A monumental flight over Mojave Trails

Mojave Desert Land Trust aerial tour shows splendor of national monument whose status could be reassessed

Amboy Crater is a significant geological feature of the Mojave Trails National Monument. Last week, the Mojave Desert Land Trust hosted an aerial tour as part of the third anniversary of the monument. [James Quigg, Daily Press]

By Matthew Cabe
Victor Valley Daily News

PALM SPRINGS — Storm clouds hovered over the city and patches of rain fell from above the nearby San Jacinto Mountains, but two Mojave Desert Land Trust officials arrived at the international airport here last week ready for a celebration.

Staff at the Joshua Tree-based nonprofit recently completed plans to commemorate the upcoming third anniversary of Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow and Castle Mountains national monuments.

All three were established Feb. 12, 2016, by former President Barack Obama through use of the Antiquities Act. Combined, they encompass nearly 1.8 million acres in the Mojave, Colorado and Sonoran deserts.

To offer a comprehensive view, MDLT partnered with the nonprofit EcoFlight for a series of flyovers within the Mojave Trails National Monument, which boasts 1.6 million acres and is the largest national monument in the 48 contiguous states, according to MDLT Communications Director Jessica Dacey.

Shortly before 10 a.m. Tuesday, Dacey and MDLT Education Coordinator Adam Henne briefed a group of passengers that included a Daily Press reporter and photographer.

“You get a bit of a buzz when you go up there,” Dacey said. “Especially coming from this angle ... you start to understand the seamlessness between the parks.”

Tuesday’s flight traveled first above Joshua Tree National Park, then over Sheep Hole Pass, which served as the Cessna 210′s entrance into Mojave Trails.

For Dacey and others, part of the monument’s importance is its function as a wildlife corridor connecting the national park and the Mojave National Preserve, the more than 1.5-million-acre swath of National Park Service land between interstates 15 and 40.

Within the monument, the Cady Mountains serve as one of the best areas in the Mojave Desert to see bighorn sheep, according to MDLT.

The North American population of the muscular animal with curved horns was once estimated in the millions. By 1900, human encroachment diminished bighorn sheep numbers to several thousand, National Wildlife Federation statistics show. Conservation efforts have since brought those numbers up to nearly 8,000.

Bonanza Spring, located near the monument’s northern border, is the only wetland for 1,000 square miles. Like the Cady Mountains, the spring is also home to bighorns and 70 bird species.

Dacey said the habitat connectivity created with the monument’s establishment allows many animals to roam, helps increase their populations and protects plant life they need to survive.

There are also unique historical and cultural aspects to the monument’s significance, she said.

Mojave Trails is home to the longest undeveloped section of U.S. Route 66. Preservation of the “Mother Road,” according to the World Monuments Fund, would equal positive economic effects like “sustainable tourism.”

The monument also includes some of the best-preserved sites from the World War II-era Desert Training Center where, under the command of Gen. George S. Patton, more than a million troops were trained on 18,000 square miles for desert combat in North Africa.

Deep within the vast expanse visible through the Cessna’s starboard-side windows, another geographical feature appeared, albeit inconspicuously from 2,500 feet above the desert floor.

The Cadiz Dunes Wilderness spans nearly 20,000 acres in the heart of the monument. The dunes appear to “hum in the wind,” Dacey told passengers.

“I think they’re more majestic than the Kelso Dunes in the Preserve,” she said.

Bruce Gordon, who piloted the Cessna, nodded in agreement from behind his aviators. Gordon founded EcoFlight in 2002 to advocate for environmental protection via programs and aerial visuals that expand public awareness of wild lands.

He couldn’t help but take his hands off the Cessna’s yoke to capture photographs of the pristine topography below. He used the 80-minute flight to share his own knowledge of the region.

Several concerns were noted, as well.

One, MDLT contends, is Cadiz Inc.’s planned water project, which would pull 50,000-acre-feet of water a year from an ancient aquifer beneath the Mojave Desert. The water would later be sold in Southern California.

Cadiz owns roughly 34,000 acres within Mojave Trails, Dacey said. Company officials have said the pumping would not harm the environment. Rather, the project would conserve surplus water lost to evaporation at nearby dry lakes.

Cadiz’s research maintains that Bonanza Spring would not be impacted by pumping. Other research published in 2018 called the company’s findings into question and said the project would threaten Bonanza Spring, according to MDLT, which funded some of the research.

Cadiz CEO and President Scott Slater has stated the company is confident of no interconnection between groundwater and water levels in Bonanza Spring, the company’s website shows.

MDLT officials say the project could harm the bighorns that use Bonanza Spring. Dacey said a pipeline for the project has not yet been constructed.

Gordon navigated the plane toward Amboy Crater, situated about three miles southwest of Roy’s Motel and Cafe. At 80,000 years old, Amboy is “North America’s youngest volcano,” Dacey said.

MDLT is one of several environmental groups working to secure Mojave Trails’ status, which Dacey said is “in limbo.”

In April 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke — who resigned his post last month — to review national monuments of at least 100,000 acres that have been designated since 1996.

Trump’s goal was to determine whether the monuments needed reduction or elimination. Mojave Trails was subsequently included for review. Trump called the monuments, particularly Bear Ears National Monument in Utah, a “massive federal land grab.”

An initial report released in December 2017 included changes to 10 monuments. That same month, Trump signed proclamations that scaled back Bear Ears, as well as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In doing so, he declared, “Public lands will once again be for public use.”

