel was built in the West Cajon Valley by the Sons of Mormon Pioneers, and dedicated on May 15, 1937. A small, weathered plaque commemorates the Mormon settlers who passed through this area in 1851. The monument, listed as California Historic Marker No. 577, is located on Highway 138, 4.2 miles west of I-15.

Pioneer Women Monument: On April 16, 1977, this simple concrete and marble monument was placed near the former Mormon campsite of Sycamore Grove to commemorate pioneer women. The plaque is a memorial to the hardships the pioneer women faced as they traveled across the untamed country by ox team and covered wagon.

The monument is located on Glen Helen Parkway at the onramp to the northbound 1-15 freeway.

Mormon Pioneer Trail: This small stone and mortar monument was placed in July 1985 to commemorate the wagon train of 500 Mormon settlers who passed by the site in 1851.

The monument is located on the Old Salt Lake Trail near the 1912 Stoddard-Waite Monument and is accessible only by permission.

Blue Cut: This large concrete monument was erected alongside old Route 66 in a narrow gap of the Cajon Pass known as Blue Cut. The monument, dedicated July 23, 1994, was placed by the Billy Holcomb Chapter of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E. Clampus Vitus. The inlaid brass plaque describes the explorers and immigrants who blazed the trails and roads through the pass, as well as some of the historic events that occurred in the area.

To reach this monument, exit I-15 at Kenwood Avenue and go south to Cajon Boulevard (old Route 66). Turn right onto Cajon Boulevard and go 3.7 miles north. Look for the monument on the left in a wide turnout area, set back among the shade trees.

Summit Train Station Monument: This carved marble monument was placed near the site of the Summit Train Station in 1996 by the Hesperia Recreation and Park District. The weathered text carved into the marble commemorates the site of the Summit Train Station on the Santa Fe Railway, and the nearby site of the Elliot Ranch settled in 1927.

The monument also is near the entrance to Horse Thief Canyon where thousands of stolen horses were driven through this section of the Cajon Pass in the 1800s.

The monument is located in Summit Valley on Highway 138, 4 miles east of I-15 on the north side of the road. It is part of a series of monuments placed by the Hesperia Recreation and Park District to commemorate historic sites in the area.

Burning Man fest leaves the desert

2011-09-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

BURNING MAN 2011: The Temple at Sunset by Jeff Sullivan

Zelie Pollon
Reuters

Organizers of the iconic "Burning Man" celebration began this week to clear the desert of any evidence that 50,000 people had just spent the past week here in a transient, art-filled, makeshift city.

As the anti-establishment arts festival and survival project disappears piece by piece from the white sands of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, participants and organizers say Burning Man -- which just had its largest week in its 25-year history -- is going through some growing pains as plans to expand its size and scope moving forward over the next year.

"When you have to be accountable and not anonymous, you change the way you act. As it's gotten bigger we've lost some of that," said Katrina Van Merter, 32, of Dallas, attending her sixth Burning Man.

The event is characterized by massive art projects and the namesake burning figure at its close, with participants heading into the desert for a week each year to build a working city from the ground up -- including an airport, a post office, and a security team -- that tries to be devoid of consumerism.

Burning Man started with an 8-foot structure burning on a beach in California at summer solstice and has morphed into a sophisticated community with year-round projects including solar energy development and a crisis response network.

Black Rock City LLC announced plans to turn its profit-making enterprise into a nonprofit this year.

Participation was capped at 50,000 people a day per a Bureau of Land Management use permit, said organizers.

Next year they're hoping to up that number, gradually adding 20,000 more people by 2016, said Burning Man communication manager Andie Grace.

TAKING THE STRAIN

But as the crowds grow, some of the long-time participants wonder if the desert gathering's principles -- including what self-styled "burners" call radical self-reliance, community, civic responsibility and an economy based on giving freely -- can take the strain of a growing population.

Others say that its growth has helped Burning Man change from a tiny party into an organization capable of innovation that can have benefits outside the "playa," the Spanish word for "beach" that burners use to refer to the site.

The Hexayurt, for example, is an easily deployable paneled shelter, created by Vinay Gupta in 2007 in honor of that year's Burning Man theme "The Green Man."

Gupta has since begun conversations with USAID about using the inexpensive structure in post-disaster areas, Grace said.

The town's crescent design, developed by Rod Garrett and founding member Harley Dubois, covers five square miles and includes 60 miles of streets, hundreds of intersections, and between two and four thousand signs created annually by a Burning Man sign shop, said Will Roger, a founder.

Roger has been asked to present to numerous audiences, including a retired Army group, about the building of what is known as Black Rock City.

Firefighters, city planners and reportedly members of Homeland Security have come to study the organizational and support structure of the complex erected to support tens of thousands of participants for a week, that then disappears as if it never existed.

ASTOUNDING GROWTH

But the astounding growth of Burning Man has its drawbacks, as some participants struggle to accept the changing demographics and influx of strangers into Black Rock City.

Participants point to bike thefts across the dusty playa, people coming to indulge but not to share, and a kind of close knit community feeling that is simply slipping away.

On Monday, thousands of talc-covered vehicles streamed out of the Black Rock Desert as the festival drew to a close.

Cars, trucks and RVs -- topped with dusty bikes, bright furry clothes and the makings for elaborate shelters -- snaked down the small single lane road toward civilization.

"We used to sit on the corner and wave goodbye to people as they left the playa, and tell them we'd see them again next year," said Dave Roetter, who came to the event with his 6-year-old son, Memphis. "People just don't do that anymore."

There are about 600 rangers who patrol the playa, along with several state agencies and the BLM. And despite the growing size, there is still a kind of citizen monitoring that encourages good behavior.

Accidents occur, as do arrests and numerous cases of dehydration, but nothing more than one would see in any city of this size, organizers say.

As for the missing bikes, Rogers says they're probably misplacing them. Thousands are left strewn around the basin by the event's end.

"It's still one of the safest cities in America," he said.

The demographic of Black Rock City is increasingly wealthy and older participants. A 2010 survey listed 40 percent of participants to be between the ages of 40 and 70 years old, and incomes ranging anywhere from less than $10,000 a year to over one million dollars a year. Several have groused about ticket prices that can top $360.

But there are also a greater number of families, and even very small children, many of which live together in one of Burning Man's largest camps called Kidsville.

The more, the merrier, said Sandy Lyle, 43, of San Diego.

"This year definitely feels bigger than usual, but what we do here is create community, so more people just gives us more opportunity," she said. "That's what Burning Man is all about."

Burning Man from Earth's orbit

2011-09-06T00:30:00.000-07:00

A European Space satellite took photos of the 2011 Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert from 373 miles above.

By Mike Wall
Christian Science Monitor

The annual Burning Man festival is in full swing in the Nevada desert, and a tiny European satellite has snapped an overhead shot of the eccentric action.

The European Space Agency's Proba-1 microsatellite took a photo of Burning Man on Thursday (Sept. 1) from an altitude of about 373 miles (600 kilometers). The picture shows campers and tents massed for the annual gathering, which attracts 50,000 people to the Black Rock Desert 120 miles (193 km) north of Reno.

The image was stitched together from four black-and-white photos, each of which has a resolution of about 16 feet (5 meters), European Space Agency (ESA) officials said. [See the satellite photo of Burning Man]

IN PICTURES: Burning Man 2011

Burning Man is a weeklong art and self-expression festival that meets every year around Labor Day. This year, it runs from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5. Attendance was capped at 50,000, and the event sold out in July.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the festival, which takes its name from the ceremonial torching of a giant wooden effigy. The event began modestly in 1986, when a handful of friends torched an 8-foot (2.4-m) wooden man on a San Francisco beach.

Burning Man first moved to the Black Rock Desert in 1990, and it has grown greatly over the past two decades. The height of the torched man has grown as well; in 2009, he measured 50 feet (15.2 m) tall, according to the festival's website.

"Proba" stands for "Project for Onboard Autonomy," and Proba-1's two cameras are indeed largely autonomous. The microsatellite, which is less than 3.3 feet on a side (less than 1 cubic meter), launched in October 2001 as an experimental mission.

Proba-2, which focuses on solar monitoring, was launched in November 2009. Two other Probas are in preparation, ESA officials said. Proba-3 will test formation flying, and Proba-V will monitor global vegetation.

A touch of paint brings a desert town to life

2011-08-30T00:30:00.000-07:00

A traveling muralist brightens buildings — and maybe prospects — in Needles.

Dan Louden paints a mural on an office wall in Needles. A relative newcomer in the town, he is popular among residents. (Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times)

By Phil Willon
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Needles, Calif — Along old U.S. Route 66, the once-kitschy Overland Motel is crumbling, vacant lots pock downtown and, as if this remote desert outpost weren't suffering enough, the last car dealership folded up and left behind a blanket of empty asphalt.

Not a pretty picture for travelers who might pull off the highway for a burger or to spend the night.

Then, about five months ago, a man with a sun-stained face and paint-crusted fingernails drifted in, and the tiny old railroad town of Needles started looking a little brighter.

The first mural popped up on a bare cinder-block wall at the Wagon Wheel Restaurant: A giant Santa Fe locomotive chugging by a roadside sign for the "Route 66 Original Diner."

Another appeared at the Valero gas station, with two space aliens that look like ET driving down Route 66 in a 1950s Buick. Elvis and Marilyn took over the side wall of the Econo Smog with their two-tone Ford Fairlane convertible parked at the Colorado River. Marilyn sported aviators and the King, white leathers.

All pay homage to U.S. Route 66, the Mother Road, which ran from Chicago to Los Angeles and right through the heart of Needles before it was retired from the federal highway system in 1985. Other larger-than-life odes appeared seemingly overnight at the Needles Point Pharmacy and Liquor Store, Deco Food Service, the local Chevron station, the Miranda Car Wash and the local Best Western — more than a dozen murals in just a few months, and more are in the works.

The man behind the brush, Dan Louden, spent 30 years bouncing around truck stops in the West, hand-painting any long-hauler's piece de resistance on the cabs or trailers. He painted Harleys for the Hells Angels in San Bernardino — until that got a little too dicey for him — and hand-lettered signs for fish markets, high schools and auto parts stores all the way up to Seattle. He's pinstriped more hot rods than he can remember.

"I do it because there's a lot of fringe benefits that come with this. You travel, you do what you want," said Louden, 52, who grew up in Diamond Bar. "I just love the desert. I don't like living in big cities. I don't like the traffic. Out here you can sleep with the door unlocked."

Susan Alexis, owner of the Wagon Wheel, said that a couple years back, Louden did odd jobs for her and others around town, but they didn't know he was a master with a few cans of paint.

When he mentioned it to her while breezing through town earlier this year, she hired him on the spot. Alexis had wanted to paint the restaurant's side wall ever since noticing how ugly the bank of cinder blocks looked on Google Maps' street view.

"I just wanted to bring some nostalgia to the building. We have so much history here, but our town doesn't reflect it," Alexis said. "Now, everyone around town is talking about the guy."

Louden said he's been drawing and painting ever since he was a kid but never pursued it. Then one day, when he was about 20, he delivered paint to an "old school" sign shop in Yucaipa and his life changed forever.

Louden has a house outside of Kingman, Ariz., that he shares with his girlfriend, Vicky Bowden, a former nurse from Lone Pine.

With work pouring in, they have camped out at the Needles Inn for weeks at a time, working almost every day. It help that he's affordable — $500 for a mural covering the side of a small building — and fast. Most jobs are wrapped up in a day. When they overheat in the scorching Mojave sun, they take a dip in the Colorado.

"It's certainly brightened up downtown, and hopefully it'll help bring more tourists in," said Needles Mayor Edward Paget. "It's not like this was planned. People are doing it on their own — and they're being greatly encouraged by both myself and the City Council to improve downtown."

Most of the businesses hiring Louden have stuck to a Route 66 theme, honoring the highway that lighted up Needles during its last heyday. In November, the town also is celebrating the 85th anniversary of the road. Needles earned a certain fame when it was named in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

"It was outrageously reasonable, and I think he captured the feel of the small town," said Needles accountant Michael Burger, who hired Louden to liven up his office building earlier this month. "It's a nice thing he's doing for the town."

Burger had a snapshot of his restored '57 Chevy truck and handed it to Louden, telling him to use that and then "do whatever you want." Twelve hours later, his building was covered with the gang from the Peanuts comic, including Snoopy's brother Spike from Needles — one of the town's biggest celebrities. Charlie Brown is at the wheel of the truck.

Louden also was hired to paint a memorial inside the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Station in Needles honoring Deputy Russell Dean Roberts, who was killed in 1995 while investigating an accident in the town.

Capt. Marty Brown of the county Fire Department also wants to hire Louden to paint the station in Needles.

"We just need to give the front a facelift — maybe to look like an old-school fire station," Brown said. "The firefighters will probably have to pay for it out of pocket, since it's pretty unlikely we're going to pay for that with public funds."

Louden says times are tough for everyone these days, which is why he keeps his prices low. He can afford to, he said, because there's more work than he can handle.

"The first sign painter I ever ran into told me that if you learn how to do this, you'll never go hungry. And he's absolutely right," Louden said. "You'll always find someone who needs something done."

Ivanpah plant closer to completion

2011-08-29T22:15:00.000-07:00

Construction workers build the 493 foot solar receiver tower for the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, five miles out of Primm, Nevada on Monday. (Al Cuizon/Staff Photographer)

Andrew Edwards, Staff Writer
Contra Costa Times

IVANPAH - A white crane towers over the Mojave Desert floor where hundreds of workers gather below and inside a hulking gray structure that is part of a multi-million dollar bet that solar energy will prove a reliable technology for powering California homes and businesses.

Sitting on 3,600 acres of public land near the Nevada state line, the solar project - its formal name is the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station - has been under construction for nearly a year. Its backers say that upon completion in 2013, the solar plant will be capable of providing electricity to some 140,000 homes.

"This is one of the crown jewels that we have in our growing solar energy program," John O'Brien, a senior vice president for NRG Energy, said during a media tour of the Ivanpah site Monday.

BrightSource Energy, based in Oakland, is the Ivanpah project's designer and developer. The company has hired San Francisco-based Bechtel to build the power plant.

NRG, based in Princeton, N.J., has signed up to invest up to $300 million in the solar plant. BrightSource has also received a $168 million commitment from Google.

The U.S. Department of Energy is also providing support to the project in the form of a $1.6 billion loan guarantee.

That money is paying for the construction of the massive gray edifice where construction workers - about 480 people work directly for the project - assemble in the dusty, scorching Mojave environment.

As of Monday, construction crews have raised the edifice to 120 feet of a planned 469 feet. The project's design calls for two additional towers and the 175,000 mirrors that have yet to be installed around the towers to capture the sun's energy.

The mirrors, the precise term is heliostats, do not convert sunlight into electrical energy as photovoltaic solar panels do. Instead, the mirrors are designed to track and reflect the sun's rays to boilers installed at the summits of each tower. Water inside the boilers vaporizes and the resulting steam flows through pipes to power turbines where electricity is generated.

"We basically take a boiler that's similar to what you have in a high-efficiency (fossil) fuel plant," BrightSource president John M. Wollard said.

Upon completion, the Ivanpah complex's gross output is expected to reach 392 megawatts. A recent fuel burning plant, Southern California Edison's Mountainview Power Plant in Redlands, began commercial operation in 2005 and can produce 1,045 megawatts.

Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric have already signed on to buy power from the Ivanpah plant. California law requires utilities to obtain one-third of their electrical power from alternative sources such as solar by 2020.

BrightSource is not the only solar project planned in the Mojave Desert. The California Energy Commission's list of planned projects includes the Calico Solar Project near Barstow, the Abengoa Solar Project between Barstow and Kramer Junction, and the city of Victorville's hybrid gas-solar project as being in the pre-construction stage.

Although solar energy is typically considered to be environmentally friendly when compared to power plants that burn coal or natural gas, large-scale solar projects in the Mojave Desert often receive scrutiny from environmentalists who are concerned about impacts to desert lands, particularly as construction may reduce habitats for the endangered California desert tortoise.

Accordingly, the environmental review process for another proposed solar plant, the Stateline Solar Farm, is at its earliest stages. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is collecting public comments on Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar's plan to build a photovoltaic solar plant near BrightSource's project.

Those comments will be used to prepare an environmental report required to include an assessment of how construction would affect tortoise habitats and other environmental considerations.

New Fire Tax Could Affect Thousands of San Bernardino Residents

2011-08-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

Irony: Fee is assessed on structures--protection Cal Fire does not provide.

Dan Wilson
Best Syndication

SAN BERNARDINO Calif. – Today the County Board of Supervisors made their position known on the fire tax by passing a unanimous resolution in opposition to it.

According to George Watson, Chief of Staff for Supervisor Neil Derry, the resolution calls for resending [sic] of the tax. “I am committed to waging an ongoing and sustained battle against this illegal tax,” Supervisor Derry said.

Initially the tax was to be $150 per household living in the wildland areas serviced by Cal Fire. First District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt tells Best Syndication that the money goes to the state’s fire protection agency. “The irony is that Cal Fire does not provide structure protection, although the fee is assessed on structures”, Mitzelfelt said.

The tax / fee could be assessed against tens of thousands of residents of San Bernardino County. The good news is that the fee was lowered from $150 to $90 per year and there are discounts available for residents who provide defensible space between their home and brush and trees.

Those with the lowest incomes could be weighed-down the most. “The High Desert has the highest unemployment in the region and our residents cannot be burdened with additional taxes when so many are struggling to make ends meet”, Supervisor Mitzelfelt said.

“This is an example of the majority in the Legislature’s irresponsible, unfair, and possibly illegal effort to balance its out-of-control budget on the backs of local residents, who already pay taxes and fees for this service.”

Watson tells Best Syndication that the assessment is on habitable structures only, not garages or sheds. According to David Zook, spokesperson for Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, the fee will be assessed on “inhabitable” structures.

“When the legislature passed the bill it was meant to cover a shortfall in the Cal Fire budget, but because the way it was written the money could go to local fire agencies”, Watson told Best Syndication.

California Governor Jerry Brown may change that. According to Chief of Staff Watson the governor wants to make sure the money goes to the state and not the local agencies.

Pioneertown Locals Fight Potential Wind Farm

2011-08-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

KPSP-TV

Palm Springs - Leaders in our Valley are looking toward clean energy jobs to get people back to work - that means more solar and wind power.

However, just up Highway 62, a group is fighting a potential wind farm in Pioneertown. That's where Portland-based Element Power is already leasing 4,030 acres from the Bureau of Land Management for green-energy production.

The proposed project is still very early in the testing phase - for now the company is only allowed to place four 60-meter tall meteorological testing towers to check the wind viability in the area but local residents are already furious about the project.

Pioneertown local Elyzabeth Turvey built her home overlooking the mesas surrounding the tourist destination.

"It's peaceful, it's beautiful, the stars at night are clear and the shooting stars are amazing - and the views," Turvey said. The meteorological towers have her worried about the development of the land.

