Siege of the Tortoise

Fifth generation rancher Dave Fisher has worked the tough high desert country in the Mojave all his life. He is a champion to other cattle growers who find their livelihoods imperiled by yet another environmental “surrogate” —the desert tortoise.

Dave Fisher, President of High Desert Cattlemen's Association

By Tim Findley
Range Magazine

Dave Fisher gazed out from the passenger seat of the sheriff’s Jeep and seemed to be struggling a little more than usual at holding down the sort of temper that erupts in slow waves from a large, quiet man not used to starting trouble.

“I guess I could just go up and tell them it’s private land and they need to get off,” he said, more like thinking aloud than actually proposing such a threat.

“You could, Dave,” Sheriff’s Sergeant Errol Bechtel reassured him. “We’d be with you.”

But Fisher said no more. Up ahead, the old van was pulled headlong into a flat spot off the rocky road, its sliding panel door open to the noontime heat. There was no one visibly inside it or nearby on the barren slopes dotted with short stands of Mojave yucca and scattered with sharp ankle-busting igneous debris strewn about by some previous eruption.

It wasn’t until the obvious law enforcement vehicle was near enough to be making loud crumbling noises off the road that a young man finally swung into view, feet first from the shade of the van, and sat with his knees to his chin in the panel doorway. He was dressed in shorts with no shirt, and his healthy pride of wavy golden brown hair and beard gave him away in about an auction second as just about what Dave Fisher expected.

Still, the tall rancher said nothing of what he was thinking as he strode on up the last bit of distance to where the young man stared back at him, a cloud of uncertain defiance already showing on his face. “Do you know you’re on private property?” Fisher asked at last in a not altogether unfriendly way. “No I don’t,” said the young man, shifting his glare between Fisher and Sergeant Bechtel. “But is that why the sheriffs keep stopping us twice a day?”

From that point, it could have gotten to be a much warmer afternoon. “...And I don’t appreciate your invading my privacy, either,” the young man added to the shutter-clicking Range photographer. As it turned out, though, young Dan Kent wasn’t a half-bad guy to talk to. They hadn’t “stopped” him or others along the road in the past couple of days, but deputies had checked their vehicles before, and this time, maybe the presence of a young lady who stayed well back in the shadows of the van added a little to Kent’s irritation at the interruption.

It was private land they were on—Dave Fisher’s deeded land that is spotted over more than 5,000 acres of Ord Mountain near Barstow, Calif., where Kent, a Utah resident, and about two dozen other trained and certified young people like him, have come for the summer to count tortoises.

Their contract with U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, underwritten with contributions from the Department of Defense, calls for an expenditure of $400,000 to total up a fairly accurate estimate of how many of the hard-shelled critters there are creeping among the volcanic debris, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes of Ord Mountain.

When he warmed a little to Fisher’s cool hospitality, Kent admitted that up to that point, they had probably counted more rattlers. But that’s something Fisher could have told him beforehand. Where they were at nearly 5,000 feet is above the normal range of the desert tortoise, and the “turtle,” as Fisher prefers defiantly to call it, is not fool enough to be crawling around in the heat of the day. So what, exactly, Fisher felt he had a right to ask, did these people think they were really doing on his grazing allotments and deeded land in a valley so wild and bare that “tree top” is measured by the miles between them?

If it’s what Fisher, and the High Desert Cattlemen’s Association, and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office, and most local governments for hundreds of miles around think it is, then the “turtle counters” Fisher fumes over have themselves in the middle of a mess that won’t so easily be solved by helping Dan Kent and his funded friends find the dim lines on a map between “public” and private land.

Fisher wouldn’t recognize himself as a sort of high-pocketed, modest Stetson, Gene Autry type hero, but for at least the last 10 years, this fifth generation rancher with a voice about as hard as the rocks he was raised on, has been the singular champion on behalf of cattle growers all over the high desert who find their livelihood imperiled by yet another environmentalist “surrogate”—the desert tortoise.

There was probably an incident one day somewhere in the Mojave Desert during the last 150 years when a big bovine of some type accidentally put its clumsy hoof on the back of a tortoise and squashed it. Must have happened, like all things do. No shell-scattered body was ever found to prove it, however, and, actually, the flat smears you can still occasionally see along U.S. 395 attest to the much more likely, and still common, catastrophe encountered by the long-lived reptile. Cows, to those who don’t know, aren’t capable of grubbing down to the base of plants, and because they eat the higher foliage, may actually improve growth for what’s at the bottom, where the tortoise eats. And as for leftovers, it seems an open question over whether the tortoise is choosy about where it obtains its carbohydrates. It is a fundamentally stupid issue. Cows don’t threaten tortoises.

If they did, for example, it might have been much less likely 25 or 30 years ago, when the price of gasoline was cheap enough to be competitive, that a few service stations in the hot flat stretches offered a free tortoise with every fill-up. It happened, and how many of the critters got tossed in the back of somebody’s suburban station wagon for a ride into extinction is anybody’s guess.

The desert tortoise is, even today, not endangered. It has just been made to seem that way by the pressure of environmentalist organizations led by the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity and opportunistic politicians who have added it to the “threatened” list of American species. Nobody really knows if even that much is true, which is one of the reasons federal authorities say they are willing to spend nearly half a million dollars in an attempt to count the slow moving creatures one-by-one on Dave Fisher’s “Shield F” ranch.

Ord Mountain is not the motherlode of desert tortoises, and counting them there won’t make scientific history. But Fisher made trouble right from the start in 1990 when the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity as well as the Audubon Society and others interested in “cattle free” rangeland first began waving around the tortoise as their own version of the spotted owl.

With generations of his own experience behind him, and aided by the knowledge shared by others who had lived and died in the Ord Valley without sometimes as much as a road to get the body out before spring, Fisher tried to point out to federal Bureau of Land Management authorities that any potential argument between ranchers and “turtles” made no sense.

For his trouble, Fisher got recognized last year, in the dying days of the Babbitt empire, as the grazing permittee and landholder most likely to be a problem to the maybe doomed tortoise. Based on an out-of-court settlement with the environmentalists, the BLM, in effect, directed Fisher to cease full grazing on 154,000 acres of his generations- old permit, and to expect trouble on even his own 5,000 acres of deeded land. They knew such an order, even if it was temporary, could drive him out of business, and even said so in their “findings.”

Incredibly, the BLM concluded in its written report that the region’s economy would be benefited by the nonprofit “financial sponsors” of the turtle savers. “...the cost savings realized by temporarily not investing money in a livestock operation would allow groups to divert funds into land acquisition, management, administrative functions and other endeavors.”

Fisher is, for all you’ll ever see of him, a calm, quiet man. But there’s something in the way he asks his own questions that suggests more. He talks to himself, works the problem out loud; he settles for stewing patience. But one of these days...
His friends—the longtime friends of his family over generations in the San Bernardino Valley—knew that about Dave. If in the BLM decision directing protection of the tortoise Dave Fisher and the Shield F were to be the fall guy, it certainly wouldn’t happen without resistance.

Thus in short order after Fisher was directed to remove cattle from his allotments, did the county sheriff sever formal enforcement agreements with the BLM and let it be known whose side deputies would take in any dispute. “This action...may result in physical resistance by cattlemen attempting to preserve their stock,” wrote San Bernardino County Sheriff Gary Penrod in a letter to the BLM. “I do not wish to be associated with any [BLM] personnel who may be precipitating possible violent range disputes through their official action.”

So, similarly, did County Supervisor Bill Postmus fire off a letter warning of “actionable harm” to the county’s economy if the BLM tried to put ranchers out of business. And so up the line through 28 members of the state legislature and at least one member of Congress objecting to BLM’s arbitrary action did the letters fly.

But that didn’t stop the Center for Biological Diversity and their love of the little tortoise from threatening more lawsuits to force BLM action. By the beginning of this year, they quietly staged the training ground sessions in Las Vegas that brought such people as Dan Kent and his friends from Utah to learn about counting tortoises in a moving two mile grid over “public” land on Ord Mountain. And though it costs money just to send young folks like them out to tramp around the rattlesnakes, that suddenly came available from the U.S. Department of Defense, which, oddly enough, borders Fisher’s allotments and properties on two sides. The Army’s Fort Irwin and the Marine’s 29 Palms desert airbase are both reportedly eager to expand their own operations without any tortoise trouble.

So far, other than that, nothing has happened. The BLM knows Fisher is not about to remove his cattle, and they know not to expect anything like help from the local sheriff if they try it themselves.

“Oh, you’re Fisher!” Dan Kent said in obvious recognition that day on the mountain.

Fisher, as noted, is the kind of slow-to-rile guy who also finds it hard to just let something go. You can just about watch it physically happening as he struggles with himself between patience and a roar you sense is down there wanting to come out. Finally, that afternoon after explaining in several ways to Kent and others from his “turtle counting” expedition what is private and “public” property, Fisher climbed back into the friendly sheriff’s Jeep.

“Maybe,” he said, talking to himself again. “I should have just told them to get off.”

Update: In June, Interior Secretary Gale Norton declared a state of emergency involving the BLM demands on Fisher and six other ranchers in the Mojave. She ordered a hearing before an administrative law judge in late July to review BLM actions halting grazing on behalf of the tortoises.

The “turtle counters” on Fisher’s land, meanwhile, have gone somewhere else, but not before sending a letter to BLM authorities in Barstow which sources said complained of Fisher and a group of armed men in “dusters” harassing one of their volunteers. According to sources, the letter claimed Fisher had “brown drool” at the corner of his mouth, and the volunteer was particularly upset by a photographer who “violated his privacy” by taking his picture without his permission.

Tim Findley—the photographer complained about by the turtle counter—witnessed neither dusters nor drool.

An Asphalt Odyssey

You can get your kicks and a big dose of kitsch on Route 66, where nostalgia and reality meet.

Eastbound Route 66, Goffs, California (Chris S. Ervin)

Reed Johnson
Los Angeles Times

DANBY, Calif. — Many miles to the west in the thickening twilight lies Roy's Cafe, a rustic high-desert hangout for weary Route 66 pilgrims, including Ronald Reagan and Harrison Ford (or so the guidebook says). Alas, it's already closed for the night.