Mojave Trails has not been altered, but Dacey said it’s never officially been declared safe.

When the monument was established, a management plan had to be drawn up by this month. That process was halted amid the Interior Department’s review. MDLT is part of a coalition working on a community proposal for a management plan. Dacey said the expectation is for it to guide future planning for Mojave Trails.

In 2016, visitors to Joshua Tree National Park more than doubled to over 2.5 million, prompting Park Superintendent David Smith to declare it was being “loved to death.” Dacey said attendance now is well over 3 million per year.

Amid the rise in popularity, as well as a massive clean-up effort underway in the damaged park following the partial federal government shutdown, groups are hoping to increase awareness of places like Mojave Trails as alternative destinations.

The question MDLT wants people to ask is, “What do these other public lands have to offer?” Dacey said.

From overhead, the answer seems simple enough.

Rare desert spring imperiled by company's plan to pump groundwater

Bonanza Spring nourishes an oasis of plants and trees in the Mojave Desert. (Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

Ian James
The Desert Sun

Below the rocky, sunbaked ridges of the Clipper Mountains in the Mojave Desert, a ribbon of green teems with life.

Cottonwoods, willows and reeds sway with the breeze. Crickets chirp. Bees buzz around shallow pools.

Clear water gushes from a hole in the ground, forming Bonanza Spring, the largest spring in the southeastern Mojave Desert.

This rare oasis is at the center of the fight over a company’s plan to pump groundwater and sell it to California cities.

Cadiz Inc. is proposing to pump an average of 16.3 billion gallons of water each year for 50 years. The company says the project won’t harm any of the springs in the area, and it recently presented a study in which researchers concluded Bonanza Spring wouldn’t be affected by its groundwater pumping.

Now other researchers have come to the opposite conclusion, saying in a new study that Bonanza Spring is likely connected to the same aquifer where the company plans to draw water from wells, and that the project would put the spring at risk of drying up.

Andy Zdon, a hydrogeologist who led the study, analyzed water samples from the spring and determined that unlike other nearby springs, which are fed by rainfall that collects in relatively shallow underground sources, Bonanza Spring flows with water that comes from much deeper underground.

Zdon said the research points to a “hydraulic connection” between the spring and the aquifer that Cadiz intends to use, indicating the spring would probably be affected by the decline in the water table.

“The spring is going to be highly susceptible to drawdown from the pumping,” Zdon said. “It would likely dry up.”

The study, which was published Friday in the journal Environmental Forensics, involved a chemical analysis of water from Bonanza Spring and other springs in Mojave Trails National Monument. The research was conducted by consulting firm Partner Engineering and Science Inc. and funded by the Mojave Desert Land Trust, a nonprofit conservation group that opposes the Cadiz project.

Zdon and his team analyzed the oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in the water and said the water in Bonanza Spring has different characteristics than several other springs in this part of the desert. The stable isotopes in rainwater vary with latitude and elevation, and Zdon and his colleagues used those “signatures” to examine the sources of the spring water.

They determined that Hummingbird, Teresa, and Chuckwalla Springs are “perched” springs, which are relatively shallow and fed by local rainfall percolating into the ground, but that the water in Bonanza Spring differs from local rainfall and instead matches rain that falls well north of the Clipper Mountains in other mountains in the Mojave National Preserve.

The scientists also found that unlike other springs, the water in Bonanza Spring has similar characteristics to groundwater in the aquifer in the adjacent Fenner Valley — including the Fenner Gap, an area where Cadiz plans to pump groundwater.

Zdon coauthored the research with hydrogeologists M. Lee Davisson and Adam H. Love. They said in the study that Bonanza Spring “has generally been assumed to be a perched spring disconnected from the basin-fill aquifer system,” but that their results indicate it’s likely connected with that larger reserve of groundwater.

And if groundwater levels decline due to pumping, the researchers wrote, that “could result in an uncertain, but potentially substantial decrease in free-flowing water from the spring.”

Cadiz disputed the findings, and scientists who recently studied the spring for the company called the new research flawed.

“Zdon does not account for the existence of two observable geologic faults that fully insulate the Bonanza Spring from any impact from the Cadiz Water Project,” Cadiz President and CEO Scott Slater said in a statement.

In the earlier study commissioned by the Los Angeles-based company, researchers identified two faults that they said block groundwater flowing in fractured bedrock. They said those two “bounding faults” intersect at the spring, and groundwater spills over the faults to form the spring.

The study, which was released in January, was conducted by geologist Miles Kenney and hydrogeologist Terry Foreman, who said the effects of groundwater drawdown around the company’s wells wouldn’t reach the area of the spring due to a “hydraulic disconnect” and faults between the two areas.

The wellfield where the company intends to pump groundwater is located about 1,000 feet lower in elevation than the spring, and about 11 miles away.

In their assessment, Kenney and Foreman wrote that “the spring’s discharge is localized within a fractured rock system that is hydraulically separated from the alluvial regional groundwater system in Fenner Valley located three miles to the east.” They said their research “demonstrates that the perennial spring discharge is controlled by the existence of two bounding faults.”

As part of the research, Kenney mapped the faults and the geology around the spring. During six days of field work, Kenney inspected a tunnel uphill from the spring on the mountainside that was apparently excavated in the early 1900s by miners, and he found a portion of the fault exposed in the wall of the passage. The other intersecting fault zone was also visible.