"With that, it means roads and fencing and everything else involved with it," Turvery said. "I do not want it to look like Desert Hot Springs."

The project manager from Element Power, Jackie Kossman, says the project still has about two years of testing before the company will decide whether building a farm in the area is worth the investment. Then, it is up to the Bureau of Land Management to approve any projects. While the BLM is allowing Element Power to test the site, any project proposal will be accompanied by environmental reports and public comment.

"People have ample opportunity - well, maybe not ample, but they certainly have an opportunity to contribute their voices to this project," said Mickey Quillman, of the Barstow Field Office.

Quillman says he has been inundated with emails about the project. He encourages locals to get involved in the public process.

Murder victim found in desert in 1971 identified

2011-08-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

Beddie Walraven

Los Angeles Times

San Bernardino County - The remains of a woman who was murdered and dumped in the Mojave Desert in 1946 have been identified through a DNA match, officials said Friday.

The discovery that scattered, unidentified bones found in 1971 are the remains of 25-year-old Beddie Walraven came after years of painstaking work by San Bernardino County coroner investigators and scientists at the state attorney general’s DNA laboratory in Richmond.

“It’s one of the older cases we had that’s been solved with DNA,” said Sandy Fatland, a coroner spokeswoman. “It’s amazing what they can do now … Every day, everything is becoming more refined."

Walraven was reported missing in May 1946. In 1975, a man arrested for an unrelated crime told Santa Ana police he had killed Walraven 29 years before and dumped her body in the Mojave Desert near Baker -– then, as now, a remote expanse that hides secrets well.

It was only recently that authorities had the technology to match the man’s story to the bones. In late 2005, highly degraded biological samples were sent to the state lab where it took five years for scientists to develop a usable DNA profile. Meanwhile, San Bernardino County coroner investigators located two relatives of Walraven in Texas who provided DNA samples that were used for comparison.

“Something from the 1940s -– I’ve never heard or seen anything like that,” said Cpl. Anthony Bertagna, a Santa Ana police spokesman.

Bertagna said homicide investigators were looking Friday for old files that would provide details of the case and whether the man –- now dead -- who confessed to Walraven’s murder was ever charged or convicted.

'Smoketree painter' Carl Bray dies at 94

2011-07-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

Artist Carl Bray with author and friend Ann Japenga

Written by Coburn Palmer and Mariecar Mendoza
The Desert Sun

Carl Bray, a famous desert artist and “smoketree painter” who lived in Indian Wells and built the Carl Bray house and gallery along Highway 111, died Saturday morning from natural causes in Banning. He was 94.

J. Patrick Bray called his father “absolutely complex,” and said while he remembers his father painting, he also said Carl Bray easily could have been an engineer.

“He built a crazy steam car out of an old golf cart he bought that we thought was going to blow up on him one day, but no, it never did, and he just drove it around the house,” he said, laughing.

Bray was born in 1917 in Prague, Okla. He studied art during the Great Depression at Miami College in the Dust Bowl state, while working on farms to pay his tuition.

He moved west to find work in 1936 and landed a job with the railroad in Southern California, where he worked for more than 40 years.

He married his wife, Luella, in 1939 and moved 20 miles east of Niland.

The railroad job took Bray and his wife to the Los Angeles area during WWII, where they bought property in rural El Monte, built a house and started their family of four.

In the early 1950s, Bray bought a Highway 111 frontage lot in Indian Wells for $1,000. Working weekends and vacations, he built a house and gallery, and the family moved to the desert in 1953.

At the time there was little development in Indian Wells. The Brays' neighbors included a few cabins, a dance hall, two small groceries, two gas stations, a dance hall and a café.

Bray continued working for the railroad while his wife ran the gallery. In the early 1960s, the Brays started to spend summers in Taos, where he had a gallery on the plaza for several years.

Bray retired from the railroad and continued to paint. His paintings are owned by celebrities and held by the city of Indian Wells in its permanent collection.

The couple sold their Indian Wells property at the turn of the century and moved to Banning.

His wife Luella died in 2008, and the 50-year-old property in Indian Wells, with its signature paint palette sign, was demolished in 2010. The Indian Wells City Council is still discussing plans to replace it with a memorial park.

“Carl was a person that you kind of felt that you'd always known very well,” said Adele Ruxton, president of the Indian Wells Historic Preservation Foundation

The funeral is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday at the Fellowship in the Pass Church, 650 Oak Valley parkway in Beaumont.

He is survived by his children Mary Weinhold (Bill), Sylvia Bray (Bernardo Larque), J. Patrick Bray (Linda), Michael Bray (Patt); nine grandchildren; and 16 great-grandchildren.

County Route Marker Program gets its kickoff on Route 66

2011-07-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

Highland Community News

San Bernardino County, CA -- No highway in the world has captured the hearts and minds of travelers as much as Route 66, which is why the County of San Bernardino plans to designate a portion of this roadway "County Route 66" as it establishes the County Route Marker Program.

Board of Supervisors Vice-Chairman Brad Mitzelfelt initiated the program after noticing route markers in other California counties. A portion of historic Route 66 in his First District was the natural choice to launch the program, with other routes to be added in the future.

"Marking specially designated roadways will help motorists navigate the largest county in America by creating route numbers that won't change as drivers enter and exit city and county areas," Vice-Chairman Mitzelfelt said. "Signage along the route will highlight and celebrate sites of cultural and historical interest, generate tourism, and promote the county's image."

Vice-Chairman Mitzelfelt is using $45,000 of his office's discretionary funding to pay for the signage on the route. No federal dollars or other funding sources will be tapped for this effort.
More than 250 miles of this iconic highway run the length of San Bernardino County from Upland through Needles, making a portion of Route 66 by far the most appropriate place to launch the County Route Marker Program, the first to be added in the state since 1983. Signs placed at various intervals along the route will serve as "bread crumbs" for travelers to follow as they explore significant landmarks.

County Route 66 will begin on National Trails Highway in the unincorporated community of Oro Grande at the border of the City of Victorville, continue north onto Main Street in the City of Barstow, continue east on Interstate 40, travel north on Nebo Street near Barstow, head east on National Trails Highway, and then north on Goffs Road to its junction with US-95.

Cultural and historical sites along this alignment include the City of Barstow and the communities of Daggett, Newberry Springs, Ludlow, Amboy, Cadiz, Chambless, Essex, and Goffs, as well as the Mojave National Preserve. This alignment can be expanded to include additional portions of or all of Route 66 at a later date.

The California County Route Marker Program was established in 1958 to mark county routes of major importance and public interest that are constructed and marked to sufficient safety standards. San Bernardino County will become the 43rd of California's 58 counties to participate in the program.

The program requires the county and the cities through which the routes pass to adopt resolutions formally establishing a specific county route. The City of Barstow next month plans to consider a resolution to establish County Route 66, which would authorize the posting of signs within city. Once Barstow acts, the Board of Supervisors will consider adoption.

"I appreciate Barstow's partnership in this initial effort establishing a County Route Marker Program in San Bernardino County," Vice-Chairman Mitzelfelt said. "I have no doubt other cities will want to establish similar partnerships for roadways through their communities."

The county has received letters of endorsement from the California Historic Route 66 Association and the California Route 66 Museum.

Commission will reduce fee used to protect habitats

2011-07-07T06:47:00.000-07:00

Irony: Halt to Eagle Mountain impacted enviro plans to buy critical habitat

Coachella Valley Multiple Species
Habitat Conservation Plan area

Written by Keith Matheny
mydesert.com

Coachella Valley -- A developer fee that supports a valleywide species habitat protection plan will be reduced.

The Coachella Valley Conservation Commission, which consists of representatives from the nine valley cities, Riverside County and local water agencies, plans to reduce the mitigation fee supporting the Coachella Valley Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan.

The plan protects 240,000 acres of open space and 27 plant and animal species in and around the Coachella Valley, including the threatened desert tortoise, peninsular bighorn sheep and desert pupfish.

The planned fee reduction is $130 per acre for commercial or industrial development, to $5,600 from $5,730.

The fee will drop $30 per acre for developments of up to eight units in affected areas, to $1,254 from $1,284.

Tom Kirk, Coachella Valley Association of Governments executive director, said the fee reductions are prompted by a new “nexus study” required of governments to occasionally evaluate the appropriateness of fees charged for new development.

Declining property values due to the struggling economy did not have a large impact on the fee, Kirk said, because the properties often purchased for habitat protection are remote and less desirable for building, which tends to keep land values more flat.

The habitat protection program hit a potential snag in March, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling overturning a land exchange that in effect halted the Eagle Mountain Landfill near Joshua Tree National Park.

The multiple species plan was counting on $250 million in long-term funding from the landfill, Kirk said, and developers potentially faced a huge fee increase without it.

But CVAG officials worked with federal and state agencies, environmentalists, and the local building industry, eventually striking a deal to continue with plans to buy critical habitat lands most susceptible to development over the next 20 to 30 years, but to shift lesser priority land purchases out up to 40 years, Kirk said.

“It drove down the fee a little bit, which was a heck of a lot better than raising it a whole lot,” he said.

Riverside County Planning Department Deputy Director Greg Neal said county supervisors are having staff return with an amended plan for a county board vote.

Other member governments will similarly have to amend their ordinances, he said.

Though the multi-species plan was adopted in 2007, to date it has raised only about $2 million in development impact fees — far below projections — due to the down economy, Kirk said.

“One of the many ironies of the plan is, when we have wildlife interests knocking at our door saying, ‘Why don't you acquire more land?' we need more development to do it,” he said.

The program has relied on about $5 million in federal grant funds and $13 million in CVAG transportation mitigation fees to pay for acquisitions, property management and biological monitoring, Kirk said.

“At CVAG, we look at it much like a developer does,” he said. “We'd rather pay a fee to help build interchanges on the I-10 than deal with the uncertainty and high cost of dealing with endangered species on a case-by-case basis.”

Solar Developers Face New Desert Tortoise Species

2011-06-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

Attention solar developers: You now have not one but two desert tortoises to worry about

Todd Woody
Forbes

Scientists on Tuesday published a paper revealing that DNA analysis shows that California’s imperiled desert tortoise actually is a separate species from its cousins elsewhere in the Southwest.

Normally that would be of academic interest. But given disputes over the impact of massive solar power plants on the Mojave Desert population of the desert tortoise, which is listed as a threatened species under state and federal law, the finding could subject those projects to greater scrutiny.

That’s because those animals found in California, Nevada and Utah that have been designated as a separate species – called Agassiz’s desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) after a 19th century biologist – now occupy a much smaller range.

The Agassiz’s desert tortoise’s Mojave Desert home, north and west of the Colorado River, constitutes only 30% percent of the desert tortoise’s previous habitat. The remainder of that range is now home to a new species christened Morafka’s desert tortoise – as a tribute to a California biologist named David J. Morafka – that roams the Sonoran Desert south and east of the Colorado River from Arizona through Mexico.

“This reduction has important implications for the conservation and protection of Gopherus agassizii, which may deserve a higher level of protection,” wrote the biologists who authored the paper, published in the journal ZooKeys. “Whereas species with broad distributions may survive population declines, those that have small distributions are far more likely to become extinct.”

“Given drastic population declines of G. agassizii during the past few decades, it might be endangered,” they added.

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service already manages the Mojave and Sonoran populations separately and a spokeswoman said the new species designations will not change the way the agency analyzes the impact of solar power plants on the Agassiz’s desert tortoise.

“We independently evaluated the Mojave population of desert tortoise and there is no evidence to suggest the species is expected to go extinct, which is the threshold for uplisting to endangered status,” Jeannie Stafford, a public affairs officer in the agency’s Nevada office, said in an email. “We do not anticipate any changes in the way development projects will be evaluated for the Agassiz’s desert tortoise in the future.”

But some environmental groups most likely will press for closer scrutiny of the dozen big solar farms planned for the Mojave.

“We’re seeing some very large solar projects on public lands that are having a very big impact on tortoise populations,” says Lisa Belenky, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, which litigates aggressively on behalf of wildlife and which has been involved in the licensing of solar power plants in California. “The threats have been increasing and the populations decreasing, and based on those factors alone, we have already been considering whether there needs to be an uplifting to endangered species status for the desert tortoise.”

“The new desert tortoise species certainly helps frame those issues even more clearly,” she adds.

Kristin Berry is one of the paper’s authors and a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Southern California who is a leading authority on the desert tortoise. She says the identification of Agassiz’s desert tortoise as a separate species should spur efforts to protect its habitat.

“In terms of conservation biology, when a species’ range is reduced by 70% one looks at what to do so habitat is adequately protected,” says Berry. “It’s a very important issue.”

Morafka’s desert tortoise, meanwhile, currently is not listed as a protected species. The government put the critter on an endangered species candidates list after it determined protection was warranted but precluded by a lack of resources and other animals facing even greater threats.

However, a legal settlement that environmental group WildEarth Guardians struck with the Fish and Wildlife Service in May requires the agency to move the tortoise off the candidates list by 2015.

Desert pipeline would send water to Inland Valley

2011-06-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

Environmental documents for certifying the project expected to be ready within weeks

By Andrew Edwards
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Water providers serving the Inland Valley and other Southern California areas may be able to draw from a new source of water sufficient to supply 100,000 households if plans for a Mojave Desert pipeline pass environmental muster.

The Cadiz Co., headquartered in downtown Los Angeles, wants to build a 42-mile pipeline to carry water from a remote desert aquifer in the Cadiz Valley to the Colorado River Aqueduct to be delivered to the Los Angeles basin.

The Claremont-based Three Valleys Municipal Water District and the San Dimas-based Golden State Water Co. are poised to be among the agencies receiving water from the pipeline, if it is actually built.

"We're always looking for water in other places in case the big earthquake hits," Three Valleys board President Bob Kuhn said.

Three Valleys wholesales water to providers serving customers in east Los Angeles County communities, including Pomona and Claremont.

Kuhn said Three Valleys has an option agreement to buy the water if the project is approved.

Environmental documents for the Cadiz pipeline have yet to be released, although a spokeswoman for the water agency charged with certifying the project said this week they are expected to be ready for review within the next few weeks.

"We're still looking at releasing the draft environmental impact report sometime," said Michelle Miller, spokeswoman for the Santa Margarita Water District.

The Santa Margarita Water District serves south Orange County and has been designated as the lead agency for the project. Its board will be responsible for reviewing and deciding whether to approve Cadiz Co.'s environmental report.

The project could create the equivalent of 745 full-time jobs, according to a consultant.

The Cadiz Co. owns 35,000 acres in the Cadiz Valley, roughly 11 miles southeast of Amboy, once a stopping point for Route 66 travelers.

Cadiz and Bristol dry lakes - and the aquifer that lies below the desert surface - can be found in Cadiz Valley. The landowners currently use the water for lemon groves, vineyards and other crops grown on their Mojave Desert property.

But if Cadiz Co.'s proposal becomes a reality, the company would build a 42-mile pipeline along an existing railroad right-of-way to a place called Rice, near Highway 62, east of Twentynine Palms.

"Why do it? It's sort of like asking, `Why conserve?" said Cadiz Co. President and General Counsel Scott Slater.

The projected construction cost approaches $278 million over a two-year period.

The work could create the equivalent of 593 full-time jobs for those directly working on the pipeline and an additional 152 jobs at businesses supporting Cadiz Co., according to a forecast from Redlands-based economist John Husing, who focuses on the Inland Empire.

"I would guess they (the new hires) would be living in the Victor Valley or Barstow, given where the facility is," Husing said.

The project's $258.5 million second phase would require the construction of a parallel pipeline to recharge, or store excess Colorado River water in the Cadiz Valley aquifer.

Cadiz Co. hired Husing at a $10,000 commission to prepare an economic impact report for the project.

The firm's executives have yet to release the proposal's draft environmental impact report. It is set to be released this summer.

Water From A Stone?

2011-06-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

Cadiz Valley. Southern California's newest source of water? (Photo by Chris Clarke)

Commentary by Chris Clarke
KCET

As Southern California's population grows and water is in ever shorter supply, one Orange County water district is looking to an odd source for more water: the middle of the Mojave Desert.

The Santa Margarita Water District, which provides water services to 150,000 residents and businesses in Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita and adjacent unincorporated areas, is putting together a proposal to import up to 50,000 acre-feet of water into Coastal Southern California each year from the Cadiz Valley, a wind-swept desert valley between Twenty-Nine Palms and Needles. The district plans to release a draft Environmental Impact Review on the project for public comment in late July.

That EIR will almost certainly be scrutinized line-by-line by desert protection activists, some of whom are calling this "the project that would not die."

Santa Margarita's partners in the venture are Cadiz Inc, which owns about 34,000 acres in the Cadiz and Fenner valleys in San Bernardino County, and four other Southern California water companies: Three Valleys Municipal Water District, Golden State Water Company, Jurupa Community Services District and Suburban Water Systems.

Cadiz Inc.'s land lies atop a large aquifer -- an underground reservoir which Cadiz's consultants say may hold between 17 and 34 million acre-feet of water, most of it laid down during the Ice Age. In the project's first stage Cadiz would build 44 miles of pipeline from wells on its property along a railroad right of way to the Colorado River Aqueduct west of the town of Rice. From there the water would head to the Greater Los Angeles Area, and the appropriate amounts apportioned to participating water districts.

Cadiz's selling point for the project is that the water it pumps from the aquifer would otherwise be lost to evaporation. In the words of the company's website,

The Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project is designed to capture and conserve billions of gallons of renewable native groundwater flowing beneath our property in the Cadiz Valley that is currently lost to evaporation at nearby dry lakes. Through the active management of the aquifer system, the Project will create a new, sustainable water supply for Project participants without adversely impacting the aquifer system or the desert environment.

The second stage of the project will involve building a second pipeline to pump "surplus" Colorado River water to the Cadiz Valley, where it would be emptied into "recharge basins" and allowed to percolate into the aquifer, to be pumped out again in dry years. Cadiz states that this phase could provide evaporation-proofed storage of up to a million acre-feet of water, a tempting proposal for Southern California water managers.

If this all gives you a sense of déjà vu, there's a reason for that: this project is a near-copy of one pushed a decade ago by Cadiz in tandem with the Metropolitan Water District. That proposal basically contained the same elements: pumping of aquifer water and storage of the occasional Colorado surplus, and an assertion that the developers could sustainably remove 50,000 acre-feet of water from the aquifer.

Environmentalists shredded that old proposal. Independent hydrologists countered Cadiz's claims about the amount of water the aquifer could spare each year, with one saying:

the estimate of annual recharge used in the Draft EIR/EIS is an order of magnitude too high--it is probably only 5,000-6,000 ac-ft/yr... once development has proceeded for a period of several decades simply stopping the pumping of native groundwater, as implied in the Supplemental EIR/EIR, will not halt the adverse environmental impacts--in other words, the groundwater system once perturbed has sufficient persistence that adverse impacts will persist well beyond 100 years, even though the project is stopped after 50 year or earlier.
Other geologists alleged Cadiz had inflated the sustainable yield of water by a factor of 15.