Dead ahead, huge lightning bolts crack the sky, casting an eerie pallor over the surrounding moonscape. Suddenly, I feel like Janet Leigh in "Psycho," eyes scanning the rearview mirror, ears straining for those slashing Bernard Hermann chords. As a sheet of rain clatters violently across the windshield, an ominous thought hijacks the brain: Wasn't that a flash-flood warning sign a mile or two back?

This wasn't exactly the Route 66 I'd come looking for, the Route 66 of Howdy Doody-era diners and irresistibly cheesy souvenir stands, a nostalgic slice of pure Americana frozen in amber like some prehistoric insect. Certainly it didn't much resemble the Route 66 depicted in the colorful Automobile Club of Southern California map spread out on the passenger seat beside me, a "greatest hits" anthology of wigwam motels, meteor craters, auto museums and folksier-than-thou truck stops.

No, this lonely, bewitching, exhilarating stretch of asphalt was more akin to what greeted Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930s, who crossed the Colorado River from Arizona, just up the road. After traveling hundreds of miles and enduring heat, cold, hunger, exhaustion and marauding goon squads bent on turning them back, those desperate migrants knew Route 66 as a harshly exotic highway, tinted with beauty and danger, promise and menace. It was "the connection between wherever people were and wherever they wanted to be," as Paul Snyder, director of the newly opened Route 66 Museum in Kingman, Ariz., puts it.

It's this Route 66, a gritty mental Polaroid framed by Walker Evans, that still grips the imagination of thousands of visitors who come here from around the globe every year. And it was this Route 66 that now flashed hypnotically across the stormy landscape, with hardly another human being in sight.

Such trance-inducing solitude may be tougher to find in the coming months. Seventeen years after its last broken fragments were decommissioned by the federal government and left for scavengers, Route 66 has become America's best-known comeback trail. Since the mid-1980s, dozens of books, videos, TV specials and travelogues have celebrated its motley heritage. This year, the 2,448-mile artery stretching from Illinois to Southern California is being feted with barbecues, biker rallies, mariachi concerts, car shows, arts and crafts festivals, rodeos, foot races and tractor pulls, right up to and beyond its official 75th birthday on Nov. 11. Not surprisingly, automobile clubs and major car manufacturers are backing some of the misty-eyed appreciations.

But the Route 66 revival can't be written off merely as manufactured nostalgia. Once a tattered road that time forgot, the highway is now part of a growing movement that reflects shifting cultural values. Route 66 preservation groups have sprung up in all eight states the road traverses, and under the Historic Route 66 Corridor Act, signed into law by President Clinton, $10 million in federal funds will be used over the next decade to help restore businesses and tourist attractions along the way.

To its boosters and interpreters, Route 66 has become the Moby Dick of American roadways, a convenient catch-all symbol of the frontier spirit, middle-class Manifest Destiny or, at the other extreme, Kerouacian free-spiritedness. If it didn't already exist, American pop culture probably would have to invent it. Which, in a sense, is what it's been doing for the past seven decades, as became clear during a recent 1,300-mile odyssey from the San Bernardino foothills to the New Mexico border and back.

At one time, Route 66 linked Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago with the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, making it the world's longest drive-thru metaphor. Although photographs showing the road ending at the Santa Monica Pier have been revealed as fakes, it was invested with a sea-to-shining-sea unity and a brawny New Deal populism. It even had its own soundtrack, courtesy of the late Encino resident Bobby Troup, who had been "getting his kicks" (and, one hopes, his royalty checks) from "Route 66" for more than half a century.

Today, huge swaths of the road have been interred beneath interstates, or cut and pasted into charmless frontage roads and spotty commercial strips, like the one that escorts motorists through Fontana and San Bernardino before plunging on through the Cajon Pass.

There, on L.A.'s suburban fringes, nature takes a back seat to chain restaurants, gun and ammo shops and the Adult Fantasy 66 Book and Video store. Fifty yards or so to the east, the Wigwam Village Motel, a vestige of better times, urges guests to "Do It in a Tee Pee." Easy to see why Frank Lloyd Wright concluded that, "Route 66 is a giant chute down which everything loose in this country is sliding into Southern California."

But around Victorville, where the metropolis finally dissolves into the desert, the spirit of the road takes over, tugging motorists past fossilized trailer parks and crumbling Mexican restaurants. Twenty miles east of Barstow, in the blink-and-you'll-miss-it hamlet of Newberry Springs, a truck pulls into the Bagdad Cafe, which, like much else on Route 66, partly owes its survival to the power of Hollywood myth-making.

Inside, Phil Dickson, the 22-year-old cook, labors over a deep fryer while his wife Jessica fields orders behind the counter. "Are your buffalo burgers really buffalo?" one trucker wants to know. Jessica shrugs.

The cafe is a classic instance of fictional greasy spoon imitates life imitates greasy spoon. A dozen years ago, the down-and-out diner formerly called The Sidewinder was cast as itself in the cult film "Bagdad Cafe," about the odd-couple friendship that develops between a German woman stranded in the California desert and the black woman who runs the local hash house. The movie was only a minor stateside hit, though it later spun off a CBS comedy series starring Whoopi Goldberg and Jean Stapleton. But "Bagdad Cafe" struck certain Continental viewers as a charming American parable of eccentricity and tolerance, setting off a stunning Euro-tourism boom.

Today, the real Bagdad Cafe, which sells videocassettes of the movie, is listed in Japanese, French and German guidebooks, and its guest log is filled with comments like, " Fantastique! Comme le film !" Slowly, the cafe is even catching on with jaded Californians. "Huell Howser's come through here, Peter Fonda came through here," Dickson says. "There's a lot of Europeans who base their whole visit to the U.S. on making this one of their pit stops."

No ordinary Hollywood auteur, however, could've dreamed up the cafe's star attraction, General Bob, a T-shirted, ponytailed Baron Munchausen who claims he once spoke 9,000 languages (including fluent hyperbole) and now diverts travelers with tales of his globe-trotting escapades. Peering through wraparound sunglasses, General Bob leans over his roast-beef sandwich and mutters conspiratorially that no one in town, not even the seemingly happy-go-lucky Dickson, can be trusted. "I've had 600 people in this town trying to kill me," he says. "Six-, 8-year-olds, they're the spies, they're the lookouts."

Just then, a young Parisian couple enters the diner and orders up chocolate milkshakes. Yes, the man says eagerly, they'd seen "Bagdad Cafe" years ago and decided to stop by en route from Las Vegas to L.A. At the cash register, Dickson discreetly offers some advice about General Bob. Apparently, several European TV news crews have reported his stories as gospel truth. "Don't believe everything he tells you," Dickson adds redundantly.

"Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley, who lived for more than 25 years in Southern California, once wrote that the shimmering light of the desert can bestow either clarity or madness on its inhabitants. Which condition best described General Bob? Which, for that matter, best describes Route 66 and its two-lane, split personality? Before World War II the road offered desperate people an exit from poverty and ruin. Afterward it came to epitomize affluence, recreation, family, the good life. How could those disparate paths be reconciled? And what did either have to do with the flotilla of SUVs and 18-wheelers roaring by on I-40, a few dozen yards away?

"Try us, you'll like us," promised the sign at the Best Motel in Needles, which fronts on Route 66. But a $22 room there featured dead bugs in the bedsheets and an air conditioner whose preset dials kept the temperature barely below sweat lodge conditions, making sleep possible only in fitful snatches.

Next morning, at the Hungry Bear Diner, a booth covered in Route 66-pattern fabric supplied the ideal spot for plotting a passage to Oatman, Ariz. A fraying, Hollywood movie-set vision of a frontier town, tucked inside the hair-raising curves of the Black Mountains, Oatman has two distinct claims to fame. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard honeymooned there in 1939, and a population of wild burros left over from mining days still roams the streets, soliciting edible donations from tourists. Tin-roofed shacks and gardens constructed from found objects offset tchotchke boutiques and the Oatman Hotel. Weekends are reserved for staged gunfights.

But the town's real attraction, looming on all sides, is a landscape of surpassing beauty and strangeness: teetering rock fortresses, cars held together by rust, wind-scoured chasms that drop away hundreds of feet into nothingness. According to a posted sign, so terrifying were the area's snaking roads, especially the infamous Sitgreaves Pass, that many Okies and Arkies would hire locals to tow their Model A's and T's through to safety. Ansel Adams would've loved this place. Or Mad Max.

A marker designating "Historic Route 66" (as the road's remains now are called) leads out of Oatman, down through a valley and on into Kingman, Ariz., a sprawling town of 21,000 that somehow feels much larger. At the impressive new Route 66 Museum, which opened last May in a converted powerhouse, director Paul Snyder says this artery's origins go back way before the Great Depression.

For centuries, Native Americans had been using local trails as trade routes connecting the Southwest and Mexico with the Pacific Coast. By 1851, the U.S. Army was mapping out a road along the 35th parallel, an ancestor of the legendary highway. Toward the end of the 19th century, railroads were bringing immigrants and tourists into the area. Fred Harvey furthered the cause with his turn-of-the-century empire of hotels and restaurants laid out along rail lines. "There was a whole culture built up along this road," Snyder says.

The guts of the museum's permanent exhibition is a series of black-and-white documentary-style photos of migrant families. These stark images of hollow-cheeked children flopped on filthy mattresses, and grim-faced police inspectors at the California state line, are underscored by a famous passage from John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": "And they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight."

Snyder shakes his head. "There's plenty of people buried out by the roadside," he says. "You wouldn't know it, but they didn't make the trip."

The exhibition's final third is devoted to a re-creation of a Route 66 small-town Main Street, complete with a beautifully restored banana-yellow 1950 Studebaker. A wall plaque describing the road's postwar heyday comes spiked with a liberal dose of conservative perspective: "Closets were for clothes, not for 'coming out of.' Gay meant joyful, bunnies were small rabbits .... 'Made In Japan' meant junk."