“Essentially those faults act like dams,” Foreman said. “It’s effectively a subsurface dam that then causes the water to overspill, groundwater to spill over those faults.”

The researchers who prepared the study for Cadiz said the spring’s flow depends on recharge from precipitation in a catchment area that extends over four miles to the north.

“The spring is going to be controlled absolutely by climatic conditions, basically changes in long-term rainfall and recharge above where those faults occur,” Foreman said. “It’s going to be driven by that recharge as opposed to anything that happens in the valley.”

Kenney criticized Zdon’s research, saying “he basically didn’t look at the local geology.”

“We think it’s flawed and it needs to be corrected,” Foreman added.

Arguing over the science

Zdon said he disagreed with the conclusions of the study commissioned by Cadiz. He pointed out that Kenney and Foreman didn’t include a similar analysis of water samples.

“You can’t begin to source where water comes from without looking at the water itself, and they did not do that,” Zdon said.

Zdon previously conducted a survey of more than 300 springs and water holes across the Mojave Desert for the federal Bureau of Land Management during 2015 and 2016. He’s found that most of the springs in the desert rely on local precipitation and may increase or decrease in flow depending on whether it’s been wet or dry.

But Zdon said records from more than a century ago show that Bonanza Spring is different and that its flow has held steady at about 10 gallons a minute. It’s still putting out as much water as it did in the early 1900s, he said, when a pipeline carried water downhill to the railway stop in Danby to fill tanks aboard passing steam engines.

Zdon said other measurements provided additional clues. When a spring depends on shallow groundwater, the water temperature is usually close to the average annual air temperature. But the water in Bonanza Spring emerges from the ground more than 11 degrees warmer, indicating it’s warmed up by the earth deep underground. His team calculated the water must be coming up from more than 750 feet underground.

Zdon also analyzed the water to check for tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that was released into the atmosphere with nuclear weapons testing starting in the late 1940s. The water in nearby Teresa Spring contains tritium, showing the water fell as rain or snow sometime between the 40s and the present day. But the water in Bonanza Spring contains no tritium, indicating it’s been underground since before those atomic tests.

Zdon said other carbon-dating tests, which weren’t described in their study, have found that the water coming out of Bonanza Spring has been underground for approximately 15,000 years.

“So, between the groundwater ages, the temperatures and the chemistry, looking at it from three different directions, it’s all pointing to the same answer: that this is tied into more regional flow,” Zdon said. “That water has got to be moving towards the Clipper Mountains through the basin-fill aquifer… and seeping through the Clipper Mountains, probably along fractured rocks along the fault zones, and surfacing at the spring.”

On that point, too, the scientists who prepared the report for Cadiz said they disagree based on their observations and their work mapping the faults and reviewing scientific papers. They also studied documents concerning two old mines located about a mile northeast of the spring.

The groundwater levels in those inactive mines are about 150 feet lower than the elevation where water flows from Bonanza Spring, they wrote, suggesting that the faults in the area, which run from the northwest toward the southeast, act as barriers and “groundwater flow is effectively compartmentalized.”

“It’s physically impossible for groundwater to move from the north, across that area where those mines are, to Bonanza Spring,” Foreman said. “Groundwater levels to the north of Bonanza Spring are lower, so there’s no way that groundwater levels can go from a high to a low and then essentially go back uphill. It’s just physically not possible.”

Kenney also reviewed aerial images in mapping the faults and the geology. Cadiz’s research team said they found other geologic signs including an abundance of precipitated minerals along the fault zones, “indicating that the faults can be strong groundwater barriers.”

As part of the study commissioned by Cadiz, 10 hydrologists and geologists visited the spring in December with Foreman and Kenney, and five of them reviewed the report and agreed with the conclusion that the spring wouldn’t be affected by the water project.

Cadiz has proposed to pump groundwater on land surrounded by Mojave Trails National Monument. The company owns 34,000 acres in the desert along Route 66, and it plans to build a 43-mile pipeline to carry water from its property to the Colorado River Aqueduct.

In 2011 and 2012, Cadiz’s proposal went through an environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act. Orange County’s Santa Margarita Water District served as the lead agency in the review process and certified the environmental impact report. The document repeatedly states that “the physical evidence indicates” the aquifer isn’t connected to the springs and therefore the pumping would have no impact on the springs.

Conservation groups challenged the environmental review in court, but they lost.

Frazier Haney, land conservation director for the Mojave Desert Land Trust, said the new research shows those environmental review documents were based on incomplete science and that the water project poses a serious threat to the spring.

During a visit to Bonanza Spring, Haney walked past blooming brittlebush shrubs and wildflowers to the edge of the spring, where the thick vegetation rustled in the breeze. He said he’s seen mountain lion tracks here. The spring is also frequented by bighorn sheep and bobcats that come to drink, and by migratory birds that forage among the trees.

Frogs and tadpoles swim in the ponds, and dozens of species of native plants grow in the wetland, which stretches a half-mile downhill from the spot where water pours out of the ground.

Walking to the top of a bluff, Haney looked out over the springs.

“It’s a magical place,” Haney said. “Springs like this are one of the most important parts of the ecosystem.”

From the ridges above the spring, you can see the open desert of the Fenner Valley below. It stretches out in a plain between mountain ranges, covered with creosote bushes. Haney pointed out the patch of the desert where Cadiz is proposing to drill new wells.

“Intensive groundwater pumping out here could be devastating for the ecosystem,” Haney said.

His group focuses on buying lands to protect parts of the desert for conservation. It has purchased more than 71,000 acres for conservation since 2006. Some of those lands have been transferred to the federal government and have become part of the Mojave Trails National Monument.

Cadiz’s managers have said they plan to use groundwater that would otherwise gradually flow downhill and evaporate from two dry lakes. On those dry lakebeds, other companies dig trenches in the cracked soil to extract salts left by the evaporating water.

The concept of using water that would otherwise evaporate from the lakebeds is reflected in the company’s formal name for its plan: the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project.

“The Cadiz Water Project will stop the annual loss of more than 10 billion gallons per year to evaporation,” Courtney Degener, a vice president and spokesperson for the company, said in an email. “It cannot and will not impact area springs but it will make available new water for 400,000 people, create critical groundwater storage capacity for our region and support 5,900 new jobs in a safe and sustainable way.”

Degener said Zdon’s new study “fails to account for the most current field work and hydrogeological conclusions about area springs, and does not present any new credible findings.”

‘Cone of depression’

Cadiz’s proposal has been hotly debated for years. While pursuing the plan to sell water, the company has been pumping groundwater on its property to irrigate nearly 2,000 acres of farmland, growing lemons, grapes, raisins and other crops.

During President Barack Obama’s administration, federal officials had hindered the project by ruling that the company would need a new permit to build a water pipeline alongside a railroad.

But in October, President Donald Trump’s administration reversed that decision and gave the company a green light. The federal Bureau of Land Management told Cadiz it wouldn’t need a permit to build the pipeline along the railroad right-of-way.

Two environmental groups — the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Food Safety — are challenging that decision in a lawsuit. Another group, the National Parks Conservation Association, is suing to challenge a related policy change: a 2017 Interior Department legal opinion that said railroad companies are allowed to lease out portions of their rights-of-way for other purposes without going through a federal environmental review.

Cadiz has said it plans to move ahead with designing and building the water pipeline alongside the railroad.

That plan still could face obstacles, though, because some of the land where Cadiz wants to build the pipeline is owned by the state. And in September, California’s State Lands Commission told the company that any use of the state-owned lands under its jurisdiction would require a lease and its approval.

Opponents of the project seized on the new study, saying it reveals problems in the 2012 environmental review.

“Given this new information, I strongly believe Cadiz’s CEQA review must be reexamined,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a statement Friday. “Cadiz needs to accept this new scientific study and abandon its goal of draining the Mojave Desert of its most precious resource: water. It’s time Cadiz and its investors give up on this desert boondoggle.”

Chris Clarke, California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, agreed and said the new research “demonstrates Cadiz has used a flawed hydrology model that produced flawed analysis” for the environmental review. He said that process “now must be corrected through additional environmental review.”

The company’s officials have defended the environmental review, pointing out that California’s environmental law is considered more stringent than any federal environmental law and that San Bernardino County in 2012 approved a groundwater management plan — formally titled the Groundwater Management, Monitoring and Mitigation Plan — which sets additional limits for the project.

Cadiz also points to the court decisions upholding the review.

“Peer-reviewed science, physical observations of the region and California’s courts all agree: The Cadiz Water Project will protect the desert environment including Bonanza Spring,” Degener said.

The groundwater management plan details the county’s oversight role for the project.

“It is not anticipated that the Project will have any impact on the springs,” the document says. “Nonetheless, this Management Plan provides for quarterly monitoring of the Bonanza Spring as an ‘indicator spring’ because it is the spring that is in closest proximity to the Project wellfield.”

The plan calls for “baseline and periodic visual observation and flow estimates” and says monitoring wells between the wellfield and the spring would be used to track groundwater levels.

According to the plan, if there’s a reduction in the spring’s flow and it’s determined to be due to the company’s wells, “corrective measures” would include reducing pumping, changing pumping locations in the wellfield or stopping groundwater extraction.

More: Federal policy change criticized for giving ‘free pass’ to controversial desert water project

One of the concerns that Zdon and others raise about Cadiz’s plan is that the pumping would create a “cone of depression” in the aquifer as groundwater flows from surrounding areas toward the company’s wellfield.

The way groundwater drawdown occurs in the desert, Zdon said, “it’s very hard to control what happens once that cone of depression starts building.”

Once the pumping begins to lower the water table, that depressed area of the aquifer would continue to expand for years, even if the pumping were stopped.

Given that dynamic, Zdon said, the monitoring plan “is not sufficient to be protective of the spring.”

“When you lower the water table below a spring system like that, the first thing you would notice is a reduction in surface flow and maybe a complete cessation of any kind of surface water at the site,” Zdon said. “If you see an impact at the spring, it’s probably too late.”

Cadiz’s executives and researchers responded that the sort of monitoring Zdon is calling for is already part of the county’s plan.

Degener said the project “will be regulated by an extensive groundwater monitoring plan enforced by the County that includes the exact kind of groundwater monitoring Zdon recommends and goes even further including monitoring features across the entire watershed.”

There are already two existing monitoring wells, one uphill from Fenner Valley and another close to Danby, Foreman said.

“It’s interesting that the water temperature in those wells is actually higher than the water temperature of the spring,” Foreman said. “And so that water has obviously moved over long distances and it’s 2 to 3 degrees higher in temperature than the spring, so we think that the spring is more local water, and those water temperatures show that separation.”

Kenney and Foreman said some of Zdon’s findings are consistent with their own but they disagree with the conclusions, including that the spring would be fed by recharge from an area far to the north.

“I’m wondering how much of his findings might change if he was to consider the watershed that we considered, not north of the Clippers but just simply the rocks in the western Clipper Mountains,” Kenney said.

Zdon and his colleagues stressed that if the pumping begins, more intensive monitoring would be necessary to protect the spring. They wrote that the groundwater monitoring “should be designed to obtain sufficient early warning of potentially damaging groundwater level decline.”

They said relying on observable changes at the spring would be ineffective, and that drilling monitoring wells close to Bonanza Spring would provide a way of spotting a decline quickly — before it’s too late for the spring.

Their research included not only data collected by Zdon and his colleagues, but also data from a study that researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory conducted in 2000 for Cadiz and the Metropolitan Water District, which were working together at the time on an earlier iteration of the project.

That earlier research focused on identifying the recharge area and estimating the amount of recharge. It included geochemical analyses of the water in Bonanza Spring and other springs and wells.

Davisson, who was one of Zdon’s coauthors, also helped carry out that research for Lawrence Livermore back in 2000, and the data was publicly released in August 2017.

Zdon said the data helped confirm his team’s findings.

“We were actually largely using the same analytical techniques in sampling that Lawrence Livermore used back in 2000 on behalf of Cadiz,” Zdon said. “What that did was essentially confirm our sampling, because basically our results 17 years later were nearly identical with what Lawrence Livermore came up with.”

Rep. Cook signs support of national monument reduction

By Charity Lindsey
Victorville Daily Press

Republican Congressman Paul Cook recently signed a letter to the Department of the Interior recommending the reduction of some national monuments, despite nonprofit efforts to preserve their boundaries and designations.

In a June 30 letter to DOI Secretary Zinke signed by Cook and 16 other members of congress from western states, lawmakers claim that the “misuse of this outdated 1906 Act has jeopardized the daily activities, livelihoods and traditions of local communities,” including energy development, wildfire prevention efforts and recreational activities like hunting and fishing.

The letter provides an analysis of the 27 monuments currently under the DOI’s review, recommending a reduction of the Mojave Trails National Monument and the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, much to the discontent of the Mojave Desert Land Trust (MDLT), whose representatives claim Cook “has not communicated with his constituents” about the Executive Order.

“It is outrageous that Rep. Cook would go behind the backs of his constituents to argue that one of our Mojave Monuments be diminished,” MDLT Executive Director Danielle Segura said. “The Mojave Desert Land Trust has invested in this landscape for over a decade, and worked alongside many diverse local groups, to create this monument. Rep. Cook couldn’t even wait until the public had commented before trying to strip protections on land important to the local community.”

But in a statement to the Daily Press Tuesday, Cook said that as a government official, “I don’t submit public comments, as this is the domain of the public.”

″Once the letter was submitted, it was published on the Western Caucus website and made available for anyone to view,” Cook said. “To assert that this was done in secret is laughable at best. In fact, my staff sent a link to this letter directly to the staff of the Mojave Desert Land Trust the same day it was sent to Secretary Zinke.”

MDLT has collected more than 1,250 comments focused specifically on the importance of the monuments in the Mojave. The Desert Defenders campaign comment period began May 10, two weeks after the executive order, which impacts four sites affecting San Bernardino County: The San Gabriel Mountains, Mojave Trails, Castle Mountains and Sand to Snow national monuments.

Mojave Trails is located between interstates 15 and 40 and partially surrounds the Mojave National Preserve. While San Gabriel was designated in October 2014, the others were all established in February of last year.

Cook noted that the letter recognized the local support for the Sand to Snow National Monument, which the congress members requested no changes to.

“On the other hand, the former President nearly doubled the total size of the Mojave Trails National Monument from any of the previous proposals,” Cook said. “This was accomplished without any public comment. This letter simply recognizes the illegitimacy of this action and asks that President Trump follow the publicly debated boundaries while rolling back the former President’s overreach.”

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors also sent a letter to the Department of the Interior on May 31, stating its position “that any national monument designations should go through the legislative process, rather than by Presidential Proclamation under The Antiquities Act.”

Joshua trees meet very different fates in California, Arizona

The sun goes down on Joshua trees at Castle Mountains National Monument in eastern California on Feb. 1, 2016. Private land across not far from here was recently transfered to Mojave National Preserve in part to protect these iconic desert plants. (David Becker/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

It’s been an up-and-down month for Joshua trees in the region.

At Mojave National Preserve in California, thousands of the iconic desert plants recently won permanent federal protection, thanks to a land transfer that added 3,100 acres to the park 90 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, in Mohave County, Arizona, a Las Vegas businessman is defending himself from allegations of a “Joshua tree massacre” on about 100 acres of private property he’s clearing for agricultural development.

Al Barbarich, who owns the land about 95 miles southeast of Las Vegas and hopes to establish a nut and fruit orchard there, said his permit to clear the land did not require him to save any of the Joshua trees. But he said he arranged to have about 100 of them dug up and replanted at homes, a school and other locations in the area — all at no cost to those who received the plants.

“We tried to do something nice for the neighbors and the community,” he said.

Some area residents didn’t see it that way. In online posts and a Feb. 12 story in the Kingman Daily Miner newspaper, the developer was accused of wholesale Joshua tree murder.

Barbarich acknowledged that some plants were destroyed as the land was cleared, though he couldn’t say how many. He said a lot of the Joshua trees shown piled up in the photos posted by his critics were older plants with little hope of being successfully transplanted.

The negative publicity is “unfortunate,” Barbarich said, because he felt like he was trying, at his own expense, to do the responsible thing. “We wanted to preserve the trees to the extent that people wanted them,” he said.

FROM PRIVATE TO PROTECTED

The additional Joshua trees now under the protection of Mojave National Preserve in California were also once subject to the whims of private development.

The plants are growing on what used to be scattered pockets of private land within the boundaries of the 1.6 million acre desert preserve. Over the past decade, the nonprofit Mojave Desert Land Trust has been buying up such “private in-holdings” and selling or donating them to the National Park Service.

The latest land transfer, completed earlier this month, involved 110 scattered parcels ranging in size from 5 to 320 acres.

Frazier Haney, conservation director for the trust, said most of the land is located in Lanfair Valley near the eastern edge of the preserve, an area “really rich in Joshua trees and Mojave yucca.”


Haney said the trust purchased the property from “a variety of willing sellers” over the past nine years. The group paid a total of $1.5 million for the land and received $1.4 million from the park service in return.

That money will be used to buy other private property within the preserve and other desert parks in California, Haney said.

“Scenic views, sensitive habitat and historic resources that might otherwise be lost are now protected in perpetuity for all to appreciate and enjoy,” Greg Gress, regional realty chief for the park service, said in a written statement.

Haney said private in-holdings are not governed by the same rules and protections as the surrounding park land. Gradually eliminating the patchwork of in-holdings simplifies management of the entire preserve, he said.

‘STRICTLY WILLING SELLERS’

But Haney stressed that the trust isn’t trying to force private landowners off their property, some of which dates to the days of homesteading in the area roughly 100 years ago. “It’s strictly willing sellers,” he said.

Since it was founded in Joshua Tree, California, in 2007, the conservation group has donated more parcels of land to the park service than any other trust in the country, Haney said.

Mojave National Preserve has gained more than 30,000 acres — and countless Joshua trees — through the trust’s efforts.

Haney said more than 1,300 private parcels remain within the boundaries of the preserve, though, “so we’ve still got a ways to go.”

Nonprofit land trust turns over 3,000 acres to Mojave National Preserve

An entrance to Mojave National Preserve on Zzyzx Road near Baker, Calif. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Associated Press
Los Angeles Times

A nonprofit group has donated more than 3,000 acres of desert land to the Mojave National Preserve.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust announced Wednesday that it had handed over ecologically and historically significant land to the park. The 110 parcels already are surrounded by the national preserve. They include juniper and yucca stands and a century-old homestead site.

The trust has an ongoing program to buy up private land that survived within the boundaries of the Mojave National Preserve, Joshua Tree National Park and Death Valley National Park.

“Development of this private land can degrade neighboring park resources, impact public access and cause management problems for park staff,” a trust statement said.

Over the past decade, the trust has conveyed about 23,000 acres of land to the National Park Service.

“Our great desert parks are immeasurably enhanced” by the work, Greg Gress, regional realty chief for the National Park Service, said in a statement. “Scenic views, sensitive habit and historic resources that might otherwise be lost are now protected in perpetuity for all to appreciate and enjoy.”

State Lauds Mitigation Deal For Ivanpah Solar Project

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (Photo: Craig Dietrich/Flickr/Creative Commons License)

by Chris Clarke
KCET Rewire

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has announced that the finishing touches have been crafted on a deal to preserve 7,000 acres of land in the Mojave Desert as mitigation for the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System near the Mojave National Preserve. But not everyone's happy with that.

The land, whose acquisition and management has cost Ivanpah's owners $11.4 million dollars, was purchased through the state's Advance Mitigation Land Acquisition Program (AMP), started in 2010 by the passage of Senate Bill 34. That program streamlined previous mitigation programs in which developers had to work on their own to acquire parcels of land for protection to "mitigate" the habitat destruction their projects entailed. Under the AMP, CDFW does the legwork of finding suitable mitigation land and developers need only write a check.

A press release on CDFW's website describes the land being preserved to mitigate Ivanpah, though with a significant error:

The lands are comprised of 163 separate parcels in the Chuckwalla Desert Wildlife Management Area (DWMA) in San Bernardino County, and the Fremont-Kramer DWMA and Superior-Cronese DWMA both in Riverside County.

The Chuckwalla DWMA is actually in Riverside County east of the Coachella Valley. The Fremont-Kramer and Superior-Cronise DWMAs are in San Bernardino County; the first is near Boron and the second north of Barstow along the southern edge of the Fort Irwin Army base.

Each individual parcel of the newly acquired lands will be managed either by the Transition Habitat Conservancy, based in Pinon Hills near Hesperia, or the Joshua Tree-based Mojave Desert Land Trust.

The Ivanpah project occupies about 3,500 acres of land, meaning that the ratio of mitigation land to developed land is about 2/1. Ivanpah is owned jointly by developer BrightSource Energy and investors NRG Energy and Google. "Working through the State's Advanced Mitigation Program has proven to be an effective alternative for satisfying the Ivanpah project's mitigation land requirements," said Marc Sydnor, BrightSource's director of environmental affairs, in the CDFW press release. "We've also been able to achieve a project goal of ensuring that the land purchased is used for the highest possible purpose -- to protect our state's natural legacy."