Drawing down the aquifer would degrade habitat in a number of surrounding protected areas, others pointed out, including the aquifer's headwaters in the Mojave National Preserve, with significant impacts to bighorn sheep, desert tortoise, and animals dependent on the area's small springs. What's more, the older version of the project would have run its pipeline to the aqueduct not along the railroad, but directly through the Iron Mountains, a relatively pristine bit of desert habitat.

Water pollution was also a concern. Not only would pumping saltier water from the Colorado into the aquifer permanently alter the valley's groundwater quality, but the aquifer was found to contain significant amounts of hexavalent Chromium, the same toxic chemical responsible for the public health issues in Hinckley that launched Erin Brockovich's rise to prominence.

For a time in 2001, it looked to desert environmentalists as though the fix was in. Cadiz's controversial founder Keith Brackpool was cozy with California politicos ranging from Gray Davis and Schwarzenegger to Antonio Villaraigosa, a close friend of Brackpool's. Nonetheless, MWD backed out on the deal in 2002, perhaps due to that year's being the dryest year on record for the Colorado River. Why invest millions in a partnership to store surplus water if there is no surplus?

Aside from the alignment of the "conveyance pipeline," the only real difference between the old plan and Cadiz 2.0 would seem to be the claim that any water pumped from the aquifer would have been lost to surface evaporation. This, along with Cadiz's other environmental claims, will likely be scrutinized closely once the draft EIR is available later this summer.

The stakes are rather high. Aquifers can collapse if overdrawn, causing the land to subside and permanently reducing the aquifer's future capacity. A few years of excessive pumping could permanently damage thousands of square miles of the wild Mojave.

Off-roaders and Marines in contention for rugged desert

2011-06-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Corps wants to expand its Twentynine Palms base for major combat exercises, but civilians fear the loss of a popular recreational area.

Off-road vehicles stir up dust in Johnson Valley, where the Marine Corps wants to extend its Twentynine Palms base to accommodate major combat exercises. (John Herrick/CRAWL Magazine)

By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Twentynine Palms — Rough and rocky, Johnson Valley is considered the perfect place to test the mettle of men and their machines.

An estimated 200,000 people a year flock to the desert valley for recreational pursuits: hiking, camping, rock-hounding, star-gazing and a new sport called "geocaching," a treasure hunt using GPS technology. Moviemakers use the desert floor for chase scenes.

But the valley has gained its greatest acclaim in recent years as an untamed, unregulated venue for off-road vehicles. Off-roaders take their Jeeps, motorcycles, dune buggies, ATVs, "rock crawlers" and other souped-up vehicles over, around and through the rills and hills and rocks.

The annual King of the Hammers race, billed as the toughest desert race in the nation, draws more than 20,000 participants and spectators.

"There's not another place in the country where we could hold our race," said Dave Cole, one of the race organizers. "This is our Daytona 500."

The Marine Corps, whose Twentynine Palms base is directly adjacent to Johnson Valley, also likes the valley's challenging terrain — for similar yet different reasons.

The Marine Corps would like to include the land inside the boundaries of its Air-Ground Combat Center as a training area for large-scale, live-fire exercises where three battalions could simultaneously practice assaulting a fixed location. The land is controlled by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Johnson Valley would give the Marine Corps a large-scale training capability it lacks at any of its bases, according to Marine brass. Even in a budget-tightening season when other projects are being dropped or trimmed, the Marine Corps has allocated $60 million for the expansion project.

Gen. James Amos, the commandant, considers the expansion "absolutely essential to providing the requisite training area for preparing Marines to meet the challenges of the future security environment."

The off-roaders look at the valley and see an exciting, irreplaceable place for their sport. Amos looks at the valley and sees a place to provide training that will enhance the "survivability" of Marines in combat.

The off-roaders and the merchants who depend on all the recreationalists are not going down without a fight. When the Marines opened up their expansion proposal for public review in May, more than 25,000 responses were received.

The Marines have offered a compromise: the heart of the Johnson Valley racing area would be available 10 months a year and closed for two months when a major exercise is planned.

But expansion skeptics feel that the dual-use idea would be withdrawn as soon as the first civilian wanders innocently or defiantly into the midst of Marine training or is hurt by ordnance left when the training is over.

The dispute features two sides that, philosophically, are aligned. Both believe in living life on the edge, facing down danger in the desert.

The Marine Corps sent a color guard to this year's King of the Hammers. Off-duty Marines have their own desert racing team. And expansion opponents, many of them military veterans, feel a twinge at opposing the Marines during a time of war.

"It's going to have a devastating effect on recreation," said Ray Pessa, a Yucca Valley activist. "National defense comes first, and if they say they need it, so be it. But I'm not sure they've looked at all the alternatives."

The Marines agree there are other expansion alternatives on the eastern and southern edges of the base but insist that none is as good as Johnson Valley on the west.

The final environmental impact statement is set for completion in early January. The Department of Navy's decision on which, if any, alternative to select is scheduled for April, in time for the issue to be sent to Congress for inclusion in the defense appropriations bill.

Beyond the effect on off-roaders and business owners, Betty Munson, with the Johnson Valley Improvement Assn., sees a loss of the freedom that lures people to the austere and often blisteringly hot desert.

"Johnson Valley is all that is left of the California desert where you can travel without any restrictions, go camping without a fee, go anywhere, any time," Munson said. "There's a lot of freedom out there that people won't have anymore."

Ninety percent of Marines deploying to Afghanistan come to the Twentynine Palms base for live-fire and other training called Mojave Viper. A re-created Afghan village has 1,500 buildings and is populated by up to 1,000 Afghan "role players." Marines are also taught to detect and dodge roadside bombs, the Taliban weapon of choice. Training is continuously tweaked to include lessons learned from the battlefield.

But what the base lacks is space to have three battalions converging on an "enemy" location.

Although the Twentynine Palms base is sprawling — 600,000 acres, compared to 125,000 acres at Camp Pendleton — there are various impediments to having a simultaneous live-fire exercise involving three battalions on the move. Among those impediments are federally protected tortoises.

The tortoise issue annoys the off-roaders. If there were more tortoises in Johnson Valley, that would probably kill the idea of annexing it to the base, said Cole, who loves Johnson Valley so much that he was married on one of its promontories.

"If I was having a tortoise race, that would be seen as valuable," said Cole. "But I'm having a people race, and that's not seen as valuable."

The Marine Corps has been studying expansion of Twentynine Palms for nearly a decade, with each study coming to much the same conclusion: Johnson Valley is the best alternative.

Under the Marine Corps' preferred alternative plan, 108,530 acres of Johnson Valley would be permanently closed to the public. An additional 38,137 acres would be open 10 months a year.

Although the issue involves federally managed land, members of California's Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Commission toured Johnson Valley in late May and, after hearing testimony from all sides, sent a letter to the Marine Corps saying it could not support the expansion plan.

Commission members suggested that the Marines look at sharing one of the spacious bases in California or Nevada belonging to other branches of the military, possibly the Army's Ft. Irwin, the Navy's China Lake, or Edwards Air Force Base. The Marines say that such an agreement would be overly expensive and impractical for a variety of reasons.

Daphne Greene, deputy director of California State Parks, said the Marines are to be complimented for seeking off-roaders' opinions and looking for a compromise. But the inclusion of Johnson Valley in the expansion plan would be too great a loss of a natural asset that Californians have long enjoyed, she said.

"We wouldn't let the Marines take over Yosemite," Greene said.

Desert tortoise comes under fire from 'Sheriff' Biden

2011-06-14T00:30:00.000-07:00

Federally funded website dedicated to reptile "a waste"

There are nearly 2,000 federal .gov domains, according to the White House (AFP/File, Saul Loeb)

AFP

WASHINGTON — As part of the White House's recently launched Campaign to Cut Waste, Vice President Joe Biden says one of his first wasteful spending targets is a website dedicated to the desert tortoise.

Biden, who was named by President Barack Obama to head up the campaign designed to identify and eliminate wasteful federal spending, said Monday that one example of such waste was a federally funded website dedicated to the desert tortoise, a threatened species.

In a message on the White House website entitled, "There's a New Sheriff in Town," Biden addressed potential cuts to spending.

"And I bet you didn't know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I'm sure it's a wonderful species, but we can't afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom," Biden wrote in the message also sent via email to supporters. "It's just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated."

The new campaign comes as the president and Republicans in Congress are engaged in difficult negotiations over the national debt and budget deficit.

There are nearly 2,000 federal .gov domains, according to the White House. Under many of these domains are smaller sites that result in an estimated 24,000 websites, and the White House said the redundancy creates confusion and wastes money.

Another website that drew criticism from the White House was a federal domain devoted to foresters who play the fiddle, but all that remained of www.fiddlinforesters.gov on Monday was a dead link.

"This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we're facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it's a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody," said Biden.

The site identified by Biden, www.deserttortoise.gov, is managed by the Mojave Desert Ecosystem Program, a database about a desert area that spreads into California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

"The Fish and Wildlife Service is committed to saving the taxpayers' money. At the same time, we will continue to work with all agencies involved to protect all endangered species," agency spokeswoman Vanessa Kauffman told AFP.

Dry Southwest slurps up surging water supply

2011-06-13T16:52:00.000-07:00

Colorado River, Lake Mead recover; Calif., Ariz., Nev. keep rationing at bay

Las Vegas gets nearly 90 percent of its drinking water from Lake Mead, which had been shrinking over the last decade.

By CRISTINA SILVA
The Associated Press

LAS VEGAS -- Communities below the snow-capped mountains of the West are bracing against the swelling rivers and flooding that come with the spring thaw. In the drought-ravaged cities of the Southwest, however, the deluge is cause for celebration.

There will be more water for Nevada, California and Arizona this year, sparing them from having to take emergency measures, such as water rationing, for at least another three years.

The three states can thank the heavy and, in some cases, unprecedented snowpack in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. The ripe June sun is sending snowmelt into the Colorado River, its tributaries and Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir located outside Las Vegas.

"This is obviously really welcome, great news," said Jeffrey Kightlinger, CEO of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million people. "It's been a godsend."

The water comes at a crucial time for the Southwest. After 10 years of receding water levels that threatened a regional water shortage, this year's melting snows are expected to grow Lake Mead, the chief source of water for the three states and Mexico, by 40 feet or more.

The jubilation in California, Arizona and Nevada is not a case of wishing neighbors ill, only the reality of nature's polarizing impact in the water-poor West. Brutal, prolonged winters in the north produce robust, life-giving water flows in the south.

That cycle had been disrupted for more than a decade as one dry winter after another emptied Lake Mead, which sits on the Nevada-Arizona border and was formed in 1935 after the construction of Hoover Dam. Mead and Lake Powell upstream are the major water storage facilities in the system.

Roughly 96 percent of Mead's water comes from melted snow in the upper Colorado River basin states: Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming.

By November 2010, the water in the reservoir had fallen to 1,081 elevation feet, a historic low and a mere six feet above the point that would trigger a large reduction of Arizona and Nevada's share of the Colorado River.

If that trend had continued, Arizona and Nevada could have had to begin water rationing this year.

That outlook changed during late winter as snowstorms blanketed Western mountains from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada.

By June, there was more cumulative snow than ever recorded in the upper basin states that feed into the Colorado River, said Kevin Werner, a hydrologist for the National Weather Service's Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.

As a result, Lake Mead is expected to grow to up to 1,126 feet by December. At full stage, the lake registers at more than 1,200 elevation feet.

For public water utilities, the engorged river will buy officials more time to plan for the possibility of a future without Lake Mead, a nightmarish prospect across the Southwest. Some researchers believe long-term drought, climate change and an ever increasing demand for water could leave the lake dry by 2021.

In California, water leaders are promoting conservation programs and exploring other water sources.

In Nevada, Las Vegas gets nearly 90 percent of its drinking water from the lake. Officials are seeking a permit to build a 285-mile-long pipeline project to import water from aquifers in northern Nevada and Utah. The project has encountered stiff opposition from conservationists and rural leaders against tapping northern groundwater to fuel more growth in southern Nevada.

Meanwhile, construction problems have stalled a $700-million effort to build a new pipe into Mead.

The huge snowmelt has somewhat eased some of the pressure driving both projects, said Scott Huntley, spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. "This is the first significant elevation in 10 years," he said. "It provides us a greater cushion to fall back on."

The good news has spread quickly.

In rural Arizona, the new water means farmers won't have to reduce agricultural acreage.

"It means we've dodged a bullet," said Kevin Rogers, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau, the state's farming lobby. "That water is the lifeblood of the West."

At the Lake Mead National Recreation Area bordering Hoover Dam, park officials are preparing for new visitors and urging concessionaires to move their marinas, floating restaurants and boat rental stands to accommodate the transforming shore.

"Water has already started to rise a foot a week," said park spokesman Andrew Munoz. "We are looking at three good years of access to the water."

The National Park Service also is looking forward to replenishing its purse. Every 20-foot drop of water during the past decade has cost the agency roughly $6 million in renovations as roads and utilities were extended to match the receding shoreline.

"That's hundreds of thousands of dollars that they won't have to spend this year," Munoz said.

Gail Kaiser's family owns the Las Vegas Boat Harbor and Lake Mead Marina outside Las Vegas. For more than 10 years, the family has repeatedly released its anchors and moved the marinas to stay attached to the receding shoreline.

This year, however, they expect to move the marinas up at least five times through August to keep pace with the rising water.

"It is always a good thing to have more water," she said. "People go, 'Wow, they are getting water there. Let's go out and see what the lake is doing.'"

Boaters forced to confront muddy beaches and newly uncovered islands as they toured Lake Mead in recent years are also watching the rising water with delight.

Rick Brodeen has been boating on Lake Mead since 1972. His friends crashed into unmarked islands as the lake began to empty. The beaches became less popular for day trippers as more and more rocks emerged. It was dangerous and depressing, Brodeen said.

"I've been watching this water go down for years," he said. "To have the water going up is a lot better."

Proposed bill would re-open lands to off-roading and mining

2011-06-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

More than 3 million California acres unsuitable for wilderness are still unavailable for public use

Soda Mountains Wilderness Study Area photo by John Dittli

By KAREN JONAS
Desert Dispatch

WASHINGTON, D.C. • A bill proposed by a California congressman would allow nearly three million acres of land — currently designated as being unsuitable for wilderness — within the state to be opened for multiple uses, such as off-roading and mining.

The Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act of 2011 — H.R. 1581 — was proposed by Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-22) in April and seeks to put control of lands designated as being unsuitable for wilderness — which are lands that were studied for wilderness designation but never classified as wilderness areas by Congress — back in the hands of local agencies, such as the local offices of the Bureau of Land Management, according to a statement recently released by McCarthy.

The bill’s language states that the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 left BLM lands that could not be classified as wilderness, yet are not being used. McCarthy stated that 6.7 million acres of BLM land throughout the U.S. are classified as unsuitable for wilderness.

About 36 million acres of national forest lands were also never designated as wilderness, yet have restrictions on public access and use, according to McCarthy.

The bill is sponsored mainly by Republicans, including Rep. Buck McKeon, who represents Barstow as part of the 25th District. There are currently 22 cosponsors for the bill.

McCarthy stated that more than three million acres in California are unavailable for public use.

“This means many rural and outlying communities that depend on tourism and recreation cannot maximize the potential of the public lands in their area,” said McCarthy.

For local off-roader Mike McCain, the bill is a step in the right direction of opening public lands for everyone’s use.

“The land has to be multi-use; it won’t be excluding anybody,” said McCain. “If it’s open for one group, it should be open for all groups. That’s the only fair way.”

Drawing water from desert

2011-06-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

Pipeline may create 745 jobs and make lake bed a source of air pollution

Lesley Thornburg from Cadiz Company walks through the vineyard at the Cadiz Farms, 12 miles southeast of Amboy. The company wants to build a pipeline that might create 745 full-time jobs. (Al Cuizon/Staff Photographer)

Andrew Edwards, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

Cadiz Dry Lake, CA -- Southern California water providers may be able to draw from a new source of water sufficient to supply 100,000 households if plans for a Mojave Desert pipeline pass environmental muster.
The project could create the equivalent of 745 full-time jobs, according to a consultant.

The Cadiz Co., headquartered in downtown Los Angeles, wants to build a 42-mile pipeline to carry water from a remote desert aquifer in the Cadiz Valley to the Colorado River Aqueduct.

"Why do it? It's sort of like asking, `Why conserve?" said Cadiz Co. President and General Counsel Scott Slater.

Letting the water flow to the aqueduct would make it possible to provide a new source of water to providers serving the region, including the Claremont-based Three Valleys Municipal Water District and the San Dimas-based Golden State Water Co.

"We're always looking for water in other places in case the big earthquake hits," Three Valleys board President Bob Kuhn said.

Three Valleys wholesales water to providers serving customers in east Los Angeles County communities including Pomona and Claremont.

Kuhn said Three Valleys has an option agreement to buy the water if the project is approved.

The Cadiz Co. owns 35,000 acres in the Cadiz Valley. Roughly 11 miles southeast of Amboy, it was once a stopping point for Route 66 travelers.

Cadiz and Bristol dry lakes - and the aquifer that lies below the desert surface - can be found in Cadiz Valley. The landowners currently use the water for lemon groves, vineyards and other crops grown on their Mojave Desert property.

But if Cadiz Co.'s proposal becomes a reality, the company would build a 42-mile pipeline along an existing railroad right-of-way to a place called Rice, which is near Highway 62, well east of Twentynine Palms.

The projected construction cost approaches $278million over a two-year period.

The work could create the equivalent of 593 full-time jobs for those directly working on the pipeline and an additional 152 jobs at businesses supporting Cadiz Co., according to a forecast from Redlands-based economist John Husing, who focuses on the Inland Empire.

"I would guess they (the new hires) would be living in the Victor Valley or Barstow, given where the facility is," Husing said.

The project's $258.5 million second phase would require the construction of a parallel pipeline to recharge Cadiz Valley's aquifer with Colorado River water.

Cadiz Co. hired Husing at a $10,000 commission to prepare an economic impact report for the project.

The firm's executives have yet to release the proposal's draft environmental impact report. It is set to be released this summer.

"We're going to do a very careful review of the draft EIR and figure out how this proposal that deals with water and affecting special places in the desert, like the Mojave National Preserve," said Seth Shteir, desert field representative for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Shteir's group opposed the Cadiz Co.'s water plans in 2002. He said it wants to review the environmental impact report before taking a position now on the project.

The association's concerns include what may happen if diversion of water away from the aquifer below Cadiz Valley makes Cadiz Dry Lake so dry that dusty particulate matter collects on the lake bed and becomes a potential source of air pollution.

Cadiz has conducted considerable research and is confident its environmental report will withstand scrutiny, Slater said.

The Santa Margarita Water District, which serves south Orange County, has been designated as the lead agency for the project. As such, its board will be responsible for reviewing and deciding whether to approve Cadiz Co.'s environmental report.

Santa Margarita officials are also counting on receiving water from the proposed pipeline, said the agency's general manager, John J. Schatz.

"We're looking at this to balance our water supply portfolio," he said.

Obama Administration Backs Away From Wilderness Plan

2011-06-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

Wilderness Society president "deeply disappointed" at the decision

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar at left as Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey speaks about an initiative that would allow the BLM to designate and protect wilderness areas on Thursday, Dec. 23, 2010 outside of REI in Denver. (AP)

FoxNews.com

Washington, D.C. -- The Obama administration is dropping a controversial plan to restore eligibility for federal wilderness protection to millions of acres of undeveloped land in the West after the GOP-led House put up a strong fight.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a memo Wednesday that his agency will not designate any of those public lands as "wild lands." Instead Salazar said officials will work with members of Congress to develop recommendations for managing millions of acres of undeveloped land in the West. A copy of the memo was obtained by The Associated Press.

Salazar's decision reverses an order issued in December to reverse a Bush-era policy that opened some Western lands to commercial development.

A budget deal approved by Congress prevented the Interior Department from spending money to implement the wilderness policy. GOP lawmakers complained that the plan would circumvent Congress' authority and could be used to declare a vast swath of public land off-limits to oil-and-gas drilling.

Republican governors in Utah, Alaska and Wyoming, filed suit to block the plan, saying it would hurt their state's economies by taking federal lands off the table for mineral production and other uses.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, hailed Salazar's reversal of what he called a "misguided" policy that would have harmed Utah's economy.

"Since the majority of land in Utah is owned by the federal government, it is critically important to strike a balance between the needs of our local communities and the protection of public lands that truly do have wilderness characteristics rather than pandering to environmental extremists," Hatch said. "Today's announcement is a positive step toward restoring that balance."

Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Colo., a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, also cheered the announcement, calling it a "positive."

"I'm glad to see the administration move in the right direction on this," he said. "We all share the common bond of loving our public lands, and ensuring access to them is important. We will continue to be vigilant and make sure that future designations of public lands are made by consensus, not by executive fiat."

William Meadows, president of The Wilderness Society, said he was deeply disappointed at the decision, which he said ignores the Bureau of Land Management's obligation to protect wilderness values.

"Without strong and decisive action from the Department of Interior, wilderness will not be given the protection it is due, putting millions of acres of public lands at risk," Meadows said.

Bob Abbey, director of the land management bureau, said the December directive would not have required protection for any particular areas. Designation as wild land could only be made after public comments and review and would not necessarily prohibit motor vehicle use or the staking of new mining claims, Abbey said.

The measure blocking implementation of the wild lands policy was included in a budget bill for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

The New Sublime

2011-06-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

Artists working at the Salton Sea capture the beauty and decay with a fresh perspective

Christopher Landis, North Shore Yacht Club Pool, 1994, digital print, 30x40 inches

Ann Japenga
Palm Springs Life

You drive in from Interstate 10 or Palm Springs, turn south at Mecca, and pass fields of peppers and the old artists’ colony called Desert Camp. When you see the first glint of blue in the distance, your spirits likely will lift. A giant lake in the desert is a miracle in light, space, and water. Enjoy that first glance at the Salton Sea.

What you see and feel next will vary. If you were raised on Sierra Club calendars and Ansel Adams panoramas, you might focus on the crumpled Mecca Hills and the big vistas of the Santa Rosa Mountains across the sea. If you grew up with Love Canal and Chernobyl, you might zero in on abandoned trailers, dying palms, and fish bones.

For decades, artists have come to the sea to put their stamp on its waters. In April, the Salton Sea History Museum in the restored North Shore Yacht Club opened its inaugural exhibition, Valley of the Ancient Lake: Works Inspired by the Salton Sea.

Curated by Deborah Martin (with historical works and memorabilia provided by Jennie Kelly), the exhibition features 10 artists who focus their work on the sea. To contextualize their paintings, drawings, and photographs, it’s helpful to know they follow the path of several generations of artists.

The first artists influenced by the sea lived around its shore and made art from the land itself. Indians carved petroglyphs in the boulders and scratched pictures in the tufa of the ancient shoreline. Native American potters made ollas from the milky-white clay cradling Agua Grande (an Indian name for the sea).

Next, expedition artists accompanied railroad surveys. In 1853, artist Charles Koppel came through with geologist William Blake and made etchings of Travertine Point and the ancient shoreline across the sea from the yacht club. For a while, the inland lake was called Blake’s Sea.

After the expedition artists, California Impressionist painters brought the style of capturing light that spread from France to the U.S. East Coast and finally to California and the desert in the early 1900s. There were no sunken trailers then, but still the desert was foreign to artists from greener places. Some saw bleakness and desolation. Others — such as Fred Grayson Sayre — saw paradise. Art collector Allan Seymour was so inspired by Sayre’s vision of “the Turquoise Sea” that he bought a home at North Shore.

As Impressionism faded, a lively and little-known era in Salton Sea art began. In 1940, one of the great Western artists, Maynard Dixon, lived in a shack along the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks near North Shore. He made a sketch for his painting Destination Unknown with fellow artist John Hilton posing as a hobo. Painters Jimmy Swinnerton and Clyde Forsythe visited him at the shack he called Desert Camp, as did Indian Wells artist Carl Bray and Desert Magazine Editor Randall Henderson.

Los Angeles Times columnist Ed Ainsworth bought property at North Shore and built a housing development known as Palm Island Estates, which eventually found Hilton, Swinnerton, Forsythe, Orpha Klinker, and Bill Bender congregating for his makeshift salon. Ainsworth’s 1960 book Painters of the Desert remains the classic on early desert painters.

By the time Ainsworth died in 1968, the open landscape had given way to tract housing and freeways. Flooding from storms damaged the yacht club jetty and submerged buildings along the shoreline. Agricultural runoff polluted the sea and repelled tourists. The increasing salinity of the water gummed up boats’ engines, and water-skiers decamped for the Colorado River. The yacht club became an emblem of decay. For a growing number of Americans, their only exposure to the Salton Sea came from Goth fashion photos taken at the pigeon-infested, graffiti-scarred, busted-up yacht club.

As the land changed, a new wave of artists tackled the degradation head-on. In the 1970s, the New Topographics photographers declared “an end to romantic nature.” Photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Balz, and others influenced young artists and photographers nationwide to turn toward the man-mauled, nonidealized landscape.

Valley of the Ancient Lake showcases the traditional, apocalyptic, and everything in between. Martin, a realist painter, places ruined buildings within luminous landscapes, while Eric Merrell works his canvases in the Early California tradition.

Beautifully tragic photographs by Christopher Landis, Kim Stringfellow, and Bill Leigh Brewer long to save the sea, while interventionist Cristopher Cichocki says his images of DayGlo-painted dead fish help bring forth “a new awareness of man and nature in conflict.”

Seymour found plein air artist Andrew Dickson painting one day on a ridge near his North Shore home and invited him to dinner. That’s how glad he was to see a traditional landscape painter at the Salton Sea. (Dickson has been coming to North Shore to visit his grandparents since age 7; his grandmother still lives there.)

Some art critics have foretold the dawning of a New Sublime, a return to the pastoral vision of America’s early landscape painters but with a contemporary edge we haven’t even thought of yet.

It comes back to that longing for the sea. If their longing is pure and sustained, the artists you see in this exhibition might be the ones to accomplish what politicians and environmentalists have so far been unable to achieve: to dream back Blake’s Sea, dream back Agua Grande.

Salton Sea From the North Shore, 2011

Mary-Austin Klein, oil on Dura-Lar mounted on board, 10x34 inches

Information: http://www.saltonseamuseum.org/

The Old Spanish Trail, Explained

2011-05-26T16:54:00.000-07:00

New Mexico to Southern California

Old Spanish Trail (in red). (National Park Service)

by Nathan Masters
KCET

Although Southern California today is a region teeming with millions, for much of its history it was a remote outpost of the vast Spanish Empire. Nearly 227 years passed between Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo's first exploration of the California coast in 1542 and Gaspar de Portolá's establishment of the Presidio of San Diego in 1769. Then, for another sixty years, Southern California grew in relative isolation from the rest of Hispanic civilization. Finally, in 1829, an intrepid merchant opened a trade route—today known as the Old Spanish Trail—between Los Angeles and Santa Fe, creating Southern California's first overland link with the older Spanish settlements of New Mexico.

From June 2-5, historians, archivists, and representatives from government agencies and the Hispanic and Native American communities will gather in Pomona at the 2011 Old Spanish Trail Association annual conference to explore the history of the trail in California.

In the late nineteenth century, hundreds of miles of unforgiving terrain and harsh climate divided Southern California from New Mexico, but both stood to profit from a direct trade route. Alta California then formed, along with the province of New Mexico, the northern boundary of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The recently-colonized Spanish territory boasted fine natural harbors in San Francisco and San Diego. But with its location at the northern extreme of the Spanish Empire, and surrounded by inhospitable desert to the east and southeast, Southern California was effectively isolated from the political and cultural center of Mexico City to the south.

To the east, the older Spanish province of New Mexico, first settled in 1598, offered California integration with the burgeoning United States and the Mexican heartland via established overland trade routes. For Southern California's rancheros, New Mexico also represented an untapped market for the region's abundant supply of horses and mules. From the point of view of landlocked New Mexico, a trade route to Southern California represented not only a potential market for Santa Fe's serapes and other handmade goods, but also a connection to foreign markets via California's ports.

Almost as soon as the first Spanish settlements arose in California, efforts were made to bridge the chasm and link the two provinces. A team of Franciscan missionaries left Santa Fe for California in 1776, but made it only as far as Utah Lake, near the present-day city of Provo.

In 1826, American fur trapper and explorer Jedediah Smith blazed a trail from present-day Utah to the Mojave Desert. After a clash with hostile Mohave Indians, Smith met two Tongva guides who offered to take his expedition to Mission San Gabriel, near Los Angeles. The guides led Smith along the intermittent Mohave River and over the San Bernardino Mountains near the Cajon Pass. Smith's party arrived at the mission on November 27, where they were warmly received by the missionaries, as depicted in the scene below.

Three years later, Santa Fe merchant Antonio Armijo led the first successful caravan from Santa Fe to Southern California, combining Smith's route with portions of the Franciscans' 1776 path to Utah to open what would later be called the Old Spanish Trail. In doing so, Armijo had established an important link between California and New Mexico, now the northern flanks of the newly-independent Mexican Republic.

Elizabeth von Till Warren, a historian of the Old Spanish Trail, writes of the new route's effect:

News of the opening of trade with California resulted in immediate commerce between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. With a few exceptions, pack trains made annual treks between New Mexico and California, bringing woven Mexican products to California, which lacked sheep, and bartering them for horses and mules, scarce in New Mexico.

The trail carried mule-trains over the Cajon Pass, then west through Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, and El Monte, to the region's major settlements at Mission San Gabriel and Los Angeles. There the traders unloaded their goods, many of which were sold at the Los Angeles Plaza.

The increased commerce hid a dark and ugly side to the trail's establishment, according to von Till Warren:

Raids for Indian slaves became common, with victims sold at either end of the trail despite official condemnation of the practice. The traffic in human beings reverberated among the peoples who lived along the trail for many years longer than the caravans plied their trade.

The trail remained an important trade route for several years until, shortly after the American conquest of California, several competing routes comprised of wagon roads were opened. The Old Spanish Trail, which allowed only for pack animals, soon fell into disuse.

Today, monuments mark the trail's path through the Southland. In Upland, the Madonna of the Trail statue overlooks the route once taken by Santa Fe-bound traders. The monument, dedicated by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1929, was one of twelve placed along the National Old Trails Road, which stretched from New York City to Los Angeles. In the Cajon Pass, an obelisk-shaped monument, dedicated in 1917, commemorates the early pioneers who traveled between Southern California and points east.

The trail's historical significance was further recognized in 2002, when an act of Congress, passed unanimously by both houses and signed by President George W. Bush, designated the corridor as the Old Spanish National Historic Trail and placed the historic route under the supervision of the National Park Service.

Marines invade Johnson Valley

2011-05-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

JUDI BOWERS
Big Bear Grizzly

Johnson Valley -- Off-road and outdoor enthusiasts are doing their best to prevent losing the largest open area in the country to the Marine Corps.

Johnson Valley is thousands of acres bordered by the San Bernardino Mountains, Lucerne Valley, Yucca Valley and the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. The Marine Corps states that Twentynine Palms is the only location in the country with the potential to expand the land area to meet training requirements for marine expeditionary brigades.

What that means is taking over approximately 168,000 acres of open land now known as the Johnson Valley Off-Highway Vehicle Area.

“I don’t like it,” says Quinn Thomas, owner of All J Jeep products in Big Bear Lake. The off-road enthusiast says there are serious safety concerns with the proposal as well as the significant loss of recreation land. “There aren’t many places left to go,” Thomas says.

May 26 is the end of the public comment period on the draft environmental impact statement. Thomas and other off-road and outdoor recreational enthusiasts are among the thousands who have submitted comments and urge others to do the same. Ray Pessa of Yucca Valley, who is a member of the Friends of Giant Rock, says the Marine Corps expansion will have a huge impact on the off-roading community. Friends of Giant Rock is an off-roading club in the high desert.

Alternative 6 is the preferred option by the Marine Corps. It leaves about 80,000 acres for recreational uses, according to information provided by the Marine Corps. About 44 percent of the land is available 10 months of the year.

The proposal calls for closing a majority of Johnson Valley permanently for use by the Marine Corps. Another section on the north side remains open while another parcel on the south corner will be used by the Marines about 48 days a year. The remainder of the time it will be available to the public.

That has Pessa and Thomas concerned. They question how the public knows there is nothing left behind from the live-fire exercises. They want guarantees no live ordinance is left before the public uses the area.

Additionally, there is no barrier between the public and Marine land, Pessa says. Fences are set up to protect wildlife, but not the public he says.

Pessa says he is also concerned that once an area is taken away, even though it’s promised to be a shared use, the public won’t get it back. He says off-road and other recreation activities will be crammed into a smaller area, which will lead to injuries and accidents.

More than 90 percent of the Marines that deploy to combat train in Twentynine Palms. Marines must train at a high state to be ready to respond to crises anywhere in the world. The expansion would provide space for a full scale exercise to be conducted twice a year for 24 continuous days during each cycle.

Pessa is torn. “I want them to have the best training they can get,” Pessa says of the Marine Corps. He would prefer the expansion went east instead of west as proposed.

Alternative 3 is preferred by off-road enthusiasts, which expands the base to the east, but was rejected in favor of Alternative 6. After several scoping meetings held in 2008-09, the Marine Corps responded by developing Alternative 6.

Comments on the Draft EIS are due by May 26. Comments can be made online at www.marines.mil/unit/29palms/las. A copy of the EIS is available online, along with maps and other information on the proposal.

Pessa says Johnson Valley is the largest public land area still open to the public. It’s a true wilderness, where you can go get lost and experience the desert. “I hate to lose it,” Pessa says.

Government tramples on citizens as it seizes desert

2011-05-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

By RICHARD CROWE
The Press-Enterprise Opinion

For decades, the Sierra Club and environmental groups like it have successfully eliminated many uses they have perceived as inappropriate in the California desert by pushing for preservation in the halls of Congress. The advocacy and resulting congressional designations are arrogant and bad public policy.

Certainly, 50 years ago the desert needed new, science-based management to address burgeoning motorcycle use.

However, the cumulative effects of congressional designations, along with environmentalist-sponsored lawsuits and species listings under the Endangered Species Act, have decimated many desert uses, gutted the Bureau of Land Management's 1980 California Desert Conservation Area plan and make a mockery of congressional mandates that the bureau wisely manage public lands for an array of uses and protection of natural resources.

Users of public lands were unfairly and unnecessarily hurt, livestock grazing and mining being the worst hit, and the economic values lost are sorely missed in these tough economic times.

And, to top it off, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced her California Desert Protection Act earlier this year ("Desert protections sought," Jan. 26). This leads me to wonder: How much protection is enough?

Perspective is needed to better appreciate this question. I offer the following analysis, which reviews 80 years of desert use history.

For this purpose, the area of the desert is the 1976 congressionally-designated California Desert Conservation Area, 25 million acres in size.

It is essentially the entire California desert excluding the Owens Valley.

By 1930, 25 percent of the desert had become private land, mostly towns and farms in the Antelope, Apple, Coachella, Mojave River, Palo Verde and Imperial valleys. The remaining 75 percent, mostly federal public lands, was little used and essentially had no management or use restrictions.

The Bureau of Land Management's did not even exist then. It did not come into existence until 1946.

By 1976, 25 percent of the desert was still private and 25 percent was now restricted to military use or designated as state and national park lands. This left 50 percent remaining for limited public use.

When Congress established the California Desert Conservation Area, it directed the Bureau of Land Management to develop a management plan for this remaining 50 percent.

After an exhaustive effort involving the public, as well as local, state, and federal agencies and science groups, the Bureau of Land Management completed the 1980 California Desert Conservation Area plan, which placed this land into four management zones. These zones designated the degree to which the land could be used and the protections that would be required.

The most restrictive zone it designated as wilderness. Wilderness zones made development off-limits, and, with a few exceptions, basically limited use to foot traffic.

So out of the remaining 50 percent of land for public use, 2.1 million acres, or 8 percent, was set aside as wilderness. This left 42 percent for other uses.

The Bureau of Land Management began enacting its plan, though due to legal reasons, it had to get congressional backing for its designation of the wilderness zones.

But, believing the amount of proposed wilderness to be too small, and having disdain for science-based multiple-use management, environmental groups pushed for more restrictions, lobbying Congress to make more desert off-limits.

In 1994, Congress passed legislation, the California Desert Protection Act. In it, Congress drastically increased the amount of land in the wilderness-zone category.

When everything shook out, 25 percent was now designated as wilderness and 25 percent designated for other uses.

By 2007, the bureau was forced to make a set of amendments to the California Desert Conservation Area Plan due to expanded endangered-species listings and lawsuits.

Now, species-protection areas were placed within the remaining 25 percent still open to public use. These species-protection areas severely limited use, and, in essence, cut this remaining 25 percent in half to 12.5 percent.

Today, this 12.5 percent is under threat of further restrictions. The still-churning environmental groups are ironically not happy with recent solar and wind proposals for the desert and has urged more land be placed off-limits.

New Legislation

They are pinning their hopes on Feinstein's legislation, which would designate that 1 million more acres be named a national monument, 250,000 acres be placed in a wilderness zone and 74,000 acres be added to our state's national parks.

If this bill passes, the 12.5 percent of land open for limited public use would shrink to 10 percent.

As you can see, through the years, the bureau's original multiple-use management mandate in the desert has been emasculated by an environmental agenda and Congress, and yet the assault on our right to use our lands continues.

So, back to the introductory question: Will there ever be enough land preserved in the minds of environmental groups? Likely not.

As long as uses proposed are not to their liking, there will never be enough.

Richard Crowe, who is a resident of Beaumont, worked for the Bureau of Land Management for 33 years, 29 of them within the California Desert Conservation Area, dealing with a wide range of multiple-use management issues.

Water plan being developed for Mojave National Preserve

2011-05-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

Restored game guzzler near Goffs, March 25, 2009. (Chris S. Ervin)

By KAREN JONAS, staff writer
Barstow Desert Dispatch

MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE • The National Park Service is seeking public input for a plan to manage water sources in the Mojave National Preserve.

The plan will focus on what will be done about abandoned above-ground water sources — such as abandoned wells, former stock ponds, springs, previous development by ranchers, and artificial water sources for wildlife that are already in use, said Linda Slater, public information officer for the Mojave National Preserve. The proposed plan also includes water sources below ground.

Slater said that many of the ranchers who previously used the preserve are now gone and have left behind many of their abandoned water structures. The preserve needed to develop a comprehensive plan so it already has a game plan when it comes to water issues instead of resolving issues on a case-by-case basis.

The plan will most likely include at least four alternatives developed with the help of public comment — including taking no action on the water sources, said Slater.

The large water sources mainly affect bighorn sheep and mule deer, said Slater. The artificial water sources were mainly intended for bighorn sheep and are currently maintained by a bighorn sheep conservationist group, said Slater.

A study was started in 2008 to determine the effect on mule deer when water sources were opened for them, said Slater. Researchers would shut off water sources and turn them on again over periods of time. They fitted mule deer with radio tracking collars to determine their location when the water sources were either off or on. The study is still underway and Slater did not have preliminary results on Friday.

The plans to possibly open up more water sources to wildlife is complex and the preserve wants to make sure that it isn’t locked into anything that would lead to problems, said Slater. She said the scientist who is leading the study on the mule deer wants the plan to be flexible, so it can be adapted as more information is gathered on the complex relationship between water and wildlife.

It will most likely be months before the plan is put into place, said Slater. There will be a number of scoping meetings in nearby areas, including one in Barstow this June. Public comments on the plan will be accepted until July 11 and an environmental impact statement will be developed after the public comment period is over.

For more information on the plan, visit http://bit.ly/mchHE3

Solar threat

2011-05-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

Desert Tortoise Estimate Undercuts ESA Listing

Opinion
Riverside Press-Enterprise

The discovery of far more desert tortoises than expected near a planned solar power plant in the Mojave Desert should prompt federal officials to rethink the project. And the incident should spur federal officials to require independent environmental studies before bulldozers roll on future solar projects.

Last week, a U.S. Bureau of Land Management assessment found the $2.1 billion BrightSource Energy Co. project near Primm, Nev., would disturb up to 3,000 tortoises and kill as many as 700 young ones. That far exceeds an estimate of 32 of the threatened species at the site -- a number derived from studies commissioned by the developer.

After biologists relocated 39 tortoises -- the maximum allowed -- BLM officials last month ordered BrightSource to stop work on two-thirds of the 5.6-square-mile site. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials will decide soon if completing the second and third phases of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System -- which would nearly double the amount of solar electricity produced in the country -- would jeopardize the species.

The clean energy generated by this project is no excuse for federal officials to allow shoddy surveys that underestimate the tortoise population. A developer rushing to qualify for hundreds of millions in federal "stimulus" funding is hardly an objective source about issues that could obstruct construction. Federal officials should have required an independent biological survey before grading and construction work began in October. And that approach should be standard for the numerous solar projects now proposed for desert land.

In this case, the sheer number of the animals that would be killed or disturbed by the solar plant justifies a significant downsizing -- eliminating one or both of the last two phases. Federal officials could have avoided such backtracking had they had the right information before BrightSource broke ground.

Wildlife officials are likely under political pressure to let the developer proceed with much of the project. But even a compromise such as relocating large numbers of the animals would be highly risky. In 2008, the U.S. Army suspended a tortoise relocation effort at Fort Irwin after about 90 of the 556 tortoises moved died, mostly killed by coyotes.

The Mojave Desert, with endless sunny days, is not a bad place for solar power plants. But federal officials need to do a better job of surveying the native wildlife before construction starts. Green projects should not, ironically, degrade the very environment they are meant to help sustain.

Bill to protect desert backed by once-fierce foes

2011-05-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

Carolyn Lochhead,
San Francisco Chronicle Washington Bureau

Washington -- In 1994, a rookie lawmaker named Dianne Feinstein pushed through the largest national parks and wilderness bill ever - by a single vote on the last day before Republicans took control of Congress - protecting 8.5 million acres of the California desert against the wishes of many who lived there.

Seventeen years later, many of those who warned that the California Desert Protection Act would sacrifice their way of life to an environmentalist utopia have changed sides, becoming allies in Feinstein's quest to create one of the biggest environmental legacies in California history: a new bill to protect 1.165 million more acres ringing the national parks at Death Valley and Joshua Tree and the Mojave National Preserve.

"Is it going to pass tomorrow anywhere?" Feinstein said. "No. Am I going to cease and desist? NO!"

When it comes to the desert, "She's just intense," said Shannon Eddy, executive director of the Large-Scale Solar Association. "She's persistent. She's very formidable."

With Republicans again in control of the House, Feinstein's former foes now count on her to protect their off-road vehicle playgrounds and block efforts to build giant solar plants in the desert.

"There has been a 180-degree turnabout in perception and attitude," said Gerald Freeman, owner of the Nipton Hotel near the Mojave Preserve. Freeman said tourism and a national park "prestige factor" has replaced the view that "environmentalists have stolen our land."

Huge ecosystem

For environmentalists, the three giant national parks of the California desert offer a rare last chance to save an intact ecosystem on nature's grand scale.

By creating buffers and filling in critical wildlife corridors, the California Desert Protection Act of 2011 would link the three parks with the desert ecosystem rather than land parcels in mind, said David Lamfrom, desert program manager for the National Parks and Conservation Association.

The Mojave is under pressure. Rivaling the Sahara in solar intensity and tantalizingly close to Los Angeles, the Mojave is prime territory for solar plants that can cover as much as 8 square miles. The Marine Corps wants to add 262 square miles to its base at Twentynine Palms (San Bernardino County). More than 8 million people visited the desert last year.

Just north of Baker (San Bernardino County), the Dumont Dunes on a single weekend can attract as many as 40,000 off-road enthusiasts, said Susan Sorrells of Shoshone (Inyo County), whose family has lived in the desert for four generations.

"Without this legislation we could lose the scenic and ecological landscapes that make the desert unique," said Paul Spitler, associate director of wilderness campaigns for the Wilderness Society. "This is a unique part of world - not just of California and the nation - but of the world."

Last month, third-ranking House Republican Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield fired a warning shot, introducing legislation to roll back millions of acres of wilderness designations, using the same arguments of 1994 that public lands should be open to multiple uses, including logging, grazing, mining and presumably renewable energy.

Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands (San Bernardino County), who fought the 1994 act and gave the Mojave Preserve $1 to operate in 1995, "has repeatedly expressed his concern about expanding government control and ownership of desert lands," his spokesman Jim Specht said.

But two Republicans whose districts would be directly affected - Reps. Howard "Buck" McKeon and Mary Bono Mack - while neutral on Feinstein's bill, teamed with Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to set aside new California wilderness in 2009. Another Southern California Republican, Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), this year proposed his own wilderness bill.

A battle-scarred Feinstein has changed tactics since inheriting the original desert legislation from the late Democrat Alan Cranston. She and her allies have spent years laboriously building consensus among rival desert users, staving off the range-war atmosphere of 1994.

Feinstein would give off-road vehicle users their first-ever congressionally protected playgrounds. She has convinced the Marine Corps to share the land it wants with off-roaders for 10 months of the year.

Some of Feinstein's fiercest former local foes now revile the prospect of solar projects allowed on "multiple use" land.

"We ought to put this solar stuff on rooftops before we fill up the public lands in the desert with these god-awful utility-scale contraptions," said Chuck Bell, a vocal opponent of the original parks act and president of the Lucerne Valley Economic Development Association.

Ex-foes back Feinstein

Local GOP officials, who once protected strip mines, count on ecotourism to fill their tax coffers. Barstow, a San Bernardino County community that was once a hotbed of the anti-park insurgency, has endorsed Feinstein's bill along with more than 100 organizations and businesses, including city councils deep in GOP territory.

Joshua Tree "helps to fill hotels, it helps create transient occupancy taxes and it provides a real boost to the local economy," said San Bernardino County Supervisor Neil Derry, a Republican.

Battle over solar sites

Feinstein's bill has staved off solar development in key parcels.

After filing applications to build on thousands of acres, solar companies have mostly withdrawn from the proposed Mojave Trails National Monument, which would also protect an unblemished stretch of historic Route 66.

"It was devastating and difficult and obviously treacherous for the industry, and not the way you would hope to start a renaissance, but we're past it now," said Eddy of the Large-Scale Solar Association. "Any projects within the boundaries of her monument are considered too much of a risk right now to develop."

Wind developer Oak Creek Energy of Oakland last month pulled the plug on a five-year effort to build a wind farm in the Castle Mountain area that Feinstein wants to add to the Mojave Preserve.

"The primary reason was that we found this area was heavily desired by powerful interests," executive vice president Edward Duggan said in an e-mail.

Giant energy plan

The state and federal governments are trying to devise a giant plan to site solar plants, preferably on old farmland or other disturbed areas.

Eddy said that is easier said than done, and the state needs all the solar energy it can get - from roof tops to utility-scale facilities - to achieve its new 33 percent renewable fuel standard. Billions of dollars of investment are on the sidelines, waiting for regulatory certainty.

"If we delay too much, then there won't be an industry later," Eddy said. "We're really at that fragile point."

Applications by solar companies to develop property that was donated for conservation was the genesis for Feinstein's legislation. The Wildlands Conservancy had raised $45 million in private funds and taxpayers pitched in another $18 million to buy old railroad parcels and give them to the federal government. Feinstein drew the proposed Mojave Trails National Monument to protect those parcels.

Approach Senate first

She included a new Sand to Snow National Monument and painstakingly drew in new wilderness areas while releasing several wilderness study areas.

Feinstein's plan is to pass the bill in the Senate first, itself a giant task.

"There is huge support, and I think we have a unified community," she said. "If it passes the Senate, I believe the opportunity for the House increases dramatically, because I think people want it."

Her original 1994 act, "has been a terrific success," she said. "We have kept the desert desert for all time."

Owls, Mules and Lizards: the makeup of federal land management

2011-04-27T00:30:00.000-07:00

Today we have federal employees who are paid to stop productivity

by Marita Noon

Marita Noon

Farming, ranching, mining, and extraction are the foundation for everything else. They are what make food, energy and manufacturing possible by proving the raw materials for our personal and economic growth. Yet these bedrock American industries have, little-by-little, been chiseled away—so subtly that most of us did not notice until now; now, when the economy continues to teeter with a slight uptick one month, back down the next. The public, America’s citizens, people who’ve never paid attention to politics or the economy, want to know what happened; they want to know, “Why?”

The answer is really quite simple and reversing the trend—growing the economy—is equally simple. But America’s citizens must push for policy-induced prosperity.

Today we have federal employees who are paid to stop productivity. Their job is to enforce regulations, not encourage expansion. The federal government used to help people establish a farm or ranch, or stake a claim. Remember the whole idea of “homesteading?” People took a barren parcel of federal land, treated it as their own and made something from nothing. Their efforts were rewarded with the deed.

While homesteading is a thing of the history books, policy that stopped development didn’t begin until the seventies. Initial results of a new study indicate that major industries once prevalent in the west, such as logging, cattle ranching, and mining, have moved out—in fact, been chased out. Instead of exporting, we now import.

What happened in the seventies to change federal lands management? The birth of the environmental movement in the late 1960s.

This shift in policy is most evident through the story of the spotted owl—a declining species said to favor “old growth forest.” The effort to protect the owl began in 1968. It was ultimately listed as “endangered” in 1990. Observing history, we see the owls’ numbers have not increased with the protection and they’ve been found in locations they supposedly do not like. While the listing had little impact on the owl, it did have a killing effect on the logging industry. Logging on federal lands once accounted for more than half of Oregon’s harvest. By 2008, less than ten percent.

In New Mexico’s Gila Forest access to federal lands has been continually cut back. Today, based on numbers from the 1970’s, there are thirty percent fewer cattle. Because of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and wilderness designations, the Forest Service required Terrell Shelley, whose family has continuously raised cattle on the same land for 125 years, to use mules to make repairs to concrete dams on his allotment. 250 mule loads of concrete were hand mixed. Not many people today are willing to continue ranching under such restrictive conditions.

Mining faces similar obstacles. In Montana, exploration for tungsten was completed in the seventies by Union Carbide. To extract the resource from what is now an “inventoried roadless area,” the Forest Service requires that the drilling equipment be hauled by pack mules—who are feed “certified weed free hay,” and that the land be cleared and then reclaimed using hand tools. Once again, productive activity is discouraged.

Due to punitive federal policy, we now have less logging, less ranching, and less mining; less jobs, less productivity, and less wealth creation.

The oil and gas industry of West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico is next. The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has proposed that the Sand Dune Lizard (AKA Dunes Sagebrush Lizard) be listed as an endangered species under the ESA. This lizard frequents sites where oil and gas development provides good paying jobs and economic stability. If the FWS proceeds with the “endangered” listing, the entire region could well go the way of logging in the Pacific Northwest or Cattle Ranching in the Gila Forest.

Now, we see how industries have been shuttered and jobs lost. We watched while entire communities became ghost towns. “Protection” and “wilderness” sound like nice ideas until you see the economic destruction they have wrought. With the benefit of history, America’s citizens can take a stand and reverse the trend. Federal agencies hold hearings where we can comment. We can make phone calls and send e-mails.

The employees at the various federal agencies don’t make the policies. They are simply enforcing the regulations. But if we speak up, we can change the game.

The public comment period for the proposed lizard listing ends May 9. Make the effort, pick up the phone. Talk to the federal employees (Debra M. Hill: 505-761-4719, Tom Buckley: 505-248-6455).

Wouldn’t it be great if the federal government once again helped, instead of hindered?

Marita Noon is the Executive Director at Energy Makes America Great Inc. the advocacy arm of the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy. Find out more at http://www.energymakesamericagreat.org/.

Tortoise finds curtail solar-site construction

2011-04-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Brightsource doesn't see stoppage impacting construction schedule

The Brightsource Energy solar power site in the Ivanpah Valley. The firm still expects energy to come on line in 2013. (Stan Lim / The Press-Enterprise )

By DAVID DANELSKI
The Press-Enterprise

Ivanpah Valley, CA -- Federal officials have told a solar developer to stop work on two-thirds of a construction site in northeast San Bernardino County because no more tortoises can be disturbed.

Until wildlife authorities reassess the tortoise population, work on the $2.1 billion project -- hailed by the Obama administration -- is limited to a 2-square-mile area cleared of the protected reptiles last fall. BrightSource Solar's entire work site, on public land near Primm, Nev., is 5.6 square miles.

The suspension order, made official Friday, was triggered when biologists hired to remove tortoises from the property handled their 39th animal earlier this month, said Amy Fesnock of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

A federal permit allowed for the displacement of no more than 38 desert tortoises found within the project's borders, said Fesnock, a wildlife biologist in the BLM's California office. The species is listed as threatened with extinction.

The suspension forced crews from Bechtel, BrightSource's contractor, to stop building fences and to fill in postholes and trenches so tortoises won't fall in and get injured or trapped.

Work cannot resume in the affected areas, known as Phase 2 and 3, until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grants permission. The agency is expected by the end of May to complete a new analysis of the BrightSource project's effect on desert tortoises, Fesnock said.

To allow more tortoises to be displaced, the service must find that doing so does not jeopardize the survival of the species, she said.

A BrightSource official said the setback isn't expected to be a major obstacle.

"We don't see this as having an impact on the construction schedule and anticipate that power will come online in 2013," company spokesman Keely Wachs said in an email.

BrightSource's plans call for three arrays of thousands of mirrors that focus sunlight on three "power towers," where steam is made to generate electricity. At peak capacity, the arrays are expected to generate enough electricity to power 140,000 homes. The project is next to Interstate 15 in the Ivanpah Valley.

BrightSource, based in Oakland, announced last week that it had completed financing for the project, including $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy and a $168 million investment from Google.

The project has been praised by President Barack Obama as a step toward reducing the nation's reliance on fossil fuels and cutting greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

It was one of several proposals approved last year by U.S. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar under an expedited or "fast tracked" environmental review process.

Some environmentalists now fault that process.

"The BLM's fast-tracked environmental review seriously underestimated the impacts of the Ivanpah power plant on the desert tortoise," said Michael Connor, the California director of Western Watersheds Project, which is suing the government to halt the solar development.

The work stoppage, he said, "is a direct result of that rushed and deeply flawed analysis."

BrightSource commissioned surveys in 2007 and 2008 that found only 16 tortoises in the entire 5.6 square miles. The Fish and Wildlife Service used the survey results to estimate a population of 32 tortoises on the site and to set a "take" limit of 38 animals that could be displaced.

Since work began in October, many more tortoises were found than expected. The BLM now estimates the population at about 140.

Healthy tortoises displaced by construction will be held in pens until they can be relocated to a nearby area in the Ivanpah Valley. Based on past relocations, at least some of those tortoises will die after being moved.

Dubois tapped for superintendent of Mojave National Preserve

2011-04-11T14:55:00.000-07:00

Superintendent Stephanie Dubois,
Mojave National Preserve

Needles Desert Star

OAKLAND, Calif. - Stephanie Dubois has been selected to be the next superintendent of Mojave National Preserve, located in the Mojave Desert of San Bernardino County between Interstate 15 and Interstate 40. She replaces Dennis Schramm who retired in the fall of 2010.

“Steph is an approachable, team-oriented person. She has worked on internal park issues and across park boundaries with park staffs, neighboring communities and other agencies to create shared visions and solve problems across landscapes,” said Pacific West Regional Director Chris Lehnertz. “A proven cornerstone of her leadership style is a desire to invite and respect the powerful ‘sense of place' that people have with the lands the National Park Service oversees.”

Dubois has been serving as the deputy superintendent of Glacier National Park in northwest Montana since 2005, where she manages park operations on just over 1 million acres, for 2 million visitors a year. “I am very excited to be heading south and west again, to the land of the sun and the wide-open desert landscapes that are my geography. I have lived and worked in the Sonoran Desert and in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, and now I am looking forward to learning about and exploring the challenges, ecosystems, features, and moods of the Mojave,” said Dubois.

“I am also thrilled to take the helm of Mojave National Preserve following Dennis Schramm, who set a great tenor in working with others to protect and interpret a remarkable ecosystem.”