Downstairs, a gift shop operated by volunteers from the Historic Route 66 Assn. of Arizona offers every conceivable item capable of bearing the Route 66 logo: shot glasses, salt and pepper shakers, golf balls, steering wheel covers, jigsaw puzzles, tote bags, bar stools. Among the shoppers are a Hawaiian couple, Clint Bidwell and Debbie Chun, who bought a neon clock, some die-metal cars, and patio party lights for an upcoming birthday party in L.A. "There's a car theme going on at the party," Chun explains, "so we thought, Route 66."

Like the old road markers that have long since been torn down or stolen, Route 66 hails from an age when America seemed infused with a monochromatic directness, a black-and-white starkness. It permeated not only movies and television but attitudes about race, religion, sexuality, the future.

That may be one reason why the 98-mile segment of Route 66 between Kingman and Seligman astounds with its Technicolor variety and vitality. Driving this gorgeous slice of mesquite-covered hills, broken every few miles by a restaurant or solitary general store, is like driving through a hand-colored still photograph, circa 1945. Or like reading Steinbeck's best prose: by turns majestic and humble, coolly workmanlike and wildly romantic, even sentimental. The landscape, beyond merely stirring, feels sacred.

That connection runs deep for the people of the Hualapai Tribe, whose reservation rises on a brow of Route 66 in Peach Springs. But times have been tough since the interstate was built. Nowadays, virtually the only local employment option is conducting helicopter or rafting tours of the Grand Canyon, says Michelle LaPointe, a planning clerk at the tribal office. Most guidebooks make no mention of the reservation, a clutch of identical earth-toned homes, many abandoned, with boarded-up windows and trash-strewn yards. On one back porch a group of young children practices firing a pellet gun.

Beyond a great wall of mountains, the tiny railroad town of Seligman (population 1,000) meanders into view. Visiting Seligman without stopping by Angel Delgadillo's barber shop is like visiting Buckingham Palace without meeting the Queen Mum. Many regard the 74-year-old haircutter, whose older brother Juan runs the next-door Snow Cap Drive-In, as the savior of Route 66 in the Southwest. When I-40 bypassed Seligman in September, 1978, Delgadillo began organizing business owners into an association to promote the historic road.

"Here in America we all clamor for something bigger, better, brighter.

You talk to people from Germany, Holland, their countries have been torn up by wars. We do it with our tractors," says Delgadillo. An avuncular presence, he retired from haircutting four years ago but will whip out his clippers on demand if a visitor requests a trim.

Nowadays there's virtually a nonstop parade of European and Japanese sightseers through the barbershop and adjoining gift store, both of which are lined top to bottom with business cards, license plates and other mementos. "They want to take a little bit of us," Delgadillo says, "and they want to leave a little bit of themselves."

Past Seligman, Route 66 dawdles, pauses, nearly grinds to a complete halt. Then it loops back into I-40 west of trendy Flagstaff, where the hippie-chic skiing and rock-climbing crowd cruises the downtown espresso bars, but many locals prefer the Museum Club, a boot-scootin' country music saloon with trees planted in the middle of the dance floor.

Fifty years ago, before the theme-parking of America, such a sight might've stopped a traveler in his tracks. But as the miles fly by, no man-made object on Route 66 retains the power to amaze. Not the guitar-player statue standing on a corner in Winslow, Ariz., immortalized by the Eagles in their '70s pop hit "Take It Easy." Not the famous giant Twin Arrows that rise above the ruins of a once-booming truck stop, where a half-dozen big-riggers usually can be found idling, as if expecting a ghostly waitress to sidle up and murmur, "Coffee, hon?"

Not the town of Joseph City, site of both the oldest Mormon community in Arizona and the equally revered Jack Rabbit Trading Post, which, besides offering the usual Kachina dolls and Minnetonka moccasins, lures passersby with a unique homemade brew.

"Cherry cider is our big thing. I guess you could call it the gimmick," says Phil Blansett, who ran the Jack Rabbit for 25 years with his wife, Pat, before turning it over to their daughter and son-in-law.

He says there's "less riffraff" now that this corner of Route 66 has been supplanted by a shiny concrete ribbon.

Not even the geodesic "country store"/gas station that abuts the mile-wide, 570-feet-deep Meteor Crater, "This Planet's Most Penetrating Natural Attraction."

"Did you ever see 'Starman,' the John Carpenter movie, with Jeff Bridges?" asks the female attendant. "Good movie. Came out around the same time as 'Star Wars' so it kind of got lost. Shot it right here. He plays an alien who crashed in Wisconsin and takes the body of a woman's deceased husband. In the movie, he goes into a cafe and the cook brings him some cherry cobbler, and he doesn't know what it is. Sat right there and ate it. Good movie."

Maybe that's it, I thought: How can a bumpy, inconvenient old country lane hope to compete with the exciting new Virtual America?

Turning south into the Petrified Forest, the diesel fumes and golden arches began to melt away. Even Route 66 yields to the ancient floodplain, where crystalline logs lie scattered like giant necklaces and time hangs in suspension.

Stripped of nostalgia by the desert's primal simplicity, Route 66 was, at last, more place than myth. The trip was ended. Two roads led home. The quiet one made the most sense.

East Mojave cattle ranchers get BLM hearing

By TERI FIGUEROA
Desert Dispatch

BARSTOW — Desert ranchers struggling to keep their rights to graze cattle on federal lands will get their day in court July 24.

It’s not a typical court, however. It’s a U.S. Department of Interior administrative court, to be convened in the Barstow City Council chambers.

Officials expect the hearing to run two weeks, and everyone expects a full house.

“I’ve been wanting this evidentiary hearing out of the Department of Interior for a year,” Dave Fisher, president of the High Desert Cattlemen’s Association, said. “This is not a show. This is a fight for my livelihood.”

The seven affected cattle ranchers are appealing a Bureau of Land Management decision to kick their cattle off public desert lands — lands home to the threatened desert tortoise.

Interior officials have until Aug. 24 to decide. If the cowboys lose their appeal, the livestock must be gone from 285,000 acres of desert tortoise habitat in the Mojave Desert by Sept. 7.

“It’s the defense of liberties, the defense of rights and of due process,” said local Assemblyman Phil Wyman, R-Tehachapi.

“It’s the line in the sand. Dave Fisher has become the poster child for the defense of private property ... There but by the grace of God go any citizens.”

Many local officials are paying more than lip service to their support of the ranchers — and their protest of the BLM decision.

In May, San Bernardino County First District Supervisor Bill Postmus stripped the local BLM of free access to the county dumps — a move BLM officials said keeps them from cleaning up the tons of garbage illegally ditched in the desert. Postmus says the BLM shouldn’t rely on the county to pick up the tab and should pay dump fees itself.

In April, San Bernardino County Sheriff Gary Penrod — calling the BLM's actions in the cattle clash "arbitrary and unreasonable" — canceled a deal allowing BLM officials to enforce state and county laws on local federal lands.

At about the same time, 28 members of the state Legislature — led by Wyman — fired off a letter to Mike Pool, director of BLM California operations.

The battle over cattle began some 16 months ago when an environmental coalition called BLM on the carpet for not protecting threatened desert species, including the beleaguered desert tortoise. They sued in federal court.

In an out-of-court settlement in January, the BLM agreed to — among other concessions — stop cattle grazing on federally owned desert lands.

Preserve enacted to separate LA from Las Vegas

Excerpt from "The US National Park Service's partnership parks: collaborative responses to middle landscapes"

by Elisabeth M. Hamin
Community and Regional Planning
Iowa State University

Federal land ownership, traditional uses—the Mojave National Preserve

In 1994, President Clinton signed the California Desert Protection Act into law, upgrading and expanding Joshua Tree and Death Valley National Monuments to National Parks, and creating the Mojave National Preserve (MNP). The MNP is about 1.5 million acres of searing brown desert interspersed with beautiful oases and dramatic hills. The vast majority of the land in the preserve area is ranched, although because the conditions are so difficult, fewer than 3400 cattle (US National Park Service, n.d.) are actually grazed by about ten families total. A fair bit of small game hunting also occurs, with quail, rabbits and the occasional mule deer as the main targets; a few coyotes and bobcats are trapped each year. More politically important in the fight over the designation were the 10 or so big horn sheep that the California State Department of Fish and Wildlife permits to be hunted each year; these are potent prizes for big-game hunters. The Mojave area has long been a rich source of minerals, although in recent years actual working claims consist of a few major corporate mines with smaller local operations few and far between. Virtually all of the Mojave lands were already federal, but at the time of the designation they were managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is another branch of the Department of the Interior.

A curious thing happened during the negotiations surrounding getting the act passed. Park proponents, who included the major environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society, pushed to get the Mojave protected at the highest possible level—as a national park. Park opponents, who included traditional use groups such as the mining industry, cattlemen's association, and pro-hunting groups as well as many local residents, instead argued hard against any inclusion in the NPS. Each side ended up with a partial victory, and a partial defeat. Under the compromise rules Congress laid out in the preserve's authorizing act, ranching and hunting will continue virtually unchanged; some mining may continue, but it will be regulated under the strict mining in the Parks Act of 1976. While in the past the park service has managed incidental grazing or hunting, in the Mojave it becomes a central part of the management role. Because so much of the preserve is under private use and management, working with grazers, miners and homeowners will be central to achieving park unit goals.

One of the reasons why in the end this compromise was acceptable to the pro-park environmentalists may have to do with the reasons for wanting the land protected in the first place. The Mojave is located directly between the sprawling megalopoli of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and directly in the path of growth for each of them. Park proponents never publicly asserted that one purpose of the Mojave designation was to place a measure of growth control on those two expansive desert cities. But in series of interviews, persons outside of NPS management but active both for and against the designation suggested that a significant goal of the bill was growth management for the southwestern desert. By placing the land under park service management, proponents could assure that a big brown belt placed strategically between the two metropolitan areas would prevent the eventual development of one massive, continuous sprawl.

from Land Use Policy
Volume 18, Issue 2, April 2001, Pages 123-135

Land Use Policy is The International Journal Covering All Aspects of Land Use

REGIONAL REPORT ON NPCA'S WORK IN THE PARKS [excerpt]

by Elizabeth G. Daerr
National Parks

* PACIFIC

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has approved legislation that authorizes the sale of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land near Mojave National Preserve in California to build an airport to serve Las Vegas, Nevada.

The final version does not require formal environmental review before the land transaction takes place; however, changes were made to increase public input before construction of any airport facility.

Improvements include: establishing the Department of the Interior as a joint lead agency in any environmental study; language that enables the land to revert to BLM if it is found that an airport should not be built there; establishing a fund that can be used for the acquisition of private inholdings within Mojave; and requiring that an environmental review must address any potential impacts on the purposes for which Mojave National Preserve was created.

At press time, the Senate had not yet scheduled a vote on the bill.

COPYRIGHT 2000 National Parks and Conservation Association

The Environmentalist Evil

by David Holcberg
Capitalism Magazine

David Holcberg, a former civil engineer and businessman, is now a writer living in Southern California. He is also a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA.

Environmentalism regards man as a spreading cancer that must be eliminated at any cost. And its leaders mean it. Environmentalism is at root a movement against man. As novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand observed, "… [their] ultimate motive [is]…hatred for achievement, for reason, for man, for life."

Most people would not believe this to be true. A great number of people tend to regard Environmentalism as a movement for cleaner air and water, for a better environment for man. But the environmentalists' actions demonstrate otherwise.

Clear evidence of their disregard for human life is their decades-long campaign to ban the insecticide DDT, even for specific use against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Whatever the long-term effects of DDT on human health, they should certainly be an option for the people at risk from the ravaging short-term effects of malaria.

Every year, about half a billion people become ill with malaria -- that's ten percent of Earth's population -- and several million die, mostly children.

Since its inception in the 1940's, the use of DDT has prevented the deaths of about six hundred million people, an average of ten million a year.

From 1993 to 1995 DDT was banned in Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru. Malaria increased ninety percent. In the same period, DDT's use was increased in Ecuador, and the incidence dropped sixty percent.

Its introduction in India, in 1960, reduced in the span of a year the number of malaria victims from a million to a hundred thousand, and in Sri Lanka from half a million down to almost zero. Soon after DDT was banned there, the number of victims climbed back to previous levels. Still today, environmentalists keep advocating a worldwide ban on DDT. They must be proud of their record.

Environmentalists are not only against DDT, but also against all insecticides. They aim to eventually ban them all, causing death and disease on a global scale. Their campaign makes perfect sense if we remember that one of the central tenets of Environmentalism is to eliminate overpopulation. As Jacques Cousteau, the famous French oceanographer admitted, "In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate three hundred and fifty thousand people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."

More proof of the their hatred for human life is their persisting campaign to stop chlorinization of water, which kills the germs in it. Their partial success in Peru resulted in thousands of deaths in a single cholera epidemic in 1992. So far they have not succeeded to ban it in the US, though they are hard at it.

Note the Environmentalists' ferocious attack on genetically engineered foods, despite the advantage that they dispense with insecticide use. This new technology promises to enhance the quality of lives by tailoring foods to our specific needs. An example is the invention of engineered rice with beta-carotene, a substance that the body can convert into vitamin A. Every year two million people worldwide go blind and a hundred million more suffer from lack of vitamin A.

If environmentalists really cared about human life and suffering they would have welcomed the new rice and revised their position on banning GE foods. Why don't they?

Maybe David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth has part of the answer: "Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet."

The most glaring proof that Environmentalism is anti human is their stand for animal rights and their opposition to animal use in medical research. Given the alternative of sacrificing a few mice or letting a billion humans die, only the lowest kind of man haters could choose the latter.

How many more people will have to go blind, get sick or die before we see Environmentalism for what it truly is?

A movement of pure hatred for man disguised as a false love of nature.

Listen to Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First, whose primary goal is cutting the world's population by ninety percent: "We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox."

David M. Graber, a biologist with the National Park Service also puts it in the open: "Human happiness [is] …not as important as a wild and healthy planet. Somewhere along the line…we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth."

He is right that there is indeed a cancer growing on Earth. But it is not man. It is Environmentalism, and the sooner we get rid of it, the better.

Requiem for a Telephone Booth

The Internet helped turn a lone phone booth in the Mojave desert into a cult phenomenon--until the bureaucrats stepped in.

The legendary Mojave phone booth, in the middle of California's Mojave desert, miles from anywhere. (Reddit)

RENEE TAWA
Los Angeles Times

"You think maybe some phreaks stole it?"--disbelieving fan on a Web site devoted to the uprooted Mojave Phone Booth.

The endless elegy to the Mojave Phone Booth is loving and wild, as passionate as the callers who rung it up at all hours and usually got an answer, as giddy as the two naked young women who recently answered calls there.

Earlier this month, the most famous phone booth this side of Clark Kent was yanked from its remote spot in the Mojave National Preserve, 75 miles from the Nevada border. Fans from all over the world called the booth or picked up its ringing phone, drawn by what was billed as "the loneliest phone booth on Earth."

What happened on that stretch of desert is a metaphor for today's wired times, a weird merging of old and new communication. Promoted by the Internet, media and word-of-mouth, the phone booth symbolized an intimate, makeshift community of sorts--until it turned into a roadside attraction among the Joshua trees. The pay phone was done in by the very fans who sought the quirky potential of a connection to the middle of nowhere. It became such a symbol that one fan had planned to get married at the site. (He met his fiancee there.) And a USC graduate student in visual anthropology is producing a documentary on the Mojave phenomenon.

The booth was installed in the 1960s for miners, and no one paid much attention to it until recently, when a computer entrepreneur, Godfrey Daniels, plugged the phone on his Web site, http://www.deuceofclubs.com/moj/mojave.html.

"All its glass had been shot out," he wrote, "but I thought it was beautiful." He posted photos and a satellite image of the pay phone, and a star was born.

In the last three years or so, fans who traveled to the booth, on a winding dirt road accessible only by four-wheel drive, reported answering more than 200 calls a day.

No one knew what was to come.

On May 17, with no notice, workers removed the booth. The number has been disconnected.

Pacific Bell and National Park Service officials cited safety concerns, saying that "increased public traffic had a negative impact on the desert environment in the nation's newest national park."

Pacific Bell spokesman Steve Getzug said he did not know who initiated discussions about hauling away the phone booth. He said it was a joint decision.

"I know there were several conversations between Pacific Bell and the National Park Service," he said. "It was really weighing this issue of public needs and impacts they saw happening out in the desert. I think they were concerned with campfires and litter, and had concerns about people coming out there and getting stranded."

*

A spokesman for the Mojave National Preserve, Mike Reynolds, said park staff members have come across "a ton of trash in the area" and stranded motorists who try to get to the phone booth without four-wheel drive. One windy day, near the booth, with no one around, "there was a blazing campfire pit. It was going crazy.

"Congress has set aside these lands to be preserved, protected and enjoyed by all citizens," he said.

Fans of the phone booth challenged the officials' statements, saying that they took care to pick up trash. Regulars at the site said that they did not notice abandoned campfires and that locals helped out stuck motorists.

In fact, said Kaarina Roberto, a USC graduate student, people took pride in the spot. Roberto, 28, was skeptical when she first started investigating the site as the possible subject of a thesis for her visual anthropology major. Then she and her husband began camping there, answering the phone as it rang all night.

"When we first heard people say they cared about it, it sounded kind of weird," she said. "But it's caring about what it represents . . . it represents the positive aspects of humanity, a diverse group of people who share some common ground, a shared humanity."

She was stunned by the news of its removal.

"It sounds really preposterous," she said, "but it felt almost like a death of a community that has formed, unlike anything else you've ever experienced."

Andria Fiegel Wolfe, a 30-year-old theatrical lighting designer, and her sister visited the booth last year from New York City. The phone was ringing as they pulled up in their rental car. In the heat of the desert, they shed their clothes and answered the phone with sun block and a smile: "Mojave Desert. How may I direct your call?" In 4 1/2 hours, they took 72 calls.

Because?

"I think it's a little bit of magic, something special," Wolfe said in an e-mail. "'I think that people also appreciated the frivolity of it all, the whimsy of the trips out to the Booth. . . .

"Me, I was inspired to go see the desert for myself. And it changed my life. If it took a silly telephone booth to give me that, I'm thankful and can't question it too much. I'm sad beyond words that it's gone, but it's a sadness over the circumstances of its removal--that the park isn't truly for the people, if that's the way the rangers see it."

Daniels, who plans to keep his Web site up, still hoped that the booth could live on, to tie the knot in front of it.

"I want to get the booth. I want to reinstall it somewhere else. I won't disclose the location, but you'll be able to call the number."

The booth, according to Pacific Bell, will be destroyed.

That's standard procedure, a spokesman said, for a damaged phone booth that cannot be revived.

If a Phone Rings in the Desert...

Leander Kahney
http://www.wired.com/

What happens when a tourist attraction, in this case a phone booth in the middle of nowhere, becomes too popular? The National Park Service removes everything but the ring, that's what.

Located smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert at the end of a dirt road, the Mojave Phone Booth attracted so many visitors to an environmentally sensitive area that the NPS cut the connection and removed the booth last week.

"While the phone and its location proved to be a novelty for some in recent months, the increased public traffic had a negative impact on the desert environment in the nation's newest national park," said the National Park Service and Pacific Bell in a joint statement announcing its removal.

At least 15 miles from the nearest paved road, which runs through the vast nowhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the phone was installed decades ago for workers at a now closed cinder mine.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, except rocks and Joshua trees, can be seen from the booth, according to Godfrey Daniels, an Arizona computer consultant who popularized the outpost.

Three years ago, after a friend told Daniels about the phone, he began dialing it every day, hoping for an answer.

Daniels documented his obsession -- A Pointless Exercise in Telephony -- and the sheer weirdness of it persuaded people from all over the planet to call the booth's number (760-733-9969).

"You can be sitting bored out of your mind at work and it’s like traveling," said Daniels of the attraction the phone exerted. "You can make something happen far away."

For the longest time, the phone attracted only a trickle of visitors. Then came a rash of news stories in the national media, and curiosity seekers flooded the site.

