Tuffnut Fire News Update

MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE - CA

Tuffnut Fire News Updates
July 20, 2006 (Initial Report)
July 26, 2006 (Update)

This fire has been 100% contained

Wildland Fire started on or about 07/20/2006
Cause - Natural (Lightning)
Providence Mtns. (CA)

Latitude 35.037 Longitude -115.509

Status as of 07/26/2006
Acreage - 1321 acres.
Fire is 100% contained
Resources committed - 1 crew, 1 helicopter, 1 helitack, 2 engines, 4 overhead. Total personnel is 47.

Estimated containment date is 7/25/2006.

Updates on fire
Steep terrain, remoteness of location, and high temperatures hampered control efforts.

Overview
Lightning caused 100 acre fire with only 5% containment as of 2000 on 7/20/06. Steep terrain and the remoteness of the location is hampering control efforts. Winds are 7-10 mph, tempurature is 106.

Strategy
Full suppression.

Vegetation affected
Short grass

Partners involved
Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service.

Lightning ignites yet another blaze

By Joe Nelson and Guy McCarthy, Staff Writers
Ontario Daily Bulletin

YUCCA VALLEY - Firefighters preparing to go home after battling a 61,000-plus-acre brush fire near Yucca Valley got back into action Thursday when a lightning strike ignited yet another blaze in Joshua Tree National Park.

Lightning struck about 1:30 p.m. in the Covington Flat area of the park. It crept up a hill, crested a ridge and shot down into a canyon, burning toward the southeast tip of Yucca Valley and threatening homes there.

As of 9:30 p.m., it had chewed through 282 acres and burned near the mouth of Black Rock Canyon. Officials ordered 400 breakfasts for hundreds of firefighters who were pulled from the Sawtooth Complex Fire and other blazes for deployment to Joshua Tree.

"This time we had the resources real fast from the Sawtooth (fire)," said Cindy Von Halle, a ranger for Joshua Tree National Park. "Right now we have about 200 firefighters and more are coming."

As night fell, the fire burned in an easterly direction farther into the 794,000-acre park. The blaze was 80 percent contained by 9:30 p.m., and officials expected to have it fully contained by 2 a.m. today.

Residents living on Carmelita Circle in Yucca Valley were advised they might need to evacuate their homes if the fire burned too close, but as of Thursday night, mandatory evacuations had not been ordered.

Pinion Juniper, Pinion Pines, scrub oak, Joshua Trees, Black Brush and a host of other native shrubs stand in the path of the blaze, said Joe Zarki, spokesman for Joshua Tree National Park.

Fires that burned in the park in 1995, 1996, 1998 and 1999 left behind a patchwork of burn areas that could thwart the progress of the fire, Zarki said.

"We'll have to wait and see. It depends on where the wind blows, what the terrain is like and how the air movements affect the fire," Zarki said.

If the fire burns into more vulnerable areas, it could prove disastrous.
"In the unburned zoned area there's quite a bit of fuel that can carry a fire," Zarki said.

Covington Flat Road, also known on some maps as Vermiculate Mine Road, was closed off Thursday to public access. The remainder of the park remained open.

The Covington fire came as a cluster of storm cells passed over the Morongo Basin and San Bernardino Mountains, producing thunder, rain and lightning. Several other brush fires flared up from Thursday afternoon, and a flash-flood warning remained in effect in the Morongo Basin.

The storm threat was expected to diminish overnight and should not pose the threat it did on Thursday, said Philip Gonsalves, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego.

"We're probably still going to get some showers and thunderstorms, but they're going to be more isolated," Gonsalves said.

On Thursday, however, the county went into high alert, sending pre-recorded telephone messages to residents living in flood-prone areas near Yucca Valley where the Sawtooth fire burned, incinerating vegetation that served as ground cover to trap rainwater and deter mudslides and debris flows.

Earlier in the day, about 200 firefighters were cutting a fire break against the 24,695-acre Heart-Millard Fire in the San Gorgonio Wilderness near Coon Creek when rain began falling and lightning ignited at least six small fires, said Rich Phelps, a fire information officer with the U.S. Forest Service.

"When the storm cells came through this afternoon, we pulled our ground crews off," Phelps said, noting that the risk of flash floods was a concern for firefighters who hike through drainage areas.

Nine helicopters and six helitankers dropped water and retardant on the Heart-Millard blaze throughout the day, and about 14.9 miles of fire break still needed to be cut, Phelps said, adding that the fire is not an immediate threat to the Big Bear Valley and is still burning about eight miles southeast of the mountain resort communities.

The Millard Complex Fire north of Cabazon and the 800-acre Heart Fire, originally part of the 61,700-acre Sawtooth Complex Fire near Big Bear Valley, were combined Wednesday, a day after the Sawtooth blaze was declared 100 percent contained. The Heart-Millard Fire was declared 62 percent contained Thursday.

The Millard and Sawtooth fires were ignited by lighting strikes on July 9, and combined killed one man, destroyed more than 85,000 acres of desert terrain, 50 homes, 171 other structures and 191 cars and trucks.

The combination of fire and rain was a double-edged sword for firefighters and residents.

"It could help things as far as the fires go, but it could make debris flows even more dangerous because there's nothing holding the water back," said Dave Dowling, emergency communications manager for the San Bernardino County Fire Department. "There's no ground cover there now, so people need to stay clear of these washes."

Shortly after lightning ignited the fire in Joshua Tree, other lightning strikes were reported. The 100-acre Tuffnut Fire was burning atop a ridge on the west side of Providence Mountain in the Globe Mine area in the Mojave National Preserve.

In Irwin Lake near Lake Arrowhead, lightning struck and area near Highway 38 and State Lane at 1:42 p.m. and burned about one-eighth of an acre before it was contained at 2:02 p.m., a county fire dispatcher said.

Experts blame grasses, pollution, temperatures for helping fires

By Andrew Silva, Writer
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin [Ontario, CA]

It's not supposed to happen.

Mojave National Preserve: 71,000 acres in flames a year ago.

Joshua Tree National Park: 14,000 acres burned in 1999.

And in the past week, more than 80,000 acres have gone up in smoke as two large fires merged in the Mojave Desert.

In a pine forest, fire is an integral part of the life cycle and is necessary for a healthy, thriving forest.

But in the desert, flames are an unnatural, unwelcome and destructive force when they roar through Joshua trees, cactuses, juniper and pinyon trees.

"In our lifetime, we won't see it back the way it was," said Larry Whalon, chief of resources management for the Mojave National Preserve.

Desert plants may be the hardiest on earth, able to thrive in blistering temperatures and long stretches without water. The harsh conditions also mean it takes a long time for the plants to grow and establish themselves, usually with wide spaces between them.

Sprawling infernos in the desert are a phenomenon not seen until recent decades.

The obvious culprits are grasses that weren't here 200 years ago. Air pollution and average temperatures that have been creeping higher may also be accomplices.

The arrival of settlers in the 19th century also meant the arrival of non-native grasses that have blanketed the desert floor.

In the past, "a lightning strike had a good chance of hitting bare ground," said Joe Zarki, chief naturalist for Joshua Tree National Park.

Some grasses spread across the landscape once seeds carried by non-native settlers and livestock hit the ground. Others were planted deliberately for cattle grazing.

Native grasses and flowers in the desert tend to dry up and blow away when they die, or they remain isolated in bunches.

The exotic grasses, though, remain standing, even after they die.

"In a good wet year like last year, it'll create a carpet" across the desert floor, Zarki said. "Nowadays, lