How Ancient Native American Rock Art Is Tearing a California Town Apart

A display at the Petroglyph Festival that many Native Americans find disrespectful

By Barret Baumgart
VICE Media

I

At 1.2 million acres, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake is the largest parcel of land owned by the US Navy. It fills an expanse of remote and rugged desert terrain bigger than Rhode Island; to the naked eye, there's not much going on inside. You might spend a whole day driving around the perimeter of the base and, notwithstanding an occasional low-flying F-16 fighter jet, never guess there was anything outside your window beyond barren volcanic tablelands, stands of brittle burrobush, and the occasional sidewinder rattlesnake.

What makes NAWS China Lake special—beyond being a secret test center for the world's most advanced weapons—is that inside a handful of its narrow lava canyons lies the largest concentration of Native American rock art in the Western Hemisphere. The images, carvings known as petroglyphs, are found throughout China Lake's Coso Range and are the oldest in the Americas. Archeologists have dated some of the images as far back as 15,000 to 19,000 years, and nobody has ever successfully counted them. A single canyon—Renegade Canyon, or as it's more commonly called, Little Petroglyph Canyon—may contain more than 1 million images of bighorn sheep, shamans, and abstract geometric symbols.

While archeologists have argued over the function of these and other figures for half a century, their original meanings largely remain a mystery. What nobody contests, however, is that the Coso Range was once one of the most spiritually important sites on the continent.

Some New Age types consider the Coso Range a "vortex"—a geographic location where harmonizing spiritual energy is supposedly highly concentrated. Examples of such places apparently include the Pyramids at Giza, Stonehenge, and the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. Even if you don't put stock in such dubious concepts, being in the presence of such ancient and sacred symbols can be a powerful—and humbling—experience.

For decades, however, their location inside a military base dedicated to top-secret weapons testing meant that the only people who knew—or cared—about the petroglyphs were a handful of Native American tribes, professional archaeologists, and a subculture of Indian art geeks and New Age vision seekers. But Ridgecrest, California—the small desert town just outside the main gates of China Lake—is attempting to change that, and turn the petroglyphs into a full-fledged international tourist destination.

This effort has created a clash between competing economic and cultural interests. For many members of the Native American tribes throughout the region, the Coso Range and its petroglyphs are the most sacred things in the world, but some say that the sanctity and very survival of the artwork is threatened by Ridgecrest's attempt to cash in on the petroglyphs and sell itself as "California's newest cultural mecca"—the Petroglyph Capital of the World.

II

In 2014, Ridgecrest's then-mayor Dan Clark proposed an entire festival centered around the petroglyphs, describing it as a potential "economic engine" for the city of Ridgecrest. "The petroglyph festival will be our signature event," he told the LA Times. "We're going to saturate this community with representations of rock art." Denny Kline, a field officer for Mick Gleason, Kern County's District 1 Supervisor, told reporters, "It's going to be the city's 50th anniversary on steroids." Sponsors for the four-day festival included Coca-Cola, General Electric, NASA, the Ford Foundation, McDonald's, and Home Depot, among others.

A year later, the town remains committed to becoming the "American 'Machu Picchu,'" as a recent press release proclaimed. That release quoted Doug Lueck, the executive director of the Ridgecrest Area Convention and Visitor's Bureau (RACVB), as saying, "Not only is tourism up, we're also experiencing an upward trend in filming for movies and commercials as well." According to Leuck, the first annual Petroglyph Festival "had over 1,000 media impressions over television and radio" and sold out local hotels. Harris Brokke, the former director of Ridgecrest's Maturango Museum, told the local paper. "Not only is the festival successful, but when people come to the festival, they come back again and again, and that's our whole goal."

"Ridgecrest has tried to brand itself in a lot of different ways," a retired Navy veteran named Mike tells me. "There's no real tourism here. Most people either work on the base or the service industry that supports it."

We're standing in the parking lot of Ridgecrest's new $6 million tourist attraction, Petroglyph Park. House finches flit between palm trees and brown monoliths carved with depictions of bighorns, zigzags, and shamans; in the background traffic hums along China Lake Boulevard.

"The city tried the Balloon Festival two years in a row, but the winds were horrendous and just destroyed everything," Mike says. Ridgecrest also launched a spring Wildflower Festival, but given the reality of the California drought and the fact that Ridgecrest only gets a few inches of rain each year, the flowers didn't always show. "But the Petroglyph Festival is something that's uniquely Ridgecrest," Mike says.

Behind us, across the street, music booms from the stage at the center of the Balsam Street Fair, where 200 vendors have set up tents selling scented candles, foreign war memorabilia, and dreamcatchers made in China. It's the second annual Petroglyph Festival, a showcase for the best parts of the town held in November. Balsam Street functions as Ridgecrest's version of a downtown arts district. Elsewhere in the city, abandoned storefronts mingle with used furniture dealers; bail bonds shops sit in squat strip malls with asphalt that looks like it hasn't been repaved since the Vietnam War—but on Balsam Street you find a newly painted bighorn sheep or shaman on nearly every available wall. This is, without question, the Petroglyph Capital of the World.