Other observers are less sanguine about the deal. Ileene Anderson, biologist and Public Lands Desert Director for the Center for Biological Diversity, lauded the land being preserved but told ReWire that better development strategy would avoid the need to replace the tortoise habitat at Ivanpah:

While these acquisitions are in important areas for desert tortoise conservation, future solar projects would be best developed on already disturbed lands and rooftops, so that desert tortoise habitat is not impacted and therefore there is no need for mitigation.

Meanwhile, blogger Shaun G. at Mojave Desert Blog, a long-term critic of utility-scale desert solar projects, was even more unsparing about the trade-offs:

[W]hat benefit did we achieve in Ivanpah? Approximately 392 megawatts of solar energy. Companies in the United States installed far more solar panels on already-disturbed lands and rooftops during the Ivanpah Solar project's construction period. And Germany added thousands of megawatts of mostly rooftop solar. All while we watched BrightSource destroy a true natural treasure in the Mojave.

Mojave land trust achieves acquisition milestone

Joshua Tree charity donates 10,000th acre to Park Service

Hi-Desert Star

JOSHUA TREE — The Mojave Desert Land Trust, a Joshua Tree public charity, announced the acquisition of its 10,000th acre of land to be donated to the National Park Service this week.

The land trust has given land to Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park through 183 transactions at a cost of $5 million dollars.

Mindy Kaufman, the land trust’s president, said she was extremely proud of the achievement: “We are only 3 years old as a land trust and these acquisitions speak to the grit and determination of the board, our funders, small staff, great volunteers and the community in its desire to preserve land in the Mojave Desert.”

Founded in 2005, the Mojave Desert Land Trust uses a fund in the Preserving Wild California Program to acquire privately held parcels inside the boundaries of desert national parks.

Most national parks contain private lands that are holdovers from the homesteading, ranching and mining days.

The Mojave Land Trust believes these lands can become the staging grounds for incompatible development, such as commercial real estate or homes, putting wildlife, natural and cultural treasures and the experiences of park visitors at risk.

According to the land trust, the National Park Service lists 1.8 million acres of private land it hopes will be acquired and donated to the government at an estimated price tag of $1.9 billion.

Inholdings that require restoration from dumping, illegal roads or other uses are restored by the Mojave Desert Land Trust before they are donated to the National Park Service.

To date, using professional contractors and the volunteer time of trained land stewards, over 70 acres have been restored — recycling more than 15 tons of debris, 36 vehicles and four travel trailers.

This year, Nolina Peak, which the land trust acquired in 2007, was incorporated into Joshua Tree National Park.

The 640-acre Nolina Peak parcel protects the Quail Mountain watershed originating in Joshua Tree National Park.

“In only three years, the MDLT has acquired over 3,500 acres in Joshua Tree, a rate of acquisition that far exceeds what the park was able to accomplish,” said Curt Sauer, superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park.

“While these lands are all critical to the management of resources within the park, the acquisition of Nolina Peak is a giant step forward in our ability to preserve the northwest end of Quail Mountain, with its resident populations of bighorn sheep, bobcat, mountain lion and desert tortoise.”

Sauer said he considers the land trust an important partner for conservation in the Mojave Desert.

Another recent acquisition of 320 acres is located in the Mojave National Preserve. A wildlife corridor, this land links the pinyon juniper highlands of the New York Mountains with the Watson Wash drainage.

The site also includes habitat for plants and animals and is the location of a historic homestead.

Preserve superintendent Dennis Schramm said the land trust’s help has been especially critical in the past several years, when federal money to buy land was mostly unavailable.

“Wilderness, desert tortoise critical habitat, springs and other biologically diverse properties are now permanently protected due to the efforts of MDLT,” said Schramm.

Non-profit begins effort to end land ownership in preserve

Solitation Letter Targets
East Mojave Property Owners


Exclusive to The Guzzler




Expansion of the Mojave National Preserve boundaries will be accomplished through "buffer zones." Source: Mojave Desert Land Trust.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust
P.O. Box 207
Twentynine Palms CA 92277

Dear Landowner,

The Mojave Desert Land Trust, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization, would like to purchase the above referenced property located within the Mojave National Preserve.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust purchases from willing sellers land located within national parklands and then donates the property to the National Park Service. All transactions with the Mojave Desert Land Trust are voluntary and at a mutually acceptable fair market value. We cover all transactions costs, including appraisals, necessary environmental site assessments and close quickly with minimal contingencies. Limited funding is in place to complete this acquisition.

You have received letters from me in the past on behalf of the National Park Foundation. For several years, the National Park Foundation was working with a grant that provided funding for acquiring privately owned land withing the National Park System. The Mojave Desert Land Trust has recently been awarded theat grant; I am working with them and look forward to possibly working with you.

If you have an interest in selling your property and would like to learn more about this opportunity, please contact me a (909) 797-5496 or email me a alavender@earthlink.net.

Sincerely,

Allyson Lavender

S.B. County supervisor's tax-rolls explanation doesn't hold water

Press-Enterprise [Riverside, CA]
OPINION
CASSIE MACDUFF


Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt's proposed policy to put tax-defaulted properties back on the tax rolls is really a thinly veiled attempt to thwart conservation groups from expanding parkland in the desert.

Conservancies and other nonprofits under state law have gotten first crack at buying properties the county sells when owners fail for at least five years to pay property taxes.