"There were a lot of visitors," Daniels said, "Well, for out there, there were a lot of visitors. Mainly at weekends. The chances of someone answering the phone were significantly improved from in the past."

Now Daniels said he is in two minds about the booth's removal. While its popularity now bores him, he remains skeptical of the National Parks Service rationale for its removal.

"I don’t think the NPS had a right to remove it," he said. "They can’t say what the negative environmental impact is. If there was a negative environmental impact, they should be able to say what it is."

The spokesperson for the Mojave National Preserve, which oversees the park, forwarded requests for comment on the booth situation to Pacific Bell, which didn't return phone calls. Neither did the the NPS.

The official joint statement simply states: "After weighing environmental concerns and public need, Pacific Bell and the National Park Service agreed to remove a pay phone located in a remote pocket of the Mojave National Preserve."

Whatever the reason, fans of the booth aren't buying it. Daniels estimated he has received nearly 200 emails protesting its removal in the last few days. Many came from visitors claiming the land around the booth remains unblemished despite the increased traffic.

"I was very impressed at how clean and untarnished the area was for being so popular," wrote "Robin," who visited last month. "There was no trash or debris, no trampled plants, no broken glass.... It looks to me like the people who have taken the time to visit the booth were very aware of keeping things in order."

Pacific Bell was a reluctant party in the booth’s removal, Daniels said, because of all the publicity it had received. The company had even replaced some of the shot-out windows with ones displaying the company’s logo.

And now, although the phone's gone, the number still rings, which Daniels said is a particularly cruel trick because unsuspecting callers believe the phone is still there.

Daniels said he hopes Pacific Bell will sell him the booth. If that happens, he plans to install the booth in a very remote, secret location and install a telecom link-up. He declined to discuss the details.

"If I had to do this all over again, I would do it very differently," he said. "I would keep it very, very quiet."

Phone booth in desert disappears

Mojave visitors can no longer phone home from a once famous communication site.

By Keith Rogers
Las Vegas Review-Journal

The number for the lonely pay phone in the Mojave Desert still rings, but the booth that once caught the attention of curiosity seekers around the world is gone.

Pacific Bell technicians with the concurrence of the National Park Service removed the famous phone booth last week from its remote location in the Mojave National Preserve in California, 75 miles southwest of the Nevada border. That's where it had stood since the 1960s to serve the nearby Cima Cinder Mine and wanderers out that way.

Pacific Bell and National Park Service officials said the phone booth had become so well-known from media exposure and Web sites that chronicled its existence that travelers were damaging fragile desert resources. And that outweighed its public service needs, they said.

"Certainly the phone and its location proved to be a novelty for some in recent months but that all had an impact," explained Steve Getzug, a Pacific Bell spokesman in Los Angeles.

He confirmed the booth was removed Wednesday and said it was hauled to a company service yard in Southern California.

Calls to the booth's number, (760) 733-9969, rang endlessly Monday, but one Web site that posts information about the so-called Mojave Phone Booth, claims dialers were hearing a "phantom ring."

Removal of the booth "was probably inevitable given the hyper-attention the booth attracted (and) federal involvement," according to the Web site known as "Deuce of Clubs."

Mojave National Preserve Superintendent Mary Martin said problems with travelers in search of the phone booth had increased in recent months.

"We had a fire out there a couple weeks ago from a blazing campfire," she said, noting that decorative rocks had been used to spell messages near the booth and vandalism was commonplace.

Ranchers in the area also complained that sightseers were pestering them to find the booth and some became stranded and sought their help.

"We've had a lot of cars that have gone out there and been stuck," Martin said.

Getzug said callers to the number will probably hear endless ringing for a few more days but once the disconnect order is processed there will be a message that the number is no longer in service. Plans call for removing the telephone lines that led to the booth.

Pacific Bell's right of way for the booth and transmission lines expired in 1992.

"It was sort of out of sight and out of mind for a number of years," Getzug said.

Bad Day at Black Rock

Bryan’s Misguided Search for a Green-Approved Legacy

by Gerald Hillier
Nevada Journal

Sen. Richard Bryan's proposal to create a new National Conservation Area (NCA) in Nevada's Black Rock Desert is not in the public interest, and certainly not in the interest of Nevadans. Actually, the senator's proposal would negatively affect precisely the area he claims he is seeking to protect. The plan would highlight these remote locations, give them public attention and attract more people to them. Other public lands in Nevada would be negatively affected also.

This is my considered view as a professional land and natural resources manager who for 16 years ran the largest NCA in existence—the California Desert Conservation Area. For 35 years I worked for the Bureau of Land Management, assigned for 21 of those years as a district manager. Thus my knowledge of the management and administration of national conservation areas is first-hand.

From my frame of reference, there are several areas where one can see a major disconnect between the explanations being given by Bryan and other NCA supporters and the actual circumstaces of this proposal.

First, although it is being offered in the name of "protection," and a purported need for it, that is an outright misstatement. The public lands are already managed and protected. It does not take designation to give BLM land "protection." The authority to regulate and manage use already exists and is being exercised. After all, the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA) has been in effect for some 24 years now.

BLM Already Has Authority
Over Applegate-Lassen Trail

The BLM has rangers in all areas, it has applied the management authority granted it under the act, and it is doing comprehensive land and resource planning. There is nothing missing from that equation. And whatever historic value does exist in the Applegate-Lassen Emigrant Trail, clear authority to manage and protect it is already in place under the BLM's existing multiple-use planning process.

But even if there were a need for additional protection, the NCA designation does not provide any.

One big reason is that there are no standards for NCAs. What, really, is a "National Conservation Area?" What standard of behavior is called for by users?

I can tell you—as someone who was an original supporter of the concept in the '70s when the NCAs began—that there is none. NCA status will not give protection purposes any more teeth. Fundamentally the NCA designation itself does not work. Essentially it is today only an interim step, on the way to something else.

How the Restrictions Come

Consider what Californians saw happen with the California Desert Conservation Area. With 12.5 million acres of public land in the southern part of the state, the CDCA became a proving ground and pilot program for the NCA concept. For its time and place, that was good—but it showed that the model does not need repeating.

Here's an example. At the end of the planning process, we found we had a special area—the high-elevation East Mojave—which was remote enough to escape urbanization and had lots of uses. It had important mining and grazing as well as hunting and rock hounding. All were valid uses—some economic and others involving outdoor recreation.

It needed a name, and what we came up with was "National Scenic Area." Our intent was to highlight both its true multiple use character and its heritage values.

What it became, however, was a stalking horse for preservationists who wanted to end multiple use on the land. The outcome was a National Preserve in the CDCA, in the name of "protection." Next, under the U.S. Park Service, came more restrictions on grazing and hunting, with the NPS announcing an ultimate goal of removing them. Mining and rock hounding were simply prohibited. And of some 500,000 acres of private lands that are or were within the East Mojave area, most soon will be conveyed to the federal government.

The bottom line is that the very values the public valued and which the BLM itself had intended to protect were virtually lost.

Now, Sen. Bryan and the environmentalists pushing for NCA status for the Black Rock have, of course, offered assurances that the designation will have no effect upon existing uses like grazing and hunting. Unfortunately, however, those assurances are empty. It is not up to the senator nor to the advocacy groups what will happen under the plan they are pushing. Indeed, their plan itself gives complete control to the Secretary of the Interior. This raises the question of whether the intention behind these platitudes is to lull local folks to sleep. Actually, if the assurances that the grazing, hunting and private property will not be affected were truly valid, there would exist no reason to propose the NCA.

Of course, everyone in the West today has had too much experience with the federal agencies to trust them to keep their promises, or even be bound by them. Sadly, that's with good reason. The nation is now littered with broken federal promises, whether one looks at Voyagers National Park in Minnesota, where lake access was "assured" until the National Park Service applied wilderness management rules, or to California, where miners were promised protection of "valid existing rights" but had to prove them and then were faced with no way to move ore out of the wilderness.

Ongoing Mischief

We are all familiar, of course, with environmentalists eagerly emphasizing the stress that visitors place on an area. Yet the preservationists advocate NCA status for the Black Rock desert—a course they know will attract more visitors there. Is their goal to create a need for even greater restrictions? This is the danger with NCAs—they set up a framework for on-going preservation mischief in the name of "protection." What that turns out to mean, practically, is "get rid of everything we do not approve of."

That has been the effect of the NCA designation—helped along by application of the Endangered Species Act—in California's San Bernardino County.

There the residents and citizens are losing much control of and access to what had been the county's resources and resource-based industry and employment. Almost 500,000 acres of private land tax base are on the way to being lost to the county, as "conservation interests"—wielding federal Land and Water Conservation Fund appropriations—move to purchase the acreage and "donate" it to the federal government.

In Southern California the California Desert Protection Act has already placed almost 9 million acres—much of it highly mineralized—off-limits for any future development and even recreation activity such as rockhounding. This represents a real loss to the county's tax base. Not only are taxable lands lost, but public lands, too, are blocked from ever being able to generate business, economic return or employment.

Because San Bernardino County is already beyond the ceilings set by law for payment in lieu of taxes (PILT), county officials there find themselves facing a substantial net loss in revenue with no decrease in the demand for services and infrastructure in the area. Indeed, much of the infrastructure use—e.g., county roads, solid waste disposal, flood control—is a direct result of federal acquisitions!

The Latest Version of the Bill

After reading the latest draft of Bryan's legislation, posted on his Senate website, I see that the bill still seeks to enact into law numerous non-NCA bells and whistles of the preservationist wish list. These include mineral withdrawal, cancellation of geo-thermal steam leasees and designation of wilderness—and it seeks to do this without the normal public planning processes.

For example, while the bill now at least in part addresses on-going uses, it also clearly sets the stage for very restrictive management. After withdrawing the entire area from mining location and leasing, and establishing the eleven Wilderness Areas, what's left to plan?

This departs from the procedures followed in other, earlier, NCAs, such as the case of the California Desert. There it was up to the agency to develop planning recommendations for wilderness. It is true that Congress later ignored the input and took the recommendations of environmentalists, but that does not negate the public record that was made and which still has validity.

Another difficulty is the bill's language on roads:

Existing Public Roads.—The Secretary is authorized to maintain public roads within the boundaries of the conservation area in a manner consistent with the purposes for which the conservation area was established ....

Does the senator propose to extinguish any road claims under RS 2477? Although those are valid existing rights, his language seems to ignore it and say that the federal government is taking over everything. I suspect that out there within the WSAs there are roads and trails—available to jeeps and other forms of access and used by miners, ranchers, hunters and others—that do not qualify as a "road" under the very technical language the agencies have lately begun using. Now they are trying to exclude from the definition of "road" anything that does not receive "regular and continuing maintenance by mechanical equipment."

Under current law, Congress can do virtually whatever it wants—including designate land area as wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act. The legislators are not constrained nor are there any requirements they have to meet prior to such designation.

However, if a federal agency recommends an area for Wilderness status, the federal government is required, under law, to both inventory the "roadless" areas and—more critically—complete U.S. Geological Survey mineral inventories. This is to document what mineral values may be lost if the area is withdrawn. All this data is then available to the Congress, if its members care to consider it. It is also available to the public, for its input into the decisions.

Now, in the Black Rock case, it is my understanding that such inventories have not been done. The areas are Wilderness Study Areas, but have generally been classified by the BLM as Not Recommended as Suitable for inclusion in the National Wilderness System. Apparently, because the BLM considered the areas unsuitable for Wilderness status, no inventories were ever authorized. This would mean that passage of the senator's bill, as currently written, would violate existing national policy, as embodied in the Wilderness Act.

The Issue of Legacy

To many observers it appears that Sen. Bryan, now in his last year in the U.S. Senate, has naturally been thinking in terms of his personal legacy to the citizens of Nevada. When approached by preservationists making disingenuous claims about the need to "protect" the Black Rock Desert and the mountains around it, the senator then agreed to seek the legislation they desired.

But legacy should not, must not, be wrapped up with implementing agendas which are not in the public interest—or which adversely affect the livelihoods of those who can ill afford to battle powerful environmental interests to maintain their income, employment and stewardship of resources.

Gerald Hillier is owner and principal, Public Land Users Services. He lives in Riverside, Calif.

The Beef with Livestock

by TODD WILKINSON
National Parks

Grazing is allowed at about three dozen parks and preserves. Although the practice is legislatively mandated, it frequently causes conflicts with wildlife and natural resource policies. The clash is most apparent at Grand Teton National Park.

LAST AUTUMN, a traveler from Tuscany came to America with hopes of catching a glimpse of the "Wild West." His imagination whetted by the classic outlaw movie, Shane, Daniele Tiezzi decided to hike in Grand Teton National Park not far from where the motion picture had been made half a century earlier.

Yet as the young Italian walked through the park and posed for a photograph in front of the spectacular mountains, he was rudely awakened by the clashing values of the Old and New Wests. Confronted by an angry Jackson Hole cowboy working for a local rancher, Tiezzi was ordered to leave because his presence, he was told, might frighten cattle grazing inside the national park boundary.

For wildlife biologist Franz Camenzind, who accompanied Tiezzi on the hike and who oversees the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance in Wyoming, the incident provides proof that livestock still are treated as sacred cows in some parks--even when the domestic animals dash with native wildlife, the National Park Service's mission of landscape preservation, and enjoyment for park visitors.

Although the National Park Service (NPS) is working to phase out grazing in some parks--notably Mojave National Preserve, Death Valley National Park, and Channel Islands National Park--others continue the practice and may in fact be extending it at parks such as Grand Teton. Some three dozen different parks and preserves began the 21st century with nonnative livestock grazing inside their borders, and at least another four sites allow grazing through agreements with the Bureau of Land Management.

Even as the National Park Service works to change the policy--a tedious and expensive process--Congress sometimes works to continue it. Led by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N. Mex.) and Rep. James Hansen (R-Utah), some members of Congress have tried to stall grazing reforms, in some cases authoring legislation that would solidify the grip of livestock grazing on public lands in the West.

But a growing chorus of prominent ecologists posits that no single human activity has negatively affected the arid West more than livestock grazing.

In addition to land, grazing has a tremendous impact on riparian areas and their inhabitants. Of the 12 Western states that have a state fish, eight are considered endangered mainly because of grazing.

A 1994 study by the National Wildlife Federation tided Grazing to Extinction found that grazing contributed directly or indirectly to a minimum of 340 species listed or becoming candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act. In the arid West, the federally protected desert tortoise has been especially hard hit by grazing. Beginning this year, NPCA has made examination of the real costs of grazing in parks a primary component of its State of the Parks program, established to identify threats to biological diversity as well as the health of natural systems and the condition of historical parks.

"Cattle grazing in national parks is an incompatible activity, given what the parks were established for, especially in as spectacular a park as Grand Teton where the needs of native wildlife should be preeminent," says Tony Jewett, NPCA's northern Rockies regional director. "Cattle compete with native wildlife, degrade native plants, and disrupt visitor experience. The longer cattle persist in these parks, the longer there is going to be conflict."

Jewett notes that some units of the system, such as Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site in Montana, were set aside specifically to celebrate the history of frontier-era farming and ranching, but they are exceptions.

The National Park Service is being forced to confront a prickly and politically volatile question: What legitimate presence, if any, should livestock have in parks?

Debra Donahue, a law professor at the University of Wyoming, is the author of a scathing critique of livestock grazing titled The Western Range Revisited (University of Oklahoma Press). Donahue is also an academically trained biologist.

"One of the only reasons that cattle remain in many national parks and many Forest Service wilderness areas is the incredible political clout that the livestock industry wields in Congress," she says. "There is little or no scientific justification that can be made for livestock grazing in parks."

In all cases where grazing persists, it is legislated by Congress. Compromises were struck to ease tensions over fears that new national parklands would be "locked up" and unavailable for traditional local uses. Grand Teton provides a vivid example. The park was carved out of the picturesque valley of Jackson Hole when livestock still ruled the range. Over the years, many cattle allotments in Grand Teton have been phased out, and "those that remain are supposed to end upon the death of the beneficiaries named.

Camenzind puts the Grand Teton impact in perspective. The park, he says, spends more than $40,000 annually to maintain these allotments, and it receives about $8,500 a year in grazing fees. The cost to graze the same cattle on private land in Jackson Hole would be about $81,900, meaning that the ranchers enjoy more than $70,000 in subsidies each year.

"And what does the public get?" Camenzind asks. "We get unnecessary conflicts between cattle and federally protected grizzly bears, which resulted in a grizzly being killed inside the national park. We got a very intensive and expensive surveillance of a wolf den in the national park because it was near the cattle. We get thousands of acres of national parkland infested with alien weed species and a corresponding depletion of biodiversity. We also get over 100 miles of fences in our national park, much of it crisscrossing major wildlife habitat and migration routes. In all, the arrangement results in an almost complete loss of winter forage on about 2,700 acres and a severe depletion of forage on another 5,600 acres. This is forage that should be available for buffalo, elk, pronghorn, and other wildlife."

Park spokeswoman Joan Anzelmo says the park has not ignored Camenzind's concerns.

"Grand Teton was born of extraordinary political compromise and one of the compromises involved the continuation of livestock grazing. Sometimes short-term compromise is necessary to accomplish long-term objectives."

George Helfrich, a management assistant in the superintendent's office who is working on an environmental review of grazing, says that grazing was established as a legitimate use in the park by Congress, which means the park itself cannot unilaterally act to end it. Scientists, he says, have differing views on whether cattle cause all of the problems asserted by Camenzind, but one thing is certain. As wolves and grizzlies continue to recolonize, conflicts with cattle are likely to increase.

Recently, park officials have made overtures about extending the leases for grazing in Grand Teton, arguing that helping to keep large ranches in the valley is important to protecting open space and wildlife habitat. If ranchers lose access to grasslands inside the park, they say, the agrarians may have no other choice but to subdivide their pastures and pave them over with development. Currently, the park is in the midst of a congressionally funded study to determine the relationship between cattle grazing and the protection of open space and wildlife habitat surrounding it. Congress also is considering an appropriation to buy conservation easements on adjacent ranches that would benefit Grand Teton's bison, elk, and pronghorn.

"I say there are alternative ranching operations that could be adopted that would free up the parkland and give it back to wildlife," Camenzind says. "We could take the dollars currently used to subsidize the permittees [ranchers] and buy winter hay or pellets for the cattle."

"Instead we give the park forage to the cattle," Camenzind continues, "and buy winter feed for our elk and buffalo on the National Elk Refuge. And throughout all of this, the permittees have made no guarantee that they would keep their ranches operating and in open space. I think protecting open space is as important as phasing cattle out of the park. I just do not accept that the two are inextricably linked."

Every park that has livestock grazing inherited it as part of the arrangement for the park's creation. Conservationists understand that deals were cut to assuage local citizens who opposed park designation; however, continuing the practice has merely extended a protracted struggle.

In desert parks such as Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park, where precipitation is minimal, it might take hundreds of acres of land to sustain a single cow, where in other, moist parts of the country, a few cows can subsist on a single acre of green pasture. It means that in the desert, the limited forage that cows consume and the patterns of their movements can cause severe stress for other plants and animals.

In these two parks, as well as Great Basin National Park in Nevada, the Park Service is having success at eliminating what were once extensive grazing allotments, but the process is far from complete.

At Mojave National Preserve, which supports prime desert tortoise habitat, the preserve had been encumbered with livestock grazing leases on 1.25 million of its 1.6 million acres. Within the last year, according to John Reynolds, the western regional director of NPS, the Park Service has been working on a project that could allow NPS to buy out the first set of grazing rights and has received a significant commitment in private pledges to buy out the remaining rights.

At Death Valley National Park, the largest park in the lower 48, the situation is just as positive. According to NPCA's Defending the Desert, a report released last fall on the anniversary of the California Desert Protection Act, the Park Service had eliminated two-thirds of the grazing in the park. Last year, the Park Service canceled the Last Chance grazing permit because of the rancher's lack of compliance with existing regulations. Additionally, the park is canceling grazing on parcels that connect to larger allotments on neighboring BLM lands. This would leave the park with only one area open to grazing.