The catch, however, is that historically it's been extremely difficult to see the actual petroglyphs of the Coso Range. According to the RACVB, 15,000 people traveled from over 50 countries for the 2014 Petroglyph Festival. But only around 40 American citizens who applied early and passed a federal background check were able to view the carvings inside the base. This year, though, an RACVB spokesperson tells me, the Navy had "agreed to forgo the vetting process" and let 500 people see the petroglyphs, including many non-Americans, who would normally be barred from entering the base at all.

Among them is a woman from Germany named Karin. She waited years for the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to the petroglyphs; during November's festival she finally did it. "Everything from the drive, the Joshua trees, the beauty of the mountains. The whole landscape was just magic. We saw wild horses," she tells me. "It's obvious why the petroglyphs are there." I ask if she learned anything. "Imagination," she replies. "Imagination is what you need."

Another woman, a Japanese citizen named Maiko, had been waiting nine years for the opportunity. "I'm actually a petroglyph freak. I go to all the sites. It's just attractive to me. I want to see the art. So I do the research on the internet. And then I go there and look for it."

Those whose love for petroglyphs burns less arduously make do with Petroglyph Park, where you can gaze at reproductions of the carvings and experience an Epcot version of the ancient etchings. City and county officials often emphasize the sacredness of the petroglyphs and the educational aspect of the attraction—"the concept of the park is to honor the Native American heritage of the Indian Wells Valley," says Denny Kline—or as Mayor Clark has said of the petroglyphs, "We can bring it to the public's attention what a national treasure they are and, hopefully, they will respect them."

But the park and the festival are unquestionably money-making affairs—the whole point is to draw in vendors and tourism dollars. And many aspects of the festival seem less interested in history and education than hustling and speculation.

I head over to the north end of Balsam Street, where Rod "The Buffalo Man" Blankenship—a Korean and Vietnam War Veteran, and "an Elder in the Cherokee Indian Nation"—is talking about the buffalo to a crowd inside the Old Town Theater. The animals were "a supermarket and hardware store," according to Blankenship, who punctuates his pronouncements with shakes of a ceremonial rattle made from dried buffalo scrotum. Toward the end of the talk, I raise my hand and ask him how important the buffalo was to the Native American tribes in the surrounding area, and he admits that the animals weren't out here in California. But maybe some of the petroglyphs depict buffalo?

"It's possible," he says. "You know what you'll see in some of those petroglyphs, though?" He pauses and seems to stare out above the audience, straight through the back of the auditorium at something unseen. "You'll see pictures of what you call,"—another pause—"aliens. They're pictures of space people. With big round heads. Oval heads."

Other lecturers in the festival's educational "Speakers' Series" include a local wilderness entrepreneur who runs private tours of petroglyph sites that aren't on Naval land—"If you're interested, we can talk prices later," he tells the audience—and an archeologist who also offers private tours. Both do so despite heavy discouragement by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which fears that if the locations of off-base petroglyph sites become widely known they'll be vandalized or stolen.

Outside the Old Town Theater, across Freedom Park, smoke billows up from the cookers stationed behind the Intertribal Powwow and Cherokee Hog Fry. The powwow has all the usual signifiers of Native American life: tepees, donkeys, women dressed in buckskin suits, men on folding chairs beating a large leather drum, vendors hawking dream catchers and geodes. The festival advertises the drummers, dancers, and vendors as members of the local Native American tribes, but the Cherokee have no ancestral ties to the land or the ancient peoples responsible for the petroglyphs.

"We didn't use tepees and we're not a powwow culture and we didn't eat pigs. They're teaching people that this is what the people looked like that were here," says Jonnie Benson, a member of the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone who adds that it's the "miseducation" of the community that is most upsetting. "They took a real touristy approach. Now we have all these people walking away after this weekend thinking, 'Oh, wow, I've learned all about the natives who live here,' when in fact they don't know shit. They learned the Hollywood story."

Down the street from the powwow sits another sore point for some local tribes: a plywood board painted with two shaman figures, their faces cutout to allow tourists to poke their heads through and smile for pictures.

"It's so offensive. Our ancestors put those marks on the rocks, whether people want to believe that or not. It's sacred to me, and to see it as basically a caricature, with people putting their faces in it—they don't know what those symbols mean," says Benson, who'd seen the pictures on Facebook. "I don't know how people would take it if there was a painting of Jesus up there and people were sticking their faces in it. Right? It just wouldn't be cool."

III

Though the Petroglyph Festival is based around the cheerful, corporate-ready commercialization of the Coso rock art, the petroglyphs themselves depict strange and often violent imagery. On nearly every cliff face of Renegade Canyon, you find not simply pictures of bighorn sheep, but bighorns etched in the throes of death, their bodies impaled with spears and torn by arrows.


The mood on petroglyph tours is, if not somber, generally one of quiet reverence. Tour guides do an especially good job just hanging back, allowing the art to sink into the group, and not pushing forth any interpretation. Though they do occasionally step in. I remember on my first tour of Renegade Canyon, a woman kept pointing out the strange round-headed humanoids carved in the walls, and saying, "Look, an alien wearing a space helmet," or, "Look, an alien with a cell phone."