Conservation groups have bought up nearly 750,000 acres in the desert this way and turned the land over to the federal government to be added to the Mojave National Preserve, held as wilderness or habitat mitigation.

Mitzelfelt says this deprived the county of tax base and prevented competitive bidding by private parties at tax-sale auctions.

He acknowledges these remote, vacant parcels would bring in only a few hundred dollars in property taxes each year, but he insists it would be better to keep the land in private hands.

If keeping property on the tax rolls is so important, why has the county recently purchased two multimillion-dollar properties with large, existing buildings on them, far more valuable than desert land?

In 2005, the county bought the former state office building catty-corner from the San Bernardino Courthouse from private investors for $23 million.

The investors wanted to lease it to the county, and they would have continued paying property taxes. But the county decided to buy it outright, thus removing it from the tax rolls.

Same with the Adelanto private prison. The county was going to lease it from the owner to use as a High Desert county jail but decided in 2005 to buy it for $31 million instead, taking it off the tax rolls.

Mitzelfelt said buying those buildings was good public policy because the county now has equity in the properties and can sell them later.

But the county is going to stay in those buildings a good long time, meaning they're off the tax rolls for many years into the future, as Mitzelfelt himself acknowledged when I asked.

So this is really about the Desert Protection Act, which created the Mojave Preserve in 1994.

A former Building Industry Association official, Mitzelfelt told me he opposed the act because it jeopardized the future of mining, put large swaths of land off-limits to cattle-grazing and public uses and was "overall a detriment to the (county's) economy."

Mitzelfelt's proposed policy was on the Board of Supervisors' agenda Tuesday, but the board put off action on it until June 5 to give his fellow supervisors a chance to figure out whether they think it's a good idea.

I hope they think carefully before putting sole authority over selling off vacant parcels larger than 20,000 square feet -- less than half an acre -- in the hands of the supervisor whose district the land is in.

Mitzelfelt and his predecessor as First District supervisor have been holding up the sales of tax-defaulted land in the High Desert for five years while this policy was being drafted.

Why did it take so long? It wasn't on the front burner, Mitzelfelt said.

Meanwhile, conservation groups including the Yucaipa-based Wildlands Conservancy and Mojave Desert Land Trust are being held at bay on 141 parcels they want to buy.

Their wait isn't over yet.

County stonewalling conservation efforts

Policy prefers private ownership to keep desert land on tax rolls

San Bernardino Sun [San Bernardino, CA]
Jeff Horwitz, Staff Writer

For three years, San Bernardino County has quietly blocked nonprofit land conservancies from acquiring tax-defaulted desert land and giving it to federal preserves.

Under state law, nonprofits and public entities can apply to redeem defaulted properties before they are sold at public auction. Instead of being considered by the board, however, the status of 90 parcels accounting for at least 2,500 acres remains pending.

The de-facto policy was established around three years ago at the request of then-1st District Supervisor Bill Postmus and his chief of staff and successor, Brad Mitzelfelt. Although the Mojave Preserve is an asset to his district, Mitzelfelt said, it doesn't make sense to help conservancies expand it by removing property from county tax rolls.

"Private property ownership, in really the most desirable parts of the desert, is a public benefit," he said. "Once we lose it, we'll never get it back."

Conservancies' representatives, however, said that the former owners' default on taxes demonstrates that the property has little monetary value.

"Our position is that this is a really positive thing for the county," said Sheldon Douthit, who handles land acquisition for the Mojave Desert Land Trust and the Wilderness Land Trust. "We're doing this at the request of the federal government."

Gail Egenes, an administrative director of the Riverside Land Conservancy, said she was surprised that the county would be concerned with the disposition of the 44 parcels her group wants to purchase.

"From a conservation standpoint, these are valuable properties, but that's really the extent of their value," she said.

Frequently, the parcels are remote - miles from any road or infrastructure. Among the most accessible are properties in the desert mining town of Leastalk, an early 20th-century mining town that has been abandoned.

Normally, the county's treasurer-tax collector would review the conservancies' intentions for the land and then send the groups' requests to the board.

"They put it on the agenda or they don't put it on the agenda," Treasurer-Tax Collector Dick Larsen said of the board. "We're just the administrators on this."

But Mitzelfelt said that he and Postmus became concerned a few years ago that the conservancies were sometimes buying up land they believed had a "higher use," whether residential or economic.

Although the Chapter 8 sales would make sense if the land was going to build a school or church, Mitzelfelt said, his office is skeptical that indirectly passing the land to the federal government would do constituents any good. Postmus and he intended to write a new policy restricting the sales but never reached a final draft, he said.

San Bernardino County's 1st District has long had an uneasy relationship with the federal agencies that own more than 8 million acres of its territory, suing over road access and other land-use issues. In 2001, the county excoriated the Bureau of Land Management's decision to remove ranchers from its Mojave Desert lands as part of a plan to protect desert tortoises.

Egenes said her organization simply hoped to convince the county that the land has no practical value.

"You're looking at mountain sides and hilltops," she said. "If these don't go through, an opportunity to place land in conservation where it can be managed appropriately is lost."

Ultimately, Mitzelfelt said, he hopes to see the direct sales to conservancies largely eliminated. "I just believe that there's room in the Mojave National Preserve for private-property ownership," he said.

The conservancies would still be able to buy the land at public auction, he said, assuming they could out-muscle public bidders.

"If we're going to lose the tax base, we might as well get the best price," he said.