Dubois is a 30 year veteran of the National Park Service and has experience at all levels of the organization. Prior to her assignment at Glacier National Park, she served as the superintendent of Chaco Culture National Historical Park from 2002-5 and the superintendent at Aztec Ruins National Monument from 2001-2. She has worked in interpretation and law enforcement in parks across the country ranging from Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona and Utah to Roger Williams National Memorial in Rhode Island. Her first National Park Service job was as a high school graduate with the Youth Conservation Corps in Maryland.

Dubois holds a bachelor's degree in botany from Duke University and remains a steadfast Duke basketball fan. She enjoys all time spent outdoors, loves to garden, enjoys back-road camping with friends, and has a lively creative and artistic side that she expresses through batik. She grew up in an Air Force family, the second of seven children, and attributes her love of nature to family outings in the many places she lived during her youth, especially when her father was stationed in South Dakota and other bases in the West.

Dubois will begin her new assignment in May 2011. She will manage a staff of 60 full-time employees and a budget of approximately $5 million.

20-Mule Team named as 2011 Grand Marshal

2011-04-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

(Photo courtesy Dave McCoy Photography)

BISHOP -- They've graced show arenas, made a number of Pasadena Rose Parade appearances and long held a special place in the hearts of Bishop Mule Days spectators. Now the 20-Mule Team will serve as the2011 Bishop Mule Days Grand Marshal.

Twenty-mule teams originated in the late 1800s, born out of a need to ferry borax, a component of glass production and many detergents, out of the Death Valley region between 1883 and 1889. The teams hauled more than 20 million pounds of borax out of Death Valley in the six years of operation. The teams were relieved of their task by the growth of railroads and new mineral deposit discoveries.

Yet, the teams were never forgotten by the public, thanks in part to the trademark team symbol that appeared on products produced by the company that would become U.S. Borax, Inc. The teams, although retired from their Death Valley trips, continued to make promotional and ceremonial appearances on behalf of U.S. Borax.

Led by Bishop's own Bobby Tanner, the 20-Mule Team's unique hitch requires many hours of preparation for an appearance such as Bishop Mule Days. This year Tanner also secured use of the famed Borax wagons, adding a distinct historical value to the team’s Bishop performances.

In the months preceding Mule Days, Tanner and his crew will tackle the dynamics of finding just the right weight-to-braking ratio, deal with the complexities of making tight turns with the roughly 170-foot long team and wagons, and spend hours fine-tuning the critical relationship between teamster and team.

What would surely be a daunting task for even the most experienced mule man is a way of life for Tanner. He drove his first 20-mule team in 1981, unknowingly launching himself into a 30-year journey of re-creating one of the West’s most beloved icons. It’s a journey that’s taken him across the country and given him the opportunity to share a piece of Americana with thousands of people.

Tanner’s father, Bob Sr., was among those who founded the Bishop Mule Days Celebration in 1969. As a result, Bobby Tanner has participated in nearly all 42 Bishop Mule Days celebrations, often winning awards for individual and packing events. He served as president of the event’s Executive Committee in 1990.

Today, Tanner owns and operates Rock Creek Lodge, a collection of cabins, a store and restaurant nestled in the trees close to Rock Creek, a favorite Eastern Sierra getaway.

The 20-Mule Team will make three appearances during Bishop Mule Days – in the Saturday morning parade, in the Saturday afternoon show and the Sunday evening show.

Bishop Mule Days will be held May 24th-29th at the Tri-County Fairgrounds in Bishop. Tickets for the event are on sale now. For more information, call the Mule Days office at (760) 872-4263.

Dead in plane crash were woman, kids

2011-03-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

Investigators with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board investigate the wreckage of a Cessna 210 that crashed Sunday. A woman and her two children were killed in the crash. The plane took off from John Wayne airport and crashed near the Barstow-Dagget Airport. (KAREN JONAS, DESERT DIPSATCH)

By SALVADOR HERNANDEZ
Orange County Register

BARSTOW – A woman and two children were killed in a fiery plane crash on Sunday near a San Bernardino County airport, authorities said.
The single-engine Cessna 210 departed from John Wayne Airport and was headed to Henderson Executive Airport in Las Vegas when it crashed, said Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman.

The woman is believed to be Katie Morrison, a Truckee, Calif., resident who is licensed as a private pilot. Officials have not identified who was aboard the plane. Her husband, Jim Morrison, confirmed his wife and two children, Wyatt and Hanna, were killed in the crash, according to Fox 40 News in Sacramento.

Coroner officials have not yet positively identified the bodies of those aboard the plane; they were described as a woman, a male child and a female child.

"The coroner's office is having to conduct extensive scientific means to identify the bodies," said Arden Wiltshire, a San Bernardino Sheriff's Department spokeswoman.

The plane crashed at 12:40 p.m., about 2.5 miles southeast of the Barstow-Dagget Airport. The Barstow Desert Dispatch newspaper reported that the crash site was about two miles south of I-40.

Witnesses told The Associated Press that the plane appeared to spiral out of the sky as it plunged into a hillside.

According to FAA records, the fixed-wing airplane is registered to Debt Free LLC.

The address registered for the 1978 airplane comes back to Jim Morrison Construction in Truckee. According to the company's website, Jim Morrison Construction builds luxury homes in premier golfing and skiing communities. Morrison is a professional skier.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash. The final determination of the cause could take months, said Mike Huhn, an investigator with the NTSB. The NTSB will look more closely at the pilot — including her experience, training and health — the plane and its engine and environmental factors such as the weather to determine the final cause of the accident, said Hunh.

This is the second fatal plane crash in the area in two weeks. A plane that crashed near Ludlow on March 8 killed Anthony D’Allen, 68, of Senoia, Ga.

Historic Inland Empire cemetery receives federal funds

2011-03-16T00:30:00.000-07:00

Leticia Juarez
KABC-TV Los Angeles

ORO GRANDE, MOJAVE DESERT (KABC) -- A historic cemetery in Oro Grande near Victorville has been called a little-known treasure. It has some 100 graves, the final resting place of mostly miners and their families. There is a much-needed facelift in its future.

A steady wind blows through the Oro Grande Cemetery where flagstones outline the final resting places and weathered white crosses mark the area for the inhabitants buried there. It is a place forgotten by time.

Joe Manners is the unofficial caretaker of the century-old cemetery, and its champion.

For more than two decades, he has been after San Bernardino County to fund its upkeep and repairs.

"Some of that history, we should have something in Oro Grande to remember that Oro Grande was a boom town when Victorville was a ranch," said Manners.

On Wednesday the county approved a $15,000 grant to build a parking lot and decorative fence to beautify the historic site. Prior to the funding approval the county used ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves to ensure the area would not be disturbed by the construction.

"We were able to get some community development block-grant funding from the federal government -- a small grant, but enough to do some basic improvements," said Brad Mitzelfelt, San Bernardino County First District supervisor.

There are between 90 and 100 graves in the Oro Grande Cemetery. Many belong to the original founders of this once-booming town.

The gold-mining town is one of the earliest settlements in San Bernardino County and the final resting place for several of Oro Grande's military heroes.

"When Memorial Day comes around, the VFW in Adelanto comes and clears all the weeds and gets the place cleaned up and they do a Memorial Day service," said Manners.

The county hopes to finish its improvement project by Memorial Day in time to honor and remember the pioneers and founders of this desert community.

Pioneertown will pay for its water

2011-03-01T23:52:00.000-08:00

A Letter from Gay Smith
Pioneertown Property Owners Association
Hi-Desert Star

I would like to set the record straight — Pioneertown water users are not going to rip off Yucca Valley.

We have a serious water problem, both quantity and quality, that the county has been trying to solve for the last 10 years. Before that time we had the best water in the whole area, but with prolonged drought, the water table dropped, which caused nitrates, arsenic and heavy metals to leach into the water line that is provided to the community by eight wells, two of which are no longer on line due to the high concentrates of cancer-producing contaminates.

In 1999, we started receiving letters along with our high water bills, warning us not to drink the water.

In 2009, the state Health Department sent the county Special Districts a letter stating that the water situation in Pioneertown must be fixed, or fines will be imposed on the water users.

Many of us, besides paying for water we cannot drink, buy bottled water and/or have reverse-osmosis systems under our sinks. The cost that was stated in a Wednesday Guest Soapbox for a reverse-osmosis system is just the tip of the iceberg. Every six months you have to hire a plumber to have the four filters changed. The filters are not cheap, ranging in price from $30 to $130 for each one.

You must remember, too, that we have to bathe in this water, and we feed it to our pets. We have had many strange illnesses and deaths to our pets that cannot be fully explained. Pioneertown residents have also experienced a high rate of cancer in its citizens for a small community.

The county has looked into dozens of ways to fix our problem. Each has its own problems and can, in many cases, cause more problems than are fixed. They have been working with the Mojave Water Agency to come to a conclusion that would be fair to all.

The people of Pioneertown are willing to pay their fair share. We will be paying for our water to the county as we now do and they in turn will pay the Mojave Water Agency for water, which will be banked in the underground holding area in Landers. The water would then be sent in Hi-Desert water pipes to another location. For the use of the pipes, Hi-Desert would also get some of the water allotted to Pioneertown.

The engineers found that the best route would be over Skyline Ranch Road, but that route was nixed by the residents on Skyline Ranch Road. They did not want the 8-inch pipe to go down the middle of the road, which would be covered and returned to its original state. This route would certainly be much cheaper to the people living in Pioneertown.

Since that route was taken off the table, the alternate route is up Pioneertown Road, which is much more expensive.

The water that we pay for and bank must then be sent to the settling pond on Pioneertown Road and then pumped up the middle of Pioneertown Road. This is a public road and would not be on a preserve or on private land. There will be a small parcel of land on the side of Pioneertown Road owned by the Conservancy that a tank will have to be situated on.…

I don’t think moving from the area is an option for any of us. This is like telling the people of Yucca Valley if they don’t like the sewer system, to move.

We are not about destroying the enviroment. The pipe will be underground and covered. But most important of all, we are not taking water from the people of Yucca Valley and we are paying for what we get.

SCE plans $750 million project to link solar plants to grid

2011-02-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Public input sought on new transmission corridor through Hesperia, Lucerne

Natasha Lindstrom
Victor Valley Daily Press

HESPERIA • Southern California Edison is planning a $750 million project to enable new renewable energy development in the Mojave Desert to connect to the power grid.

The proposed project would build a new substation near Newberry Springs and construct 67 miles of new transmission line between Edison’s Lugo and Pisgah substations — including 18 to 20 miles of a new transmission corridor that would border some 600 residents between Hesperia and Lucerne Valley.

Edison does not yet have estimates on the number of jobs the project would create.

While the project’s still in the early stages, Edison is turning to local residents for input on four possible routes for the line of large metal steel towers topping 100 feet, with a public workshop in Hesperia scheduled for March 3.

“Like most new transmission-type projects, a lot of people are concerned as to where it’s going to be located geographically as to where they live,” said Spear, adding that Edison has notified all the residents living along the potential transmission corridor routes. “We’re just wanting to be very up front with the public and go to them early and let them know what’s sort of on the preliminary drawing boards.”

An executive order signed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger requiring California utility companies to increase the percentage of renewable energy in the state’s electricity mix to 33 percent by 2020.

The next steps in the Lugo-Pisgah project will be for Edison to submit applications to the California Public Utilities Commission for approval, which Spear said will likely happen in the first quarter of 2012. It’ll take up to two years for the applications to be processed and the project’s build-out will taken another three. The tentative construction completion date is in 2017.

The public is invited to share their input and ask questions about the project at a public workshop 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the Percy Bakker Community Center, 9333 E Avenue in Hesperia.

For more information, Hesperia residents can call (760) 951-3281. Apple Valley and Lucerne Valley residents can call (760) 951-3237. Or visit sce.com/lugopisgah.

MOJAVE DESERT: Military seeks OHV area for exercises

2011-02-25T22:35:00.000-08:00

By DAVID DANELSKI
The Press-Enterprise

The military wants to expand its Twentynine Palms training grounds to take in more than two-thirds of the popular Johnson Valley off-road recreation area southeast of Barstow, according to U.S. Marine Corps documents released Friday.

Under the Marines' preferred plan to expand the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, the military would control 146,667 acres in the Johnson Valley that now is a designated off-highway vehicle recreation area. The valley draws tens of thousands of off-road enthusiasts each year.

The 932-square-mile combat center also could add another 21,304 acres at its southeast corner, northeast of Twentynine Palms.

The proposal is among six alternatives being considered by the military to prepare troops for desert and urban warfare.

All but one alternative involves taking most of the 189,000-acre Johnson Valley OHV area.

The disclosures contained in the 941-page environmental study fit with earlier statements by Marine Corps officials. Military officials at Twentynine Palms did not return a call Friday.

Lt. Col. James McArthur said in an interview in late 2008 that Marine officials had determined that the Johnson Valley is best for live-fire exercises and maneuvers because it provides a natural extension of training corridors on the base.

The expansion is needed, the military has said, so that Marines have enough space for three battalions to maneuver simultaneously using live ammunition accompanied by air support. Each battalion would have about 1,000 Marines aided by other troops performing command and logistics duties.

Ray Pessa, a Yucca Valley resident who builds dune buggies, said the preferred plan is not a complete loss to off-roaders.

He was part of a group that met with military officials and explained the importance of the Johnson Valley to various groups, including hikers, campers, wind sailors and rocket clubs.

The preferred plan would allow public access on 38,137 acres in the southeast part of Johnson Valley for about 10 months each year. That would allow the popular "King of the Hammers" four-wheel-drive rock-crawler race to continue, he said. The annual event attracts about 8,000 people, Pessa said.

Still, 108,530 acres of the Johnson Valley would be for military use only, including the Rock Pile and Bessemer Mine Road areas.

"I am not in a position to argue with the military," Pessa said. "If the U.S. Marines say they need that area, then they do."

Pessa added that off-roaders also are being pushed from public land because of new wildlife protections.

"All over the country, public lands are being taken away," he said.

The military's environmental impact statement will be open to public comments through May 26. It can be viewed at www.marines.mil/unit/29palms/las. Comments can be mailed to Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Southwest, Attention: Twentynine Palms EIS Project Manager, 1220 Pacific Highway, San Diego, CA 92132-5190.

The Marines will host public meetings on April 12, 13, and 14 in Joshua Tree, Ontario and Victorville, respectively.

The military's news release did not state when a final decision is expected.

Pioneertown about to rip off Yucca Valley

2011-02-19T00:12:00.000-08:00

Letter from Dee and Bill Campbell
Yucca Valley
Hi-Desert Star

Listen up, taxpayers of Yucca Valley. We are all about to be ripped off.

A meeting was held with a few grumpy residents from Pioneertown, yet not announced to taxpayers of Yucca — but it will affect us all.

This “private” meeting for the people included Mr. Neil Derry.

Regarding a few complaints about the long-time, naturally occurring arsenic in one water well, it’s been this way since 1940.

They have the audacity to think that they (Pioneertown) can run a pipeline and take our water from our recharge ponds, that we’ve all paid for with our taxes. Mind you, those people did not pay one cent for our water-recharge ponds!

Yucca Valley’s water is extremely contaminated, due to a poorly-thought-out advertising campaign back in the 1990s to come “Discover Yucca Valley.” So as Los Angeles “discovered Yucca Valley,” they forgot to bring a sewer system! Now all our ground is contaminated with L.A. sewage, and another town thinks they can leach off of our money — I mean our water supply?

Who do they think they are? Are they going to pay us all back for those ponds? Do they have permission to create a utility corridor through that preserve and people’s private lands?

I seem to recall the same issues fought against Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently. What’s the difference now?

Anyone who has lived in this area has known the problems with that well in Pioneertown. Perhaps those who are so upset should just move! Because our tax dollars are not paying for your poor choice in real estate! Buy a filter. Via the Web, Whirlpool has a nice model for $150. That would not require any more destruction of our desert.

Quite frankly, we long-time residents are fed up with city folks coming here and trying to change everything. If you don’t like your environment, leave it! But don’t destroy my desert and expect us all to stand by quietly while you take our water that we paid for. No way! No way!

Act would set aside Mojave land

2011-02-16T01:07:00.000-08:00

The bill states that there shall be no commercial development within the areas locked up.

Seth Shteir of the National Parks Conservation Association maps out a large section of desert wilderness that would be added to Joshua Tree National Park if the California Desert Protection Act of 2011 is passed into law. (Rebecca Unger, Hi-Desert Star)

By Rebecca Unger
Hi-Desert Star

MOJAVE DESERT — As the region celebrates the 75th anniversary of Joshua Tree National Monument this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is introducing federal legislation to designate additional areas of the Mojave Desert for recreation and environmental conservation.

Seth Shteir, the California desert field representative for the National Parks Conservation Association in Joshua Tree, is enthusiastic about the possibilities of the passage of the 2011 California Desert Protection Act.

“This is really visionary legislation, in that it protects the heart of the California desert and its critical wildlife corridors,” the conservation professional said.

“We now know that living things are interconnected, but the boundaries of our national parks have political boundaries, not ecological or geographic,” Shteir said.

“To protect what’s living in the parks, we must maintain critical wildlife corridors so they can seek food, water, shelter and mates. This is particularly true as our climate gets warmer, and studies show that the American Southwest is a climate change hot spot.”

The proposed legislation calls for the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a study on the effect of climate change on the lands covered by the Protection Act.

The 2011 legislation also protects desert wildlands from large renewable-energy developments.

“The bill states that there shall be no commercial development within the areas covered by the CDPA,” Shteir explained.

In addition to adding lands to the Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks and the Mojave National Preserve, the act would set aside nearly 76 miles of rivers, 250,000 acres of wilderness, 941,000 acres of the Mojave Trails National Monument east of Ludlow and 134,000 acres of Sand to Snow National Monument, which would include the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve.

The 2011 CDPA also permanently designates five areas in the Mojave Desert for off-highway vehicle fun.

Shteir sees the CDPA’s protection of critical wilderness areas coupled with set-aside regions for sport riding as win-win.

“The desert is an economic engine for the region,” he said. “The report ‘Economic Oasis’ says that in 2003, outdoor recreational users spent $230 million visiting the Mojave region. In 2007, the Michigan State University money-generation model for national parks reported that visitors to Joshua Tree National Park spent $32 million, and supported over 500 jobs in the area. So, the CDPA is not only good for our plants, wildlife and our recreation, but it’s good for the health of our economy.”

Preserve would be part of monument

The riverbank habitat of the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve in Morongo Valley is one of the areas that would be get additional protection in Feinstein’s act.

The preserve links wildlife corridors between Joshua Tree National Park and the high country of the San Bernardino Mountains.

“The park’s bighorn sheep rely on the preserves as a year-round water source,” Shteir pointed out. “I was recently hiking in a remote area of the preserve and saw three bighorn sheep, and one of them was very pregnant. After the heavy rains in December I saw bear tracks in the muddy earth along a creek.”

The preserve also is a world-renowned birding destination. A total of 235 species have been recorded here, with 70 nesting species.