"Archeologists call those 'patterned body anthropomorphs,'" a guide eventually told her, adding that the art was still sacred to the tribes throughout the region, and it was disrespectful to infantilize the art of their ancestors in such a way.

When the festival isn't happening, normal tours of Renegade Canyon, arranged through the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, take 20 people on select weekend dates determined by the military during the fall and spring months. The Navy makes you sign a form that releases them from responsibility should you break a leg or catch a stray bomb, and the background checks conducted by the military usually take two to three weeks. The tours cost $40 and nearly ever one sells out. Excluding the festival, only about 800 people make it in to see the art each year.

In many ways the tours seem like a routine trail walk. People park in a dusty lot, tightening their boots and backpacks while guides take a headcount. In the distance below, the black gash of Renegade Canyon cuts west across the wide desert terrace, its exit at the lower ridge too far off to see.

A trail winds out through the fragrant burrobush, sage, and creosote, out from the edge of the dirt lot to the rim of the canyon, where it drops down through a steep side wash. Below, bright lichens cover the brown walls of the canyon, but you can't see anything yet. Guides remind you to watch your step as gravel crunches underfoot. Sunlight burns against your back, painting your blue outlines as you file forward and the walls narrow and voices hush. A carpet of soft sand covers the canyon floor. Like children sneaking into some forbidden sanctuary, everyone keeps trading excited and worried glances, scanning for the first petroglyph—but there's only the vast silence of the canyon, impenetrable as the rock walls closing you in. You glance back. Faraway, along the eastern horizon, a pair of perfectly formed volcanic domes lay like soft breasts tanning in the morning sun.

Then, without a word, the digital camera shutters start clicking. Up ahead, a dozen people stand aiming at the rock wall, while others crouch and kneel, jostling for position. Five pale shoe-sized sheep engravings cover the dark basalt. Geometric designs wrap around the periphery. A man crawls up for a closeup and one of the guides tells him that it's close enough: "Everyone, please keep back at least two feet from the petroglyphs." People keep vying for position, standing on their toes with cameras raised, as though the tiny darting sheep were actually alive, actually running away, fleeing the hungry tourist photographs.

Just minutes later, this initial flurry of photography seems absurd. The canyon contains more petroglyphs than any camera eye or human memory can record. By the time most people reach the cliff at the end of the canyon, they've stopped taking pictures, stopped talking altogether—they just sit and stare off into the expanse below.

The cumulative effect of the canyon is hard to describe. It's not something you can get from simply looking at a few panels of petroglyphs. You have to spend the whole day walking the canyon's entire length to let the images wash over you. Not everyone who takes the tour hikes the mile and a half down to the end—some people only go halfway and then return to the shaded picnic table beside the parking lot. You cannot get this cumulative effect if you turn back. Nor can you get it from other petroglyph sites off base or the tours during the Petroglyph Festival, which only spend an hour at the canyon's entrance.

Everyone's experience differs, I'm sure. For me, an initial impression, if there ever was one, that the petroglyphs resembled something inspirational or alien faded away the further I walked down the canyon. It was replaced by a sense of awe at the sheer number of etchings, which in turn gave rise to a sensation of mild dread when I realized that they all mostly depict the same image—bighorn sheep.

And as you continue to wander down the length of the narrow lava canyon, despite the open sky, the clean desert light, and the quiet conversation of the people around you, a feeling of claustrophobia begins to assert itself. And the further you venture, the more the canyon narrows, and the more pictures you pass, the deeper this feeling extends, until you come to understand that you've entered a place that is not your home, gawked at pictures not made for your enjoyment, photographed panels of bighorn sheep never made for pleasure but rather in pain, ripped out from the walls by desperate men with bloody fingers over so many lonely millennia, and once you reach the end of the canyon and see how many times that single intentional image occurred, a final conclusion presents itself: Something went wrong here.

IV

No one knows for certain what the rocks record. But they have been perfectly preserved thanks to airtight military security. Even the tribes who revere the rock art of the Cosos have to jump through hoops to pay their respects.

"The sites still have their power but we can't use them properly; we have to be escorted and they watch us down at the hot springs and it's very irritating," says Kathy Bancroft, the Cultural Officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone.

"At this point in the journey," says Jodie Benson, "I'm just grateful that the art is out there on Navy land, and not just anybody can go out there."

Not all the petroglyphs are on land protected by the military, however, and as the art has become more famous, Native Americans and archaeologists worry about people damaging other unprotected sites or stealing the petroglyphs right off the walls. The worst case of vandalism occurred not long before the first annual Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival, in an area north of the Cosos. In a matter of hours, looters wielding power saws, electric generators, and ladders managed to steal a handful of petroglyphs that had survived thousands of years of natural erosion.

"Anybody could have driven out on top of them, there would have been a dust cloud," Greg Haverstock, an archaeologist at the Bureau of Land Management, tells me. "These people were extremely bold." The event was the worst case of vandalism ever seen on the nearly 1 million acres of public land managed by Haverstock's BLM office.