Studies collected on lands analogous to Mojave and Death Valley show a clear correlation between cattle and environmental destruction. The Park Service's own resource guidelines recognize "the pervasive quality of grazing impacts on park resources" and cite a long list of resource concerns, including vegetation changes, water quality degradation, and degradation of cultural resources.

Johanna Wald, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, "It is well established that livestock grazing can have significant adverse effects in arid environments like the Mojave National Preserve."

Unfortunately, individual park superintendents do not have the power to take action, says Reynolds. Title 36 of the Code of Federal Regulations, section 2.60, prohibits "the pasturing or grazing of livestock in a park area, except as specifically authorized by statute, as required under a reserved right, or as conducted as an integral part of a program to maintain an historic scene. In all the parks where we have cattle, it is authorized by Congress."

Although the hands of NPS personnel may be tied to some degree by Congress, Helen Wagenvoord, NPCA's associate director of the Pacific region, says the agency has an impressive arsenal of laws at its disposal to counter some of the worst effects of grazing. These include the Organic Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Over the past few years, the Park Service has made some impressive gains in eliminating grazing from some parks where it had been most entrenched.

"Where we have been working pretty diligently is trying to arrange situations where it is beneficial for the ranchers with grazing arrangements to phase out over time," says Reynolds. "Where we have had financial partners to help facilitate the transition, the success rate has been pretty high."

Reynolds cites the recent withdrawal of cattle from 46,000 acres in Great Basin in Nevada--although sheep grazing continues--after ranchers were compensated for their allotments. In January 2000, grazing also was phased out of the Cades Cove meadows in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee after 70 years. These actions, in the East and West, are considered potential models for remedying the ongoing conflict with cattle.

NPCA's Southwest Regional Director David Simon says the land use history of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico demonstrates why intensive livestock grazing is incompatible with parks in the parched West. In arid environments, cattle have especially insidious effects because they reduce native grasses and their hooves break open the thin cryptogamic crust that anchors native plants and serves as a protective layer against wind and water erosion.

In 1879, 140 cattle were grazed in the entire state of New Mexico. Four years later, aided by the arrival of the railroad, which could ship animals to market, there were 1 million head, and a decade after that, millions more swarmed public lands including the landscapes of future parks.

"In Bandelier, the scars caused by cattle, sheep, and burro hooves are written deep into the land," Simon says. "Many believe the park is in intensive care, suffering from a combination of grazing, climate change, and fire suppression. The last burros were pulled out of Bandelier in the 1970s, and 20 years later the park is beginning to figure out how to grapple with all the problems," says Simon. "Overcoming the wounds is going to cost a lot of money, but who should be responsible for fixing it? It's like a Superfund site where nobody wants to pay the bill."

In response to public pressure, the Park Service has assigned Kathy Davis, a resource specialist based in southern Arizona, to draft a report on park grazing issues that could form the basis of a national management policy.

For tourists like Daniele Tiezzi, any reforms will not occur soon enough. He now realizes that the frontier mentality that shaped cowboy classics is not a fiction. In the "Wild West," including some of America's finest national parks, the jingle rings true: Cattle is king.

TODD WILKINSON lives in Bozeman, Montana, and is a frequent contributor to National Parks. He last wrote about the decline of the California sea otter population.

COPYRIGHT 2000 National Parks and Conservation Association

KMUD’s Pirate Radio Adventures at the Mojave Phone Booth

janggolan weblog

The Mojave Phone Booth was a phone booth in a remote region of the Mojave National Preserve that rang almost 24 hours a day 7 days a week. People from all over the planet called the most remote phone booth known on earth with the hope that someone would answer. Installed shortly after World War 2 at the request of local miners, the phone booth was miles from civilization, 15 miles from the nearest highway, near Death Valley.

For more than fifty years it was the most curious landmark in a wild and desolate area until it was removed by park officials in May 2000.

On March 20, 2000 an adventurous and enthusiastic crew from shortwave pirate station KMUD descended on the Mojave Phone Booth for a historic broadcast from the site. The phone booth had been recently publicized in the media including the nationally syndicated Art Bell show. One of the KMUD operators that night called the Art Bell show from the booth and spoke with guest host Peter Weissbach. KMUD was allowed to give the time and frequency of their broadcast but not the phone number (which was 760-733-9969). However, the phone number was easily available on the internet, setting the stage for a live call-in show transmitted by KMUD on 6851 and 3450 kHz.

KMUD crew members spent three days and two nights in the Mojave National Preserve and recall the weekend as being perfect for their activities. Careful planning had gone into the technical arrangements. Antennas were set up and transmitters finely tuned. Batteries were charged and ready to go. An audio pickup and mixer were connected to the phone. Wires and cables were strung everywhere, turning the booth into a scene from an electrician’s repair shop.

Everything seemed to work like a charm. No park rangers visited the phone booth that weekend and thankfully no one from the Federal Communications Commission. After half an hour of testing, KMUD signed on with Art Bell’s “The Chase” theme. The signal went out in AM mode with about 20 watts of carrier power. A CD of wolf calls played atmospherically in the background as the KMUD crew interviewed callers on the air. The effect worked beautifully – no one seemed to notice that coyotes, not wolves, are indigenous to the desert.

KMUD’s broadcast featured conversations with callers, some music and station IDs, and the announcers encouraging listeners to call the phone booth. An interesting woman caller suggested that the Mojave Phone Booth was drawing its power from a UFO held at “Area 51” in Nevada. Two callers reported on reception conditions. Two reporters from Canadian Television arrived at the phone booth just prior to the KMUD transmission. They interviewed the KMUD crew before the show and videotaped them fielding phone calls. This must have been a first – shortwave radio pirates broadcasting live being interviewed by television journalists.

One woman who called during the weekend was an official with a Zurich based financial institution. She called from St. Moritz where she was facilitating a seminar for corporate CEOs. Several weeks earlier the woman had been touring the desert and happened upon the phone booth. She answered some calls and learned all about the booth’s story. After returning to Switzerland she decided to call the booth herself.

The KMUD broadcast from the Mojave Phone Booth was well documented in audio and video. It is unclear how many people actually heard the broadcast but those who did were witnesses to pirate radio history. The beautiful, stark Mojave environment was a natural setting for people connecting with other people, their voices shimmering through the phone lines and the ether, the power of radio bringing them all together.

Public Takes Title to Almost 225,000 Acres of Inholdings Spread Across California Desert

Business Editors
Business Wire

SACRAMENTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)

The public, through the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), yesterday (January 18, 2000) took ownership of almost 225,000 acres of key parcels of private lands spread throughout the California Desert in San Bernardino County as part of an unprecedented public-private partnership to protect the Desert's natural values.

The Partnership, in addition to BLM, involves The Wildlands Conservancy (TWC), a non-profit group based in Oak Glen, Calif., which contributed $15 million to private funds toward the purchase; Catellus Development Corporation (NYSE:CDX), owner of the alternate sections of lands originally granted to Southern Pacific Railroad, which sold the lands at a discounted price; and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was instrumental in obtaining the $10 million in Federal funds from Congress needed to complete the purchase.

The acquisition not only brings 224,706 acres of private lands into public ownership and makes these lands immediately available for public use and enjoyment, it also fills in critical gaps and provides the public improved access to several hundred thousand acres of existing public lands interspersed with the newly acquired inholdings. These lands are spread across more than 140 miles of desert lands stretching from Barstow east to the Colorado River.

The transaction is part of a larger acquisition effort involving TWC, Catellus, BLM, the National Park Service (NPS), and hundreds of small inholders who desire to sell their scattered tracts in the large area. The Department of Interior, which oversees BLM, is required by the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, sponsored by Sen. Feinstein, to give priority to consolidating Federal Ownership within the National Park units and BLM wilderness areas designated by the Act.

The larger acquisition partnership was initially aimed at bringing into public ownership a total of 437,000 acres of Catellus holdings and up to 50,000 acres of small private inholdings within the NPS's Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park and within 15 BLM Wilderness Areas and other BLM areas in the Desert with high recreation and wildlife values.

TWC has recently reached an agreement with Catellus to expand the potential acquisition by 433,000 acres, to a total of 480,000 acres of Catellus lands. The additional acquisition area would include portions of the scenic Cady Mountains and key wildlife corridors and habitat between Joshua Tree Park and Mojave National Preserve.

In addition to the $25 million expended yesterday, Congress has appropriated $5 million to the NPS acquisitions in Fiscal Year 2000 and has targeted an additional $15 million for BLM and NPS in Fiscal Year 2001 if certain conditions are met to complete the overall effort. TWC is endeavoring to raise the additional private funds necessary to complete the remaining land acquisitions from Catellus. Including yesterday's closing, these acquisitions would total $53 million.
In addition to the direct acquisitions, the side benefits of the partnership include:

-- Ongoing land exchanges between BLM and Catellus, such as an
exchange which closed last week valued at $3.7 million. This
exchange resulted in public acquisition of about 12,000 acres
near Barstow, primarily in the Black Mountain Wilderness and the
Rainbow Basin Area of Critical Environmental Concern; and

-- A commitment obtained by TWC that Catellus will grant the Federal
government easements over certain properties Catellus will retain
in the Desert once the overall acquisition is completed,
providing the public access across hundreds of miles of
recreation routes currently traversing Catellus private lands.

Further information on the BLM can be obtained at their website www.ca.blm.gov.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Business Wire
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

The Mojave Phone Booth

How a windswept, bullet hole-ridden telephone became a legend in its own time.

By J.A. Getzlaff
Daily Planet on salon.com

Jan. 12, 2000 Somewhere in the middle of the Mojave National Reserve is a phone booth. Thanks to Internet cowboy Godfrey Daniels, the windswept, bullet hole-ridden booth, once used solely by ranchers and miners, is now famous.

The story goes like this: Daniels, a computer programmer by day and hopeless romantic by night, heard about a working phone booth sitting in the midst of scorched scrub about 12 miles off of Interstate 15 and 75 miles southwest of Las Vegas. Curious, he set out to find the booth, and not only did he find it -- he fell in love with it.

Daniels rode home and created a Web site, cleverly titled The Mojave Phone Booth Site.