Before the Green Path North energy project was scrapped, high-voltage transmission towers would have been placed in the preserve. The passage of the 2011 CDPA would add another layer of protection for the preserve by making it part of the Sand to Snow National Monument.

“We are sandwiched between the two burgeoning metropolitan areas of Las Vegas and Los Angeles,” Shteir noted. “As their development increases, the desert will become increasingly squeezed. When we protect the desert’s special places, we protect our natural history, our ecology and our recreational opportunities for future generations.”

Shteir also wanted to clear up a misconception that has fueled rumors of a “land grab” by environmental extremists.

“The lands protected by the California Desert Protection Act are federal lands,” he said. “There is no private property in this legislation.”

Hatch: Stop Obama’s War On The West

2011-02-03T00:30:00.000-08:00

Opinion
Sen. Orrin Hatch
St. George News

Utah is one of the most beautiful places on earth. In their latest attack on the rural West, President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced unauthorized and unlimited “Wild Lands” designations in western states. Federal law is clear that “wilderness” can be designated only by Congress, but the President has the audacity to hope that this subtle wording change, from “wilderness to “Wild Lands,” will let him act without constraint in closing off vast public lands to the public who own them. Utahns and other Americans living in the West, with their way of life at stake, hope he’s wrong, and I will be introducing legislation to stop him.

The recent announcement demonstrates brazen contempt for the rule of law. These lands belong to the people, not to federal land managers. The Wilderness Act passed in 1964 clearly gives Congress authority over these lands, and Congress has not approved this action. Federal law also requires input from local and state officials on these matters. Furthermore, the President’s announcement blatantly disregards agreements the federal government has stricken with Utah and other states to keep this kind of action from happening. Finally, it reverses comprehensive Resource Management Plans that have taken decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete.

The Obama Administration is simply ignoring these concrete limits on his power. This new policy shows blatant disregard for Utahns way of life that has been a backbone of American culture. Utah’s rural communities represent what is best about America, what is best about families, what is best about hard work, and what is best about the moral values necessary to hold any democracy together. For rural areas to survive, they must be allowed to pursue basic activities that sustain rural economies: energy development, ranching, hunting, and access to these public lands on established roads.

A survey of energy companies indicates that new federal constraints have removed about $2.8 billion in investment from the Rockies. More than 70 percent of the industry respondents blamed new federal policies for the trend, and 89 percent of the companies will continue to divert investment from the Rockies until regulations become less hostile. That was before the President’s latest “Wild Lands” announcement which will be even worse for Utah jobs.

In a time when we must work to become less dependent on foreign oil, this latest attack on the rural West is bad news for our nation, and it will contribute to high gas prices. But rural families are the hardest hit. In a letter I received from a family in rural Utah, they wrote, “As the new presidential administration and new head of the Department of the Interior took over, the oil and gas production companies slowed their drilling and production programs drastically. The rapid economic change was shocking … We went from being a prospering business to a business that is just hoping we can pay our bills.”

Another young woman in rural Utah wrote: “I was working for Superior Well Services. I was able to have health insurance and life insurance. I had an amazing future in front of me. I was laid off….. Since then, I can’t get medical insurance, I’m behind on all of my bills and the only job I could find is being a waitress at a local café. Where is this change we were promised?”

The “Wild Lands” policy increases uncertainty for every aspect of the rural economy in the West, including mining, ranching, energy production, hunting, and recreational access to our public lands. Is it any wonder the plan was drafted with no outside input other than the one group that would benefit from the plan – extreme environmentalists?

I appreciate the national beauty that Utah has to offer. However, we in Congress will not stand idly by while the President plays a reverse Robin Hood in the West, stealing an important way of life from the many for the benefit of an elite few who want these lands for themselves. I will continue to fight as hard as I can to ensure that does not happen on my watch.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch is the ranking Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee. He also serves on the Judiciary and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committees and Joint Committee on Taxation. Long recognized as a principled conservative, Hatch has been at the forefront of the battle in the U.S. Senate to rein in the ever-expanding federal bureaucracy and costly, burdensome regulations. Recognized recently by U.S. News & World Report magazine as one of America’s top 22 leaders, Hatch’s legislative achievements and initiatives include the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, the Strengthening Our Commitment to Legal Immigration and America’s Security Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Water worries: The drying of the West

2011-01-27T00:30:00.000-08:00

The Colorado River and the civilisation it waters are in crisis

Lake Mead's "bathtub ring" at Hoover Dam.

The Economist

STANDING on the Hoover Dam and looking upstream at Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir, the visitor notices a wide, white band ringing the cliffs. Nicknamed “the bathtub ring”, this discolouration comes from minerals that were once deposited on the volcanic rock by the Colorado River and have become visible as its level has dropped. It is one sign of a water crisis that threatens America’s south-west.

Other reminders abound. Farther upstream there are dry docks, jutting out ominously into desert, where boats were once moored. In one finger of Lake Mead buildings that were abandoned in the 1930s, as the water of the newly dammed river rose and submerged them, have eerily begun reappearing, like a ghost town.

The main reason why Lake Mead, currently only 40% full, has been getting emptier is a decade-long drought. Whether this is a cyclical and normal event, or an early sign of climate change, is unclear. But even if the drought ends, most scientists think global warming will cause flows on the Colorado River to decrease by 10-30% in the next half century, says Douglas Kenney, the director of a water-policy programme at the University of Colorado Law School.

The other reason, says Mr Kenney, is the rapidly increasing demand for the river’s water. The Colorado provides much or most of the water for many cities and farms in seven states—Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California—before it peters out in the sands of Mexico.

In the northern states, its water supports cattle empires. In its southern stretch, especially in California’s Imperial County, the river irrigates deserts to produce America’s winter vegetables. And all along the way, aqueducts branch off to supply cities from Salt Lake City and Denver to Phoenix and Los Angeles. The metropolis closest to Lake Mead, Las Vegas, gets 90% of its water from this one source.

That is why Las Vegas is a canary in the mine shaft, as Pat Mulroy, the boss of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, puts it. The Las Vegas valley gets its water through two long channels drilled through the rock. The first taps the lake at 1,050 feet (320 metres) above sea level, the second at 1,000 feet. Lake Mead’s water level is now near its record low, at 1,086 feet. Within a few years it could leave Las Vegas’s first intake, or even both, dry.

The threat to Sin City is a good example of the four dimensions—physical, legal, political and cultural—of water in the West. For the physical, the standard response is to summon the engineers. Ms Mulroy already has them digging a third intake at 890 feet. Given the weight of the water on top, this is fiendishly difficult and will not be ready until 2014. Ms Mulroy also wants to pipe groundwater from the rural and wetter northern counties of Nevada to Las Vegas, but that has caused a vicious row.

Another response is to call in the lawyers. This was the preferred approach a century ago, in the era of the “water wars”. Starting with the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and continuing with statutes, a treaty with Mexico and case law until the 1960s, a truce was achieved. Called the Law of the River, the resulting regime determines who along the river has what right to how much water.

At least, it does in theory. The problem is that the law took shape after two decades of record water flows, which became the basis for allocation. As a result it apportions more water than there is in the river. For decades that did not matter, since there were so few people. Then the cattle, fruit and people using the river multiplied.

The law’s seniority rules theoretically mean that, for example, the taps to Las Vegas would be shut completely before a single lettuce-grower in California’s Imperial County lost a drop. This “idiocy of who gets cut first and second”, as Ms Mulroy calls it, gives rise to the political dimension. These days, co-operation has supplemented, if not wholly replaced, the old rivalries among agricultural and urban users, and among the seven states. Nevada and Arizona, for example, have a water-banking partnership, whereby Arizona stores excess water in its aquifers so that Nevada could use it in a pinch. In California, the water utility of Los Angeles has bought water rights from farmers in Imperial County. But arguments persist.

The final dimension is the culture of the West. Does every middle-class house really need a lawn in a desert? Ms Mulroy has already started paying Las Vegans to rip out their turf and opt for desert landscaping, which can be chic. Her own husband put up a fight but lost. So out went that lawn, too, just as the low-flow toilets and taps came in.

Feinstein reintroduces desert protection bill

2011-01-25T22:00:00.000-08:00

Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).

By DAVID DANELSKI
The Press-Enterprise

Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday reintroduced legislation that would create two national monuments covering more than a million acres in the Mojave Desert.

The California Desert Protection Act of 2011 is similar to a desert bill the California Democrat introduced in late 2009, but this one is more focused on land conservation efforts.

The earlier bill also sought to streamline approvals of alternative-energy projects.

Feinstein said in a statement Tuesday that she would work separately with other Western senators on energy legislation that would allow "quicker development of renewable energy projects on private and disturbed public land."

The new bill would:

Create the Mojave Trails and the Sand to Snow national monuments, protecting 941,000 acres and 134,000 acres of federal land, respectively. Mojave Trails would be mostly south of Interstate 40 and west of Needles; Sand to Snow would be north of Interstate 10 between Cabazon and Joshua Tree National Monument.

Add land to Joshua Tree National Park, Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. The additions would include the remote Castle Mountains near the preserve and a strip of land known as the Bowling Alley near Death Valley.

Protect nearly 76 miles of four waterways in and around Death Valley and the San Bernardino Mountains.

Designate new wilderness areas, including about 250,000 acres near Fort Irwin.

Designate four existing off-highway vehicle areas in the California desert as permanent.

"This bill protects the great wide spaces of the Mojave," said supporter David Lamfrom, California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. "Places like the Castle Mountains, the Bowling Alley and Sand to Snow are part of the beating heart of the Mojave Desert."

San Bernardino County Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, who represents much of Mojave Desert area, said he is concerned about bill's effect on the region's economic potential.

"Putting more land off limits for mining, for mine exploration and for development, I'm not sure that, in this economy, is what we need to be doing right now," he said.

Technology reviving mine

2011-01-22T15:10:00.000-08:00

Molycorp winds up in position of power

Scott Honan, environmental manager for Molycorp Minerals, talks about the Molycorp rare earth mine near Interstate 15 in Mountain Pass. (LaFonzo Carter)

Wesley G. Hughes
Redlands Daily Facts

MOUNTAIN PASS - No one was on their way to Vegas 1.3 billion years ago when a large, high-quality deposit of rare earths formed here.
Molten rock was pushing up through the Earth's mantle in eastern San Bernardino County and leaving a sizable deposit of the metals just poking its nose through the planet's surface.

Uranium hunters stumbled across it around 1950 - rare earths are often found in the company of heavier radioactive metals - and eventually it came under the ownership of Molycorp, a Colorado mining company.

Today, according to Molycorp CEO Mark A. Smith, "potential buyers are beating down the door to get those rare earths," which Molycorp stopped mining in 2002 because of environmental problems - and China could do it cheaper, anyway, he said.

Things change. China has virtually cut the world off from its supply of rare earths.

The Asian nation has the world's largest deposits, but Mountain Pass is No. 2, experts say, and Molycorp is back in the race.

Why should we care?

Rare earth metals - or oxides - are vital commodities for a range of products, from smart phones to smart bombs.

And the company's Mountain Pass Mine promises to make lots of money for Molycorp.

It's potential customers can breathe a sigh of relief now that there is another source of the elements. They are so relieved they have pushed Molycorp from a 52-week low of $12.10 on the New York Stock Exchange to a Jan. 5 high of $62.10. It has moderated a bit since the high and closed at $42.99 on Friday, down $3.55 on the day.

Molycorp is tearing down its old plant and building a $500-million operation about 15 miles from the Nevada border to mine and process the ores.

The company celebrated earlier this month with a groundbreaking and barbecue for the board of directors, top management and employees at the site. They are calling it Project Phoenix, Smith said.

But not everyone is happy with the operation.

A national environmental group, Western Watersheds project, criticized Molycorp's 8.6-mile proposed gas pipeline, which it says traverses protected desert tortoise habitat.

Western Watersheds filed a complaint Jan. 14 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeking to halt the Ivanpah Solar Project, which it says got an inferior examination in its Environmental Impact Statement to help it meet a deadline. That deadline has been extended a year to Dec. 31, and Western Watersheds wants a proper EIS done, which it predicts will halt the power project being built by BrightSource Energy.

"We want it to go away," said Michael Connor, California director for Western Watersheds.

He was unfamiliar with Molycorp's core project, but the pipeline was mentioned in the complaint his group filed.

Still, the Mountain Pass project is gaining interest from potential customers, cut off from China's rare earths but interested in what's in Molycorp's huge open-pit mines.

"We are getting attention - a lot of attention," Smith said on the day of the barbecue.

He expects the new plant to be operational by mid-2012.

SAFER MINING?

Jim Sims, Molycorp's director of public affairs, and Scott Homan, the company's environmental manager, explained to visitors at the mine how environmental problems that played a role in halting production back in 2002 have been eliminated by new technology.

Before Molycorp halted production, the company piped liquid residue - mostly salt water - to evaporation ponds in Ivanpah Dry Lake - a scant 10 miles from Mountain Pass.

During a process of putting rinse water through the 8-inch plastic pipeline, pressure got too great. The pipe burst in several places. A buildup of radioactive material inside the pipe led to contamination of the aquifer under the dry lake.

That raised a public outcry that included concerns from county regulators and environmentalists and the shutdown.

During earlier operations, Molycorp had been the biggest user of hydrochloric acid west of the Mississippi River, Sims said. The acid was used to separate the rare earths from the ore. In order to stop the acid's action after separation, Molycorp neutralized it with sodium hydroxide and the product of the combination became salt water.

But by using electricity with chemistry, a process known as electrolysis, to treat the salt water, Molycorp found they could change it back into its original hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide.

Voila! The chemicals could be re-used almost endlessly. No longer will 15 to 25 tanker trucks full of acid be arriving each day at Mountain Pass and no longer will the salt water be piped to Ivanpah Dry Lake for evaporation. Nor will it get the chance to build up radioactive scale inside the miles of drainpipe.

In addition, Molycorp will no longer buy the most expensive electric power Edison sells. It will generate its own. Another 8-inch pipeline is to be built to carry low-polluting natural gas, which will be used for power generation and to reduce the use of diesel at the mine.

For Molycorp, these moves have given immense benefits: The company has dramatically reduced its environmental impact and has led it to claim it has cut its costs to half those of the Chinese today. And Sims said that soon Chinese costs are likely to double because of environmental changes Chinese miners are being forced to make. More good news for Molycorp.

CONCERNS

All that could be jeopardized by Western Watershed's complaint.

Molycorp said repeatedly that it had "crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's" and it had no more hoops or hurdles for the project.

That said, the company faces a hearing before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it was learned Friday. A Molycorp spokesman could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon.

And there's still environmental concerns over the tortoise and the pipeline.

When Connor - the California director of Western Watersheds - was told about some of Molycorp's efforts to be environmentally friendly,he said: "That doesn't help the tortoise."

BENEFITS FOR THE COUNTY

County officials are excited about the project.

They are predicting it will have long-time benefits for the county through new jobs, for business and for property and sales taxes.

Most of the 700 construction jobs for the new plant will come from near and far. Most of the 300 permanent jobs will most likely be filled by Las Vegas residents, because it is closer to Mountain Pass than population centers in California.

But First District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, whose district includes Mountain Pass, called the project "great news. It's been a long time coming.

"I think we will put a lot of people to work. I just don't have the numbers. It's a major mining operation that will use a lot of trades and professions."

Mitzelfelt also predicted Molycorp will be buying supplies locally.

Sims, Molycorp's director of public affairs, confirmed that.

"Molycorp is trying as much as possible to buy equipment and supplies in San Bernardino County," he said.

SUCCESS?

Molycorp officials say that they don't know the full extent of the rare earth to be found at Mountain Pass. They won't know until they dig for it, they assert.

Since 1865, various minerals have been mined in the historic Clark Mining District, where Mountain Pass is located, according to the project's environmental review.

For 57 years, Molycorp and its predecessors have recovered bastnasite, which contains 14 rare earth elements.

Its initial use was as a concentrate called mischmetal, which was used as flints for cigarette lighters and in some metallurgical applications.

In the 1960s, the EIR continued, additional mineral recovery operations were added to allow separation and recovery of individual rare earth elements, including europium, a critical element for making color television.

At the time, Mountain Pass was the world's only commercial source of europium.

Subsequent rare earth elements were produced, and Molycorp plans to mine more, bringing to 10 of 14 rare earth elements that will be produced at what is now a 55-acre site, with plenty of room to expand.

The 55 acres is part of more than 2,000 owned by the company, which also has federal mining claims for the next 30 years on another 8,000 acres.

With a limited world supply of rare earths, Molycorp is in a good financial position, said Christopher Reed, chemistry professor at UC Riverside.

The marketplace - whether its for oil, gold or rare earth elements - is full of cut-throat players, Reed said.

As for Molycorp, he said, "Time is on their side. In the longrun, they really can't fail."

Unfettered vistas restored in remote valley

2011-01-15T23:41:00.000-08:00

This is one of the massive pits left behind after years of gold mining at the Hart mining area. Those pits will remain amid other reclamation efforts. Several new uses for the land have been suggested.

By DAVID DANELSKI
The Press-Enterprise

As road graders moved earth for a huge solar power array in northeastern San Bernardino County, the reverse occurred in a remote, nameless desert valley about 30 miles way.

There, utility crews removed the 18 miles of power lines, leaving the lush stretch of the Mojave Desert more like it was in 1900, before gold was discovered in the hills.

Finishing the job in early January, the crew used a crane to hoist 5,000-pound bundles of wire onto a flatbed truck bound for a Las Vegas scrap yard. They also hauled away piles of creosote-soaked utility poles. The work is part of a reclamation effort by Castle Mountain Venture, which is cleaning up after a decade of open-pit mining.

Returning land to a wilder state bucks the trend in Southern California's deserts, where energy developers are in a rush to tap the vast spaces and ample sunshine and wind to help meet the nation's clean energy needs. If all the pending applications were approved, wind and solar projects would cover as much as 880 square miles of public land.

Yet the valley's fate is far from clear.

Conservationists and at least one legislator want it added to the Mojave National Preserve, which surrounds it. An energy developer wants to buy the former mining land to conserve as wildlife habitat -- compensating for habitat destruction elsewhere. And a wind energy company wants to build wind turbines there and erect new power poles along the same route where workers just finished taking the old ones down.

David Lamfrom, California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, has been monitoring the power line removal with great interest.

Earlier this month, after the poles were down, he drove the 140 miles from his home in Barstow to the no-name valley.

Pivoting full circle, he saw only grassland, Joshua trees, hills, mountain ranges and sky -- no buildings, fences, wires or pavement. Inspiring, he said.

"This is one of the few places left where you can see as far as 25 miles without seeing the hand of man," he said.

The 18 miles of electrical lines had paralleled a dirt road for 20 years, carrying power to the open-pit mine in the Castle Mountains near the Nevada border. Gold was discovered there in 1907.

The modern-day mine produced 1.34 million ounces of gold and about 400,000 ounces of silver in about 12 years, according to the mine manager. The digging stopped in 2001.