Though multiple people I talked to say that cases of vandalism were on the rise, there was some disagreement about the cause. Donald Storm, another BLM archaeologist, says that China Lake's severely restricted access is a problem—if people can't enter the base they might go looking for petroglyphs on unprotected land. "If they're out in the public domain, damage is more likely because these sites are hard to control," he says.

Bob Robinson, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Kern Valley Indian Council, thinks that the festival is not helping to reduce the destruction. "As it is we have enough problems with sites being vandalized without all the promotion of the festival." Robinson says that tourists need to know that the petroglyphs are not doodles on rocks, but put there for a reason, and they're part of a living ongoing culture that is here today: "People need to understand that they're sacred and they need to be treated with respect." According to Robinson, this is the "education part that I hope will be there at the festival, and not this thing of creating this whole New Age story around aliens putting them there."

But Robinson isn't very optimistic. He describes the festival as "commercial exploitation. They're turning it into a Roswell bullshit."

This, ultimately, is the dividing line between Ridgecrest and some local Native Americans, who see the festival not just as a commercialization of their culture but something that could literally fuel the destruction of their sacred symbols.

"The worst thing about it is the town of Ridgecrest," says Kathy Bancroft. "They want to be the petroglyph capital of the world. I heard that on the local radio station and I thought, Who said they should do that? " Bancroft says it's incredibly disrespectful for the festival to be promoting the petroglyphs with vandalism on the rise.

On this point, everyone agrees: Protecting the petroglyphs is the most important thing. "The only way that the petroglyphs will continue to be here for a very long time is by protecting them and respecting them," says Debbie Benson, the current director of the Maturango Museum, which organizes tours of Renegade Canyon. "Not all petroglyphs are on the base. If people are harming them and don't understand them and not respecting them, they will not last."

Some of the materials in Petroglyph Park are of dubious educational value, however. One large engraving near the entrance is entirely unlike any of the actual petroglyphs; when I asked archaeologists about it they said they had never laid eyes anything like it. "I can honestly say I've never seen an image in rock art that resembled that even closely," Greg Haverstock said. "I look at that and I think 1950s sci-fi aliens."

The particular stand of petroglyphs is labeled "Shamanic Visions or Alien Visitors." The placard in front of it pays lip service to the popular New Age concept—promoted by Erich von Däniken's 1967 bestseller Chariots of the Gods—that many rock art images throughout the world portray aliens who visited earth, planted the seeds of consciousness in primitive humanity, and made possible all the cultural achievements of ancient man. This notion has been criticized for minimizing the actual artistic achievements of indigenous people and for simply being shoddy history. "That writing as careless as von Däniken's," Carl Sagan wrote in 1976, "whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times."

V

As it stands now, the tribes have no interest in participating in the Petroglyph Festival. None of the Native Americans I spoke to had ever attended it, and some, like Bob Robinson, openly condemned it. "They're just cashing in on something sacred. They're selling it. And I don't want any part," he says. "We don't want to participate because of the money."

Kathy Bancroft says that Ridgecrest never even approached her tribe about the festival. All they did was send advertisements. "If I really felt they cared and wanted to do it right maybe I'd participate," Bancroft says. "They've taken something sacred and spiritual and created a stereotype, a team mascot for the city of Ridgecrest, and it makes me sick."

Some Native Americans I spoke with emphasize that a festival that educated the public about the petroglyphs could be beneficial, if it made people more aware of the sacred nature of the rock carvings and the history behind them. Barbara Dutton, a member of the Death Valley Timbisha-Shoshone, tells me the festival was "a good opportunity for educating the general public about how important these sites are to the native people." But Dutton did admit, "I don't know what kind of information they have out there."

Given the information I encountered there, the Petroglyph Festival appears to have little interest in educating the public about the sacred nature of the rock art or the history behind it—which is truly a shame.

The petroglyphs at China Lake can be interpreted many ways. I prefer an explanation offered by archeologist David Whitley, who thinks that the Coso Range was once the central pilgrimage point for rainmaking shaman throughout the Great Basin.

"The images should not be interpreted in a literal sense," Whitley says. The petroglyphs represent not literal hunting scenes but rather "graphic expressions of the visions of rain shamans that, themselves, were metaphors for the rain shaman's supernatural control over the weather." The images of mutilated bighorns represent prayers for rain, not bighorns, according to Whitley.

As anyone who has lived through California's ongoing drought knows, we still pray for rain, though we do it in different ways. It was in China Lake where the military crafted the rain-making technology of "cloud seeding," which was deployed during the Vietnam War in an attempt to flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Today the technique, which involves shooting particles into clouds to form ice crystals, is used across the American West, including California, to ward off drought. It isn't clear, however, that cloud seeding is any better at bringing rain than carving bighorns into the sides of rocks.

If you go to the Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival, or if you visit the rock art of the Coso Range, don't approach the art lightly. Don't dismiss its creators as being primitive, or assume they needed to be influenced by UFOs in order to make their art. Think about their world, plagued with uncertainty, their struggles to scratch out lives against the harshness of the Mojave Desert. And think about the uncertainties of our own world today—the reality of global climate change and a perpetual war on terror. Remember that at China Lake, while the military continues to protect the traces of past man, in the same breath, in the same location, they continue to perfect the art of erasing him from the present.