His labor of love paid off, and soon digital surfers from far and wide were calling the phone -- and in some cases, peeling their butts from their chairs to actually visit The Booth to answer its incoming calls.

To date, calls have been made by South Africans and answered by New Yorkers. At all hours of the day and night, the phone rings.

But not everybody has been happy about it. According to Daniels' site, one killjoy stole the phone's receiver, and now park rangers are confiscating the quartz stones that have been used to write out the booth's phone number for aerial viewers.

Yet the Mojave Phone Booth prevails -- it remains up and running, lovingly decorated with big-busted Mattel toys and photographs of itself, and inspiring television commercials, a short story and even an indie film, "Dead Line."

True Grit - Cattle Ranching in the Mojave Desert Under Siege

It's never been easy for cattle ranchers in the rugged western Mojave. Now laws designed to protect the desert tortoise threaten to end their cowboy way of life.

MELANIE FINN
Los Angeles Times

Miles of it. Sand, rock, mesquite bush, yucca and sky. Out where I-40 blasts east through the Mojave Desert and Route 247 heads south onto the sun-baked plain of Lucerne Valley. Miles of nothing.

No, miles of cattle country.

"This is great country for them," says Bill Mitchell, a local rancher out on a roundup astride his feisty appaloosa, Chief. It's a 90-degree day, and the rough desert ground is thick with rattlesnakes--Mojave greens, the lethal kind. But the cattle know how to avoid the snakes, they know what to eat and where to drink, Mitchell explains. The warmer climate allows for year-round grazing, and the dryness helps prevent disease.

Indeed, his cows look sleek and content as he patiently guides a dozen of them toward his home base, Two Hole Springs Ranch, at the mouth of Rattlesnake Canyon in Lucerne Valley. Mitchell speaks softly to them, a mantra, "Easy now, easy now."

He's been talking to cows since his childhood. He learned to rope, ride and wrangle on his grandfather's Mojave ranch, Horsethief Springs. In 1986, Mitchell bought his own ranch, Pilot Knob near China Lake. A decade later, he sold "PK" and bought Two Hole Springs.

"Working cattle is the only thing I've ever wanted to do in my life," he says.

In his cowboy hat and jingle-bob spurs, Mitchell seems a reminder of another age, a time when San Bernardino and Riverside were known as "the cow counties." In the 1920s, there were 30 ranches spread out over the Mojave, each ranch comprising several hundred thousand acres. Two Hole Springs, with 53,000 acres and 86 head of cattle, is one of six that remain.

As the century draws to a close, Mitchell and his fellow ranchers have no wish to become anachronisms--or worse, landless. These are men and women who believe in hard work and self-sufficiency, who profess an intense love for this harsh landscape. But their livelihood and way of life are under increasing pressure from various conservation organizations, which say the fragile desert ecosystem is definitely not good country for cattle.

Most of the land on these Mojave ranches is leased from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the government agency overseeing federal lands. All but five acres of Mitchell's Two Hole Springs belongs to the bureau and is, therefore, subject to a host of new grazing restrictions resulting from the 1989 listing of the desert tortoise as an endangered species.

Regulations Are 'Piling Up'

As the ranchers see it, groups such as the Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee seek to enforce the Endangered Species Act on these federal lands to an extent that ranching could become economically nonviable in most of the western Mojave.

"A lot of days I'm going through all these new regulations piling up on my desk and I get to thinking, 'Do I want my son and grandson to wrangle with all this?' " says Dave Fisher, president of the High Desert Cattlemen's Assn. for 14 years. A taciturn man in his 50s, he runs 500 head of permanent range cows on his ranch of 30,000 private and 90,000 federal acres. His father started ranching this area in 1927.

"I think maybe we're not long for this world," he says.

Fisher adds quickly and defiantly, "But then I think, 'No, I'm not going anywhere.' "

He's speaking from a cell phone in his truck, 30 miles in any direction from another human being. It's 7 in the evening. His day started at 4 a.m., he's been in the saddle for 10 hours. And he's smiling: "I love this life. I wouldn't change places with anyone on this planet."

The sparse vegetation necessitates such mind-boggling acreage. The range is open, and cattle are free to wander where they will. The Bureau of Land Management restrictions aim to prevent overgrazing. Each cow is allotted a certain number of acres, ranging anywhere from one head per eight acres to only one head per 50 acres. And if there's no rain, the bureau can close down or curtail any grazing on federal lands. Ranchers would then have to downsize their herds, auctioning extra cattle until it rains and the bureau reopens the acreage.

Even without the bureau restrictions, area ranchers say they would rather sell off their herds than overgraze.

"It's in our best interest to take as good a care as we possibly can of the land," Mitchell says. "Whether it be federal or private, it's our resource. We depend on it."

A long-term drought could all but close down a ranch. This dependence on the weather and on this wild, lean land seems to define those who choose to live here. "Life is simple and hard," says Julie Mitchell, Bill's wife and the mother of their 2-year-old daughter, Serenity. "You learn to take whatever comes and to be grateful for everything--the rain, the morning."

The old adobe house on their ranch is without heat and electricity. They use a wood stove, solar panels and gas lamps. They cook on a barbecue under a huge Palo Verde tree. The view drifts east for hundreds of miles.

Most of the week Bill works a grinding 10-hour day as a heavy equipment operator based in Barstow; it's a well-paying job that enabled him to buy Pilot Knob and will allow him to live permanently on Two Hole Springs within the next few years. His cattle take up the rest of his time. The offspring from his base herd of 86 cows must all be caught, branded, vetted, castrated, weaned and occasionally loaded onto a trailer and sold--no mean feat when the average 6-month-old heifer weighs 500 pounds, has never seen a human and doesn't want to be moved.

Often, Julie is Bill's only ranch hand and the two of them ride miles of fence line checking for gaps and cuts. Even with a good fence, the cattle will roam off the ranch, and it can take days of hard riding to round them up and herd them back. Bill and Julie must also frequently check the dozens of water holes scattered throughout the ranch, which can become clogged or contaminated.

Source of Contamination

The contamination source is often human. Bill recalls finding a group of duck hunters with a beer cooler, sitting in their fold-out chairs by one of his water holes. The wild cattle won't approach the water with humans present, no matter how thirsty they are.

"I asked them how they'd feel if I came and camped in their backyard with my campfire and my horse and a couple of big bulls," he says.

Julie, a small-town girl from Illinois, is new to ranching but has embraced it for herself and her daughter. She used to work part time but now has her hands full with Serenity and the ranch.

She hopes to home-school Serenity.

"We don't want her to be excluded from a social life," Julie says, noting that Bill's three daughters from his first marriage were home-schooled at Pilot Knob but were active in local rodeos and youth events. "I really think kids should be living like this. They should be out running around and throwing rocks, not watching TV," she says.

"On ranches, kids are always involved," Bill says. "They learn the interconnectedness of things. If you ask them, 'Where does milk come from? Where does beef come from?' they're not going to say, 'The store.' "

One also learns to be aware in such a wild place, to step carefully. Julie remembers a morning this summer when she and Serenity were letting the doves loose from their cage: "I turned my back for a second to undo the latch, and I heard Serenity say, quite happily, ' 'nake, Mommy, 'nake.' " Julie turned to see her daughter standing over a Mojave green.

Moving very slowly, she picked up Serenity, backed away and called out to Bill, who then shot the snake.

People who endure such incidents as part of their daily lives are not easily intimidated. But "the conservationists"--as the Mitchells, Fishers and other ranchers politely refer to conservation organizations--have caused concern, even anger. And they've certainly prompted change.

Of the 6.2-million acres of the western Mojave in federal hands, 1.58 million acres were designated in 1992 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as critical habitat for the threatened desert tortoise. The Bureau of Land Management then had to comply with various guidelines concerning land use in these designated areas. New restrictions were placed on cattle grazing in the hopes of reestablishing a healthy tortoise population.

Cattle's Effect on Ecosystem

According to Michael Conners, executive director of the Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee, the tortoise is particularly threatened by the damage that cattle can wreak on a fragile desert ecosystem.

Cattle tend to prefer riparian areas such as stream beds. So, although there may be one cow allotted for eight acres, chances are that cow, and cows from surrounding eight-acre allotments, will congregate around the water, compacting the soil and destroying the surrounding vegetation, Conners explains.

Conners is clear about his organization's goal: "We would like to see an end to all grazing in all critical tortoise habitat." He points out that the Endangered Species Act is a law and believes that the only reason why cattle are still grazing in designated areas is that ranchers are a powerful political lobby.

For the moment, however, the land bureau will continue to allow controlled cattle grazing. But the smorgasbord of new restrictions is making life increasingly difficult for the ranchers.

Bill Mitchell learned about designated habitat the hard way. In 1986 he bought Pilot Knob with 100,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management leases and 1,320 of private land for his 75 head. Three years later, when the western portion of his land was one of the first areas designated as critical tortoise habitat, he worked with Lee Delany, then area manager with the land bureau.

"We tried to come up with something that would work for both of us," Delany says. "It was a lot of additional work for Bill. He had to put up fencing and rotate cattle and reduce their numbers." But the cattle continued to wander into prohibited areas. By 1995, Bill retained only 20 head.

"I just couldn't keep going," he says. He finally decided to sell Pilot Knob--to a ready deep-pocket buyer: the Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee and its co-sponsor, the Wildlands Conservancy. While much of Two Hole Springs, Bill's new ranch, is also in designated critical habitat, the grazing restrictions are less severe and he hopes to maintain his current herd size.

Conners has little sympathy.

"It'll be a hundred years before Pilot Knob will be back to normal." He describes "normal" as a pristine, wildlife-healthy wilderness. As it is, the number of permanent range cattle has declined consistently over the last 50 years. According to Pete Lounsbury, agricultural biologist with the San Bernardino Department of Agriculture, the area held more than 13,500 range cattle in 1948. Last year, there were perhaps 1,600.

"It's a way of life more than anything," says Lounsbury, who empathizes with the Mojave ranchers but notes their economic contribution to the state is fairly minimal these days. "It's so tough. They've been fighting city hall one way or another for so long that now some are saying, 'The hell with it!' "