In addition to removing the utility poles and wires, Castle Mountain Venture also has shaped the spent ore into contours that mimic the landscape and re-established native plants. The huge open pits will remain.

Coveted Land

Lamfrom wants to see the whole area -- the 7,600 acres owned or claimed by Castle Mountain Venture and more than 21,000 acres of public land surrounding it -- added to the Mojave National Preserve.

Adding the land to the preserve is one of Sen. Dianne Feinstein's legislative goals. A bill introduced last year by the California Democrat to create two desert monuments included provisions to add the Castle Mountains area to the preserve. She said she plans to reintroduce the proposals this year.

When Congress created the preserve in 1994, the area was excluded because of active mining operations.

A boost to preservation efforts could come from Oakland-based BrightSource Energy Co., which is building a 5.6-square-mile solar energy project in the Ivanpah Valley off Interstate 15 near Primm, Nev. Construction is under way for the first array of mirrors that will focus sunlight on a tower, where steam will generate electricity.

The energy company wants to buy 7,600 acres from Castle Mountain Venture to make up for desert tortoise habitat lost to the Ivanpah development. The first phase of the BrightSource project already has displaced 23 tortoises, a species threatened with extinction.

Such a deal would prohibit future mining, making the land an even stronger candidate for inclusion in the national preserve.

BrightSource's land-acquisition proposal is under review by the state energy commission, the BLM, California Department of Fish and Game, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Unanswered Questions

Complicating efforts to restore the valley to a wilder state are the pending wind development application and questions about whether tortoises actually would live in the area, as BrightSource envisions.

Oak Creek Energy Co., which has wind farms in the Tehachapi area, filed an application with the U.S. Bureau Land Management to develop wind turbines on thousands of acres of public land near the mine.

Ed Duggan, the company's executive vice president, said wind energy can be developed there in conjunction with conservation efforts. The company would mostly use existing roads and other disturbed areas, he said.

If the various agencies approve BrightSource's plan to buy the former mining land, it might not benefit tortoises much, according to some observers.

"It's pretty poor habitat," said Mike Conner, California director of the Western Watersheds Project, a conservation group that has followed efforts to bring large energy developments to the desert.

A wildlife survey of the mining area done last March found tortoise burrows but no live animals, and Juan Hernandez, a biologist retained by the mining partnership.

Replacement habitat should be of equal or better quality than the habitat destroyed, and the proposed replacement land just isn't as good for tortoises, Conner said.

U.S. Geological Survey scientist Kristin Berry, who has studied the animals since the 1970s, said tortoises are found only occasionally at elevations above 4,000 feet. The land BrightSource wants to buy ranges from 4,100 to 5,200 feet.

Hernandez said about 3,200 acres of the land under consideration has plants that tortoises eat, including desert dandelion, lotus and notched phacelia.

Mick Lynch, the mine manager, said tortoises were fenced out of the mining area about 20 years ago, but those fences have since been removed so the animals can return.

In addition, tortoises are expected to migrate to higher elevations as the globe warms, according to the land-buy proposal BrightSource submitted to the California Energy Commission and other agencies.

Bighorns At Play

Lamfrom and Hernandez said protecting the land around the mine would have conservation benefits beyond providing habitat for tortoises.

The area includes a rare ecosystem of native bunch grasses and a forest of full-sized Joshua trees.

Adding the area to the preserve could allow for reintroduction of antelope-like pronghorn, which are second only to the cheetah in running speed. The grazers are believed to have been hunted out by gold miners in the early 20th century.

The area also is a route for bighorn sheep making their way between the Piute and New York mountain ranges. Lynch said he often has seen bighorns running up and down the steep slopes of mine pits. "They are like kids at a playground," he said.

Lamfrom is hopeful that the deal will win approval and the land can become part of the Mojave National Preserve. "This could be the finest example of high desert grasslands in California," he said.

Renovated depot in Kingman opens this spring

2011-01-14T06:01:00.000-08:00

February open house will mark end of decade in red tape limbo

Dusty footprints still spread across the floor of the newly-renovated Kingman Train Depot Thursday morning. The depot will be turned over to Amtrak in early spring, which will then add the finishing touches on its new waiting room there, including furniture. (JC AMBERLYN/Miner)

James Chilton
Kingman Daily Miner

KINGMAN - Renovation work on the historic Kingman Train Depot was completed late last year, but it may still be several months before Amtrak customers can expect to utilize the facility.

According to Kingman Public Works Projects Manager Kyle Taylor, the city is currently waiting for Amtrak to move into the structure, something he said isn't likely to happen until spring.

"The city doesn't have control over that, but I did speak to Amtrak (Wednesday) and they're looking to hopefully put some of their equipment in there in March or April," Taylor said. "It wouldn't be until after that that it would open up to Amtrak passengers."

The 103-year-old train depot had been in limbo for nearly a decade while the city wrangled with various governmental agencies to get the proper clearance for the project, which only got underway last summer. The rehabilitation, which was made possible through a $600,000 grant from the Arizona Department of Transportation, has seen the construction of a new platform, new exterior and interior work, and the creation of a space that has been set aside for use as a railroad museum - an appropriate

move given the city's namesake Lewis Kingman, who performed survey work for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad.

"It's basically the eastern half of the building is the museum and the western half is Amtrak," Taylor said. "There's two rooms on Amtrak's side. One room is going to be just a waiting room and the other part is going to be Amtrak's staff area."

Taylor said the exact details of who will run the museum and what objects will be featured there have yet to be decided. Public Works has taken proposals from both the Whistle Stop Railroad Club - a group of railroad hobbyists and former career employees - and the Mohave Museum of History and Arts. A final proposal for the museum is likely to come before the City Council for approval in the coming months.

In the meantime, however, Taylor said the city does plan to host a ribbon-cutting and open house for the newly-renovated train depot sometime in February, when members of the public will finally be able to get a glimpse at contractor T.R. Orr's interior handiwork.

"It'll be on a Saturday, probably the second or third Saturday I think," Taylor said. "Toward the latter part of February."

Feinstein vows to pass new Desert Protection Act

2011-01-02T22:47:00.000-08:00

By BEN GOAD
The Press-Enterprise

WASHINGTON - Sixteen years ago, the clock was ticking on landmark legislation to protect millions of acres of Inland Southern California's mountains, rivers, washes and rugged desert land.

One minute remained on a 15-minute vote for the bill more than a decade in the making. It was the last day of the October session in the U.S. Senate, and Democrats, unbeknownst to them, were facing a Republican takeover that would have made passage of the bill all but impossible.

Just then, Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, of Illinois, delayed by a faulty garage-door opener, burst into the chamber and cast the deciding vote on the bill championed by freshman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, sealing the creation of the Mojave National Preserve, and the Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks.

No such luck this time around.

Feinstein, D-Calif., late last year once again introduced legislation to preserve vast swathes of Southern California desert. But efforts to pass the Desert Monument Protection Act of 2010 before Republicans claim control of the House and add to their numbers in the Senate next month fell short, doomed by a flurry of other national business.

Yet Feinstein, who spent more than a year building support from area off-roaders, solar energy and environmental groups before introducing the bill, said she is undeterred by the prospect of a tougher political landscape in the next Congress.

"I have had a 20-year vested interest in the desert -- in seeing that it's protected and that what solar is there is appropriate for the area and does not destroy the flora, the fauna, the beauty," Feinstein said this month before the Senate adjourned for the year. "I am relentless in that regard."

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS

In total, the legislation would bar development on more than a million acres in San Bernardino County's High Desert and northwest of Palm Springs. The largest component is the 941,000-acre Mojave Trails National Monument, encompassing dry lakes, mountain ranges and other terrain on both sides of Interstate 40, south of the Mojave National Preserve.

It also would establish the Sand to Snow National Monument stretching across 134,000 acres from San Gorgonio Peak to the desert above Palm Springs.

The larger monument would incorporate 266,000 acres of former railroad land that was deeded by an Oak Glen environmental group to the federal government in the 1990s for preservation. The Wildlands Conservancy acquired the land through private donations and turned it over to the federal government with the understanding that it would be protected from development.

The group was outraged to learn in recent years that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management had begun accepting applications on that land from solar energy firms, who saw the land as perfect for alternative power plants. The conservancy's concerns provided the initial impetus for the bill.

Feinstein and her staff, over many months, built a coalition of support for the bill from recreation groups, the energy industry, off-roaders, local governments, the military and others with competing interests in the desert.

SELECT DEVELOPMENT

The bill would designate permanent off-road vehicle play areas to ensure continued recreation options. It also would require federal agencies to identify zones within their jurisdiction where renewable energy production is in the public good. Those firms whose applications were accepted and would be displaced by the monument would get first crack at developing projects in those areas.

The bill won support from the Obama administration and received a mostly warm reception during a hearing in May before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. But concerns remain, particularly among some Republicans who oppose limits on development and adding to the government's land management responsibilities. The 1994 desert bill, for example, got support from only 12 of the 42 Republicans then in the Senate.

At least one Republican, Sen. Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, opposes the bill on those grounds, his spokesman said soon after it was introduced.

Inland Rep. Jerry Lewis, who represents portions of the High Desert that would be impacted by the bill, has not taken a public position. But Lewis, R-Redlands, has raised concerns about locking up areas that have been used for mining, energy development and military training exercises.

Feinstein considered attaching the bill to a huge end-of-year spending package to fund federal government operations. That might have lessened opposition since her proposal would have reflected a small part of legislation seen as essential to keep the government running.

But faced with expiring Bush-era tax cuts, ratification of a major nuclear arms treaty and the repeal of the military's ban on openly gay service members, Congress opted to pass a stopgap resolution to keep current funding levels. Feinstein had to shelve the idea and shift focus to re-introduction of the bill in the next Congress.

'AN ABSOLUTE FIGHTER'

Few lawmakers are better suited to collect support across party lines than Feinstein. Now in her fourth term, Feinstein has forged important relationships with her Republican colleagues and has gained a reputation as a moderate on many issues.

But she's also unyielding in her pursuit of wilderness protections, said Elden Hughes, a longtime desert environmentalist who was closely involved with both the 1994 bill and the current legislation. If the earlier bill is any indication, she will have to be.

Sixteen years passed from the time then-Rep. George Brown, D-San Bernardino, introduced the first version of that bill to the day 16 years ago, when Feinstein saw her version approved.

"She's an absolute fighter," Hughes said. "She will hang in there."

Board Accepts Grant for Victor Valley Museum

2010-12-01T00:30:00.000-08:00

Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt
Mitzelfelt Memo

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors authorized the County Museum to receive a grant to fund programs at the soon-to-reopen Victor Valley Museum in Apple Valley at 11873 Apple Valley Road.

"The museum will provide educational outreach programs to at least 1,500 students in 20 schools throughout the Victor Valley," said Supervisor Mitzelfelt. "Funds will also be used to purchase equipment and supplies to develop and present public programs at the Victor Valley Branch Museum, reaching more than 1,250 residents in a series of Family Fun Days and informal gallery programs."

The County Museum will receive $9,000 of Community Foundation grant funds from the San Bernardino County Museum Association to serve High Desert residents during in-school "Museums on the Road" programs. The County Museum has received this grant funding annually since 2005. Starting this year, funds will also be used to develop and provide public programs at the newly acquired and remodeled Victor Valley Branch Museum in Apple Valley.

The Victor Valley Museum, first opened in 1993, was donated to the county in January 2010. With funds provided mostly by Supervisor Mitzelfelt, the County Museum immediately began renovating the facility to align the museum with the County Museum's important American Association of Museums accreditation standards. All collections, exhibits and programs are being evaluated and refurbished to present the cultural and natural heritage of the High Desert region in a way that supports state educational standards.

The effort to renovate a 14,000-square-foot facility is no small assignment. Crews are currently making the museum compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. New flooring and lighting have been installed, and the interior and exterior have been repainted. The thousands of collection objects are being evaluated; school programs are being developed, and 95 percent of the exhibited elements have been completed.

Once crews are done with the renovations, museum staff will need a month to populate the interior with exhibitions. Reopening is anticipated for January 2011.

Boxer, Reid huddle over strategy for massive resources bill

2010-11-30T00:30:00.000-08:00

Colleagues enlist Reid's help with last-ditch push for massive water, lands, wildlife package

By Paul Quinlan, John McArdle and Patrick Reis
E and E Publishing

Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Harry Reid (D-NV)

The full-court press is on to assemble and pass a monumental package of waterways, public lands and wildlife bills in the final days of this Congress.

Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) last night to discuss packaging a slew of waterways bills that won bipartisan endorsements from her committee with measures that emerged with similarly broad-based support from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee aimed at protecting more than 2 million acres and creating new national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and wildlife sanctuaries.

"It was great," Boxer said of her meeting with Reid. "What we're doing is we're talking to the Republicans now who voted for all the bills in my committee to see if they will go along with doing a package of bills."
Boxer added it was unlikely that such a bill could pass the Senate with unanimous support; thus, work is under way to obtain the necessary 60 votes.

"I think we have a good chance because they are bipartisan bills," Boxer said.

Reid spokeswoman Regan Lachapelle declined to discuss the meeting's outcome but said a package was possible. "We do not discuss private meetings, but this is on a list of possible items for consideration this work period," she said in an e-mail.

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee's National Parks Subcommittee, said his committee's bills have "broad support" and that he was working down a list of Republican colleagues to ask if they would be supportive.

"There's a lot of conversation occurring right now," Udall said. "There's been a lot of hard work the last two years, and it would be disappointing, to say the least, if a lot of these targeted bills died because the Senate couldn't find the time to move them forward."

Others, like Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), who sits on Boxer's committee and hopes to pass a Great Lakes bill he is co-sponsoring as part of the package, spoke more pessimistically about the odds of success in a badly divided Senate chamber with an already swamped agenda for the lame-duck session.

"I think it's a problem getting anything done at this stage in the game," Voinovich said. "Anything now is going to be tough."

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who wants to include a Chesapeake Bay bill that would backstop the Obama administration's ambitious, U.S. EPA-led effort to clamp down on farm and stormwater pollution, also warned of the long odds.

"Lame ducks are always uncertain," Cardin said. His bill, the most controversial of the waterways bills, eventually won bipartisan committee support after negotiations with the GOP. "Significant changes were made because of their concerns. I think we got it right."

Environmental groups continue to push for action on what they say would be a landmark package. The waterways bills up for consideration, which sailed through Boxer's committee in June, would protect and restore the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, Long Island Sound, Gulf of Mexico and San Francisco Bay. Most would authorize, but do not appropriate, money for EPA to set up new program offices relating to the major waterways, award grants and increase accountability.

The Pew Charitable Trusts is running an ad in tomorrow's editions of Roll Call and Politico that will urge Republicans and Democrats to pass the bipartisan wilderness legislation, which the ad says would "give permanent protection to more than two million acres of breathtaking landscapes in thirteen states -- from Washington State's Alpine Lakes to Idaho's Boulder-White Clouds to Tennessee's Upper Bald River."

"Hunters, anglers, business leaders, conservationists and other local citizens who've worked together to get these measures this far are counting on Congress to take action before it adjourns," the ad says, against a backdrop of New Mexico's Organ Mountains, which include lands in line to receive protection.

Demolition crews take down Carl Bray house

2010-11-25T00:30:00.000-08:00

The Carl Bray House and Gallery was demolished and will soon be replaced with an “interpretive exhibit” to showcase artifacts from the historic site. (Courtesy of the City of Indian Wells)

Mariecar Mendoza
The Desert Sun

The last of the Carl Bray House and Gallery has been torn down to replace what the Indian Wells City Council called an “attractive nuisance” with a safer alternative.

Demolition of the more than 50-year-old building began last week, with final work completed Wednesday, Indian Wells officials said.

On Nov. 4, the City Council approved the demolition and gave the green light for city staff to move forward with work on an “interpretive exhibit” to showcase artifacts from the historic site.

The demolition was the result of more than a year of debate between city officials and residents who wanted to preserve the historic building.

The building was named after Bray, an artist known nationally for his desert landscapes and smoke tree paintings and has been a staple of the city since the early 1950s.

The city purchased the 14,148-square-foot site in January 2009 for nearly $260,000 claiming the structure posed a “safety hazard.”

The city spent $56,000 for the environmental impact report and legal services needed to ensure a vetted process.

The demolition cost about $58,000, said Community Development Director Corrie Kates.

Had the city decided to rehabilitate the building, city officials said it would have cost an estimated $960,000.

“We tried our best to save something of old Indian Wells,” said Adele Ruxton, president of the Indian Wells Historic Preservation Foundation, who fought to preserve the historic site.

“I hope that whatever appears as the interpretive exhibit on the Carl Bray site really depicts not only the artist who lived and worked there, but tells the story of old Indian Wells when it was but an Indian Village.”

Dennis Schramm to Retire

2010-11-24T00:30:00.000-08:00

Mojave National Preserve
NPS Digest

Dennis Schramm, Superintendent of Mojave National Preserve for the last five years and a 33-year-veteran of the National Park Service (NPS), is retiring on December 3rd .

Dennis completes 12 years at the Preserve, including seven years as a management assistant, from 1995 to 2002, a tenure that spans the first seven years of the park’s existence.

He began his NPS career in the Denver Service Center in February 1978 as an environmental specialist and planner. In his park service career, he worked in three California parks, including Lava Beds National Monument, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, and the Preserve. His career also includes assignments in the Alaska Regional Office and at the park service’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Dennis especially prizes his eight years in Alaska, where he was fortunate to travel throughout the state working on mining and hazmat issues in the parks. He is particularly proud of the extensive hazmat clean-up work that was completed in Denali National Park & Preserve, Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve.

Dennis served on the National Wilderness Steering Committee during his tenure in Washington, D.C., and he was pleased to be part of the team that rewrote management policies in 2005. Dennis also lead a national team of planners in the development of the updated management planning policies and handbook and, in particular, the new planning training course for NPS.

Dennis was honored to be assigned to duty in Washington, D.C., in 2007 to help develop plans for the celebration of the parks national centennial in 2016. He also was privileged to serve as deputy superintendent at Yosemite National Park in 2009. Other assignments included serving as the Pacific West Region superintendent representative to the Natural Resource Advisory Group for three years and, most recently, as NPS representative on the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative initiative.

Dennis is proud of his five years as superintendent at Mojave and of the many accomplishments of his dedicated staff. His management of the Preserve focused on building support for the park, on turning around troubled relationships with stakeholders, and on starting the first friends group for the Preserve. He was also extensively involved in external issues and in working across agency boundaries on landscape scale conservation.

Dennis has extensive experience in the Mojave Desert through his NPS assignments and his formal education and a deep life-long connection, having grown up in the Mojave. He was reared mostly in Las Vegas and attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Dennis had the good fortune to conduct his graduate studies in Death Valley, studying the plants of the Black Mountains.

He and his wife, Marcia, also an NPS employee, have three grown children. They plan to relocate to the Denver area in the spring of 2011 where they can be closer to their grandson, Mason.