And if you have a chance, take a look some of the most impressive petroglyphs, the rare ones depicting the skinny men riding strange animals, the white men arriving—the aliens. Ask yourself: Who will last longer—us or the petroglyphs?

Navy weapons unit produces a high-desert boomtown

The Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake plans to add 1,000 civilian jobs by 2011, spurring construction projects in nearby Ridgecrest that are drawing workers from across the West.




By Alana Semuels
Los Angeles Times





Ridgecrest, Calif. -- While the rest of California struggles with joblessness and budget woes, this high desert city is proof of the power of government spending. Uncle Sam has helped turn it into a modern-day boomtown.

A hospital, three hotels and a pizza restaurant are under construction on the main drag, where heavy equipment clears land once covered by sage and creosote bushes. Crooked "No Vacancy" signs are a familiar sight at local motels, whose parking lots are jammed most weeknights with contractors' oversized pickup trucks. Job recruitment billboards greet drivers heading toward Ridgecrest on California 14.

Once known as Crumville, this parched community of 28,000 about 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles has become the land of opportunity. At least for those who don't mind isolation, searing heat and little entertainment beyond Wednesday night karaoke at the local bar.

"We don't have Disneyland, we don't have an opera house," Mayor Steven Morgan said. "But California is having economic troubles, and we have jobs."

The source of those help-wanted billboards -- and the engine of Ridgecrest's economy -- is the U.S. Department of Defense. The Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, situated on the 1.1-million-acre testing range known to many here simply as China Lake, expects to add 1,000 civilian jobs by 2011, many of them good-paying engineering and computer science posts.

About 4,300 civilians are currently employed on the base. The weapons division is also spending $200 million on research centers, labs and other buildings where it will continue to develop armaments for the Navy and Marines.

In response, the local hospital and school district are pouring millions into renovations to prepare for growth. And developers are building houses and hotels to accommodate base visitors, hiring contractors from across the West.

The result is that Ridgecrest has been largely insulated from the state's downward economic spiral.

The city's unemployment rate of 8.4% in June was well below the state's 11.6% average and is much lower than the 14.7% rate in surrounding Kern County. Home values are also holding up better than in many other areas. The median in Ridgecrest in May was $165,000, down 8.3% from May 2008. That compares with a 42% plunge in Kern County over the same period.

There's no question that Ridgecrest has felt some fallout from the larger economic downturn. A Mervyn's closed when the department store chain went out of business, and a car dealership was lost when its owner moved it to Los Angeles.

But despite a $250,000 decline in sales tax revenue, Ridgecrest will still end the fiscal year with a $1-million cushion.

That relative security has made Ridgecrest an oasis of jobs -- although not everybody's happy about it.

When a government commission recommended in 2005 that naval defense research be consolidated at China Lake, employees at the Navy weapons station in balmy, seaside Point Mugu in Ventura County were aghast. A poll of workers there showed that about 80% of those slated for transfer said they'd rather quit than move to the desert.

Finding enough skilled people "is a challenge," said Doris Lance, a spokeswoman for the China Lake facility. She recently left the base to work in Arizona. Last month, the weapons division added two additional recruiting billboards on the 101 Freeway in Ventura County in addition to its giant "Now Hiring" signs on California 14.

Building contractors, too, have long had a tough time coaxing laborers to commute to the desert for work, said Mark Crisci, executive vice president of K Partners Hospitality Group, which completed a 93-room SpringHill Suites in Ridgecrest last year and is currently building a Hampton Inn across the street.

Not anymore. With the construction industry hammered by the housing bust, hard hats are now grudgingly making the drive.

Jim Buford, a pipe-fitter from Buena Park who is working on the new hospital, said that a couple of years ago he could ignore requests to work out of town. But threatening to quit won't gain him much leverage with his employer now, not when Ridgecrest is one of the only places to find work.

Laborers fill the town's motels during the week. The Motel 6 is nicknamed the construction frat house because the men stand outside their teal green doors at night drinking beer.

Stephen Edstrom, a road grading superintendent, flies every week from his home near Ogden, Utah, to Las Vegas, then drives about 240 miles to Ridgecrest. He misses his family, he said. But he needs the paycheck.

"You've got to do what you've got to do," he said, dipping his feet in the pool at the town's Econo Lodge. "This is the only job I could find."

Several big projects are underway. The Sierra Sands Unified School District is investing $25 million to modernize its schools. Ridgecrest Regional Hospital is spending $70 million to add units to its 80-bed facility by 2010.

Others are in the pipeline. The planning commission recently approved a 223-lot housing development. And the city is negotiating to bring in a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

In May, 109 homes were sold in Ridgecrest, more than triple the number sold in May 2008, according to Zillow.com.

"It's a good economy here in Ridgecrest," said Stan Dye, an entrepreneur who is building a pizza parlor on the town's main thoroughfare, China Lake Boulevard.

You can't swing a dead cat in Ridgecrest without hitting a Ph.D

Twentysomethings who wouldn't have given Ridgecrest a second glance in better times are finding it preferable to the unemployment line. Currently, about 75% of the young professionals offered jobs at China Lake accept them, said Betty Miller, head of the professional recruitment office at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division. That's higher than in previous years.

Andrew Gray, a 28-year-old UC San Diego graduate, wasn't impressed by Ridgecrest when he first visited the base to interview for a job as a test manager. "The job looked cool, but the town didn't," he said.

He accepted the position and has adapted fairly well, though he visits L.A. every other weekend to attend business school part time. Because of the base's research center, his boss likes to say that you can't swing a dead cat in Ridgecrest without hitting a Ph.D.

Settling in Ridgecrest is a matter of perspective, said Billy D. Williams, a 30-year-old computer scientist who moved from Lompoc, Calif., last year.

He can walk into the local sports bar, Tommy T's, and know everybody, he said. He's gotten involved in a pool league in town, and he officiates at town baseball and football games.

It's a far cry from New York, where he lived for years, he said, but he's willing to make sacrifices to work to support the military mission.

"You have to take this place for what it's worth," he said. "If you compare the rest of the world to New York, you'll be disappointed."

Stark Beauty, Solitude, Squalor and Sulfur -- Trona Has It All

Once a prosperous and tidy company town with desert vistas, Trona is in decline, cherishing its memories but living with crime and blight.

David Kelly
Los Angeles Times

TRONA, Calif. — Fed up with the crime, congestion and cost of Orange County, Fred Hermon went looking for a place where he could be alone, a place so remote, so unappealing that few would ever want to live there.

His strategy was simple: Locate the popular, pricey towns on a map and move steadily outward. That's where he found Trona.

When he searched the Internet for information, the word "hell" kept popping up — 'Is Trona Anywhere Near Hell?," "Where the Hell Is Trona?," "Long, Lonely Ride Through Hell."

Hermon didn't actually expect to find perdition as he descended through Poison Canyon into Trona three years ago, but the smell of sulfur, the blast-furnace heat and barren landscape made it feel uncomfortably close.

A real estate agent showed him a neighborhood with block after block of burned-out homes.

"I said, 'Oh my God, no,' " he recalled. "Another area looked like Los Angeles after the riots. I love the desert, but this was pushing it."

Nevertheless, he found a house for $24,000, installed an enormous swamp cooler and now spends his days digging for old artifacts while caring for nine cats, an inquisitive packrat and two desert tortoises, Speedy and Kid.

Hermon, 60, has already spent $2,600 on a chain-link fence and rarely leaves home for fear of being burglarized. On his first night in town, someone swiped his $15 garden hose. He stays for the solitude but wonders how Trona came to this.

"Something must have been going on for a long time to bring the town to this level of devastation," he said.

Over the years, Trona, once a thriving community of 6,000 on the ragged edge of Death Valley, has shriveled to just 1,800. Drug dealers looking for cheap housing have moved in. Parolees abound. Arsonists have torched dozens of vacant homes, leaving charred skeletons behind. Business owners, unable to make a profit, have simply locked up and walked away.

The result is blight on an industrial scale. San Bernardino County has torn down a handful of houses, but officials say it's too costly to demolish entire blocks of dilapidated, asbestos-riddled buildings.

Meanwhile, many Tronans are fleeing to Ridgecrest, 25 miles away, leaving mostly senior citizens and a smattering of young professionals behind.

Whether Trona can survive as the population dwindles is an open question.

Most workers at Searles Valley Minerals, the major employer, now live elsewhere. The high school has just 160 students with a graduating class last year of 15. The football team, unable to field 11 players, now plays with eight.

"A lot of people are leaving town," said Ruth Soto, the high school guidance counselor. "Closing the school has been talked about."

Many who stay love Trona for the friendships they've made, memories of better times and the desert's stark beauty. Others are simply stuck, unable to afford a house elsewhere.

Homes here are among the cheapest in California, with a median price of $40,000, according to DataQuick, which tracks real estate sales.

Even die-hard Trona boosters agree that it has seen better days. They concede that streets lined with torched houses, combined with the pungent odor from the chemical plant, add up to a poor first impression.

Pastor Larry Cox of the First Baptist Church said his first words on entering Trona were "People live here?"

The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department has offered deputies willing to work in Trona free housing and less jail duty. Most prefer jail.

Hollywood comes calling when scouting places resembling alien planets or how they imagine the end of the world might look.

Parts of "Planet of the Apes" and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" were filmed at the Trona Pinnacles, towering mineral formations near town. Conspiracy buffs have long held that Trona was the site of NASA's "moon landings."

An old highway sign put it this way: "End of the World 10, Trona 15."

Yet this extreme environment has bred people as tough as the rock and desert around them. They endure months of 120-degree temperatures and winds that fling boulders down mountainsides.

Seniors hit the links at the bare bones Trona Golf Club, batting balls on a mostly sand and dirt course while skirting the occasional rattlesnake.

"The sand leaves the clubs a little dog-eared," noted 82-year-old Barbara Crowther.

The Trona Tornadoes, named after dust devils spinning off dry Searles Lake, may be the only high school football team outside Alaska to have an all-dirt field. Astroturf would blow away, they say.

The white lines contain eye-stinging sodium sulfate to better stick to the field.

"It gives us a psychological edge in home games," said Coach John Foster.

The town was a stopover for the homicidal Manson family, who loaded up on water before heading to Barker Ranch about 20 miles east, where they were eventually arrested in 1969.

"I got my picture taken with Manson — with the girls too," said Robert "Ballarat Bob" Dunlap, an 83-year-old gold miner living in a desert shack.

Dunlap is one of the last in a long line of miners who burrowed and dynamited their way through here hoping to find a fortune.

In 1862, John W. Searles came looking for gold and found borax instead. His mining business would lay the foundation for a new town.

Named after a kind of sodium carbonate, Trona was established in 1914 by American Trona Corp., which owned the community outright. It built the schools, homes and dance halls and issued its own money to be used in town. Even when the business changed hands, residents were well cared for.

Teachers earned among the highest salaries in the state, often $96,000 a year in pay and benefits, thanks to royalties the company paid in exchange for mining on federal land. Sometimes local schools got $5 million or $6 million a year.

Lately, that number has dropped to about $1.6 million, school officials said. "I came here from Cleveland in 1945," said Kathe Barry, 75. "I loved it here because so much was going on at the time. We had a dance every Saturday night. There wasn't an empty house in Trona. It was just wonderful."

Ralph Garner, 94, stumbled on Trona during the Depression.

"They told me it was darn hot but I said I could take it," he said. "I was a mechanic and earned about 49 cents an hour. I had a good life here."

But times changed. In 1954, the company, then American Potash & Chemical, sold its homes to employees.

Workers were no longer required to live in Trona. In 1982, more than 400 chemists and engineers were relocated to Oklahoma.

For many, this was the beginning of the end. Layoffs and bitter strikes followed. The workforce shrank. Houses that couldn't be sold were abandoned.

Touring Trona with Russell Rector, 75, is a jarring journey from what was to what is, a landscape of memories rudely interrupted by jagged reality.

He nosed his red pickup toward the empty tennis courts.

"Everyone used to play out here," he said. "We would have beer parties in the desert and everyone would come. It's not the same place anymore."

He passed the old dance hall, once alive with laughter, now closed. The bookie's house stands empty. Trona had 13 saloons; now there are two.

Down at the First Baptist Church, Pastor Cox typed a sermon in his small air-conditioned office. He came from Simi Valley three years ago and feels like a missionary in a remote land.

"You step into Trona and you are stepping into a Third World country," Cox said. "This is a place where a lot of people have been forgotten. When a house burns down, it stands for 10 or 15 years. I tell people if they are looking for the middle of nowhere, we are in the middle of that."

The pride of Trona is the Old Guest House Museum, a shrine to the town and the minerals that made it. There are old photos of John W. Searles. His violin sits behind glass. Small bottles of potash, borax and fly ash are displayed, along with maps, history books and assorted mining and railroad paraphernalia.

Margaret Brush, 79, is curator and the town's most energetic promoter. She recently won funding for a kiosk along the road to Death Valley offering information about Trona.

"We needed something to attract people to Trona and to our museum," she said.

The heart of the town is Searles Valley Minerals, a vast, twisting array of pipes snaking above mountains of chemicals.

Arzell Hale, 69, has lived in the community for 28 years and handles public relations for the company.

"I'm going to die here, no question," he said cheerfully.

Yet he concedes that Trona suffers an image problem. The mere sight of it, he said, can scare off potential hires.

"When I first came here it was 10 at night, so it wasn't as bad as the daytime," Hale said.

That was in 1978 when the company had 1,450 employees. Now it has 650.

Hale drove around Searles Lake, a 42-square-mile expanse of mud and brine producing a million tons of soda ash a year and nearly a million tons of boron. The former is used to make glass, the latter soap and detergent. So far only 10% of its reserves have been used, Hale said.

"People drive out here and say, 'I wouldn't live in that godforsaken place for anything,' " he said, scanning a landscape more lunar than earthly. "But you don't know a place until you know the people, and the quality of people here is unreal."

True, but some are higher quality than others.

On a recent afternoon San Bernardino County Sheriff's Cpl. Tim Lotspeich drove into the hardscrabble Argus neighborhood and quickly found trouble brewing.

A shirtless man apparently high on methamphetamine was screaming abuse at another man down the street.

Lotspeich warned him to calm down and not do anything he would regret later.

Eric Cartmell, 37, watched from behind his chain-link fence.

"Look around you," he said, pointing to the trashed houses along the road, "and see what meth can do to a town. The drug addicts have stripped these houses of toilets and whatever they can sell for drugs. If they cleaned this place up, there would be no better town."

Lotspeich, who has patrolled Trona for three years, must carefully decide when to make an arrest.

The nearest county jail is 100 miles away in Barstow, and he has only two other deputies.

"I could spend all day out here doing under-the-influence arrests, but by the time I drive them to Barstow that's half my day, and sometimes they are back before I am," he said.

Minutes later he rounded a corner and spotted a man wanted for a parole violation and arrested him.

He arrested another parolee shortly after. With two men handcuffed in his SUV, he stopped a teenager riding a motorbike on the street.

"Take it out to the desert," he said.

A woman flagged him down to point out a homeless man wandering her neighborhood.

The corporal had been on patrol just 20 minutes.

Methamphetamine abuse is a scourge in Trona, leading to other crimes, such as burglary. Arsonists also have helped destroy much of the town.

"That was the mentality — you had a problem with someone, you set their houses on fire or you set their car on fire," Lotspeich said. "That was just what you did up here. Once we made an arrest and they saw they would actually do time, it stopped. We haven't had arson in a year."

He credits aggressive policing for an upsurge in arrests. Trona went from 12 felony arrests in 2002 to 56 in 2005, according to sheriff's records.

"The good outweighs the bad here, but there is a lot of bad," the officer said.

Not far away, the Trona Tornados took to their dirt field for practice. "It's 115 degrees but it feels like 105 with the breeze," said Coach Foster, 41.

The team has won its league three times and has a reputation for hitting hard.

"No one else plays on dirt," said running back Emilio Horta, 16. "They all cry about it."

Asked if he will stay in Trona after graduation, he shook his head. "It's not where I want to be," Horta said. "I want a more civilized place."

A hot wind blew, carrying a bracing whiff of rotten egg.

Foster smiled.

"I said I wanted to leave as a kid," he said. "I went to the Navy for four years, then I came back. I like the small-town atmosphere and I love knowing where my kids are at night. I have no plans on going anywhere."

Desert bighorn ewes may be farmed out

FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
Victorville Daily Press

BARSTOW — Fifteen ewes from a thriving herd of desert bighorn sheep in Mojave National Preserve may be moved to rebuild a dwindling herd 100 miles away in the China Lakes Naval Air Weapons Station area near Ridgecrest.

"We have a healthy population of bighorns in the preserve, but the herd at China Lake is small and consists of only 17 rams and two ewes," Old Dad Mountain preserve spokesman James Woolsey said.

California's Department of Fish and Game said the preserve's bighorn population numbers about 250. The department proposes capturing up to 15 ewes in the Old Dad Mountain area for relocation to Eagle Crags, to correct the imbalance between rams and ewes, officials said.

"If that ratio is as low as our data now suggests, we need to reverse the trend," said Vern Bleich, senior environmental scientist and project manager.

In August, the sudden deaths of five endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep sparked worries among scientists that there might be a major die-off that could wipe out the bighorn population near Palm Springs.

In the Victor Valley, bighorn populations appear to be doing well, according to recent reports. A population of 30 to 50 bighorns lives in the mountains above Lucerne Valley.

Bighorns also live in the upper San Gabriel Mountains near Wrightwood.

Relocation project planned for bighorn sheep

Chuck Mueller, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

A robust herd of desert bighorn sheep that thrives on several peaks in the Mojave National Preserve offers an opportunity to rebuild a dwindling herd 100 miles away.

California 's Department of Fish and Game has proposed relocating up to 15 bighorn ewes from Old Dad Mountain in the preserve, east of Barstow, to Eagle Crags at the China Lakes Naval Air Weapon Station near Ridgecrest.

"We have a healthy population of bighorns in the preserve, but the herd at China Lake is small and consists of only 17 rams and two ewes," said preserve spokesman James Woolsey.

Aerial surveys show the herd on Old Dad Mountain numbers close to 250. It is the largest population of bighorns in California and has been a primary source of sheep to restock other areas.

The department has attempted to restore 13 populations of mountain sheep to their historic ranges since 1970. By 1989, four herds were re-established in the Mojave Desert , according to an environmental assessment of the relocation project.

Under the department's proposal, between five and 15 ewes would be captured from Old Dad Mountain and relocated to Eagle Crags in a remote part of the air-weapons range.

Noting the imbalance between rams and ewes at Eagle Crags, officials said it is necessary to correct the skewed sex ratio and increase the reproducing potential of the herd.

"If that ratio is as low as our data now suggests, we need to reverse the trend," said Vern Bleich, fish and game's senior environmental scientist and project manager.

"If it isn't that low and more females are present, this translocation program will help us find other females."

The plan calls for sheep to be captured by net-gunning from helicopters, then moved to a base camp off Kelbaker Road in the preserve. From there they would be hauled by truck to Eagle Crags.

No schedule has been set for the removal process.

The removal program conforms with state policy, which says that mountain sheep should be managed and maintained at sound biological levels, Bleich said.

"Translocation is the only means by which mountain sheep can be restored to previously occupied ranges," he said.

The program is not a simplistic approach to conservation of the species, Bleich said, calling it a "well-thought-out conservation strategy."

By relocating bighorns, healthy herds of sheep can be preserved throughout the desert.

"Historically, Old Dad Mountain has been used as a source for repopulating herds elsewhere," Woolsey said. "With this program, we hope China Lake's population of bighorns can be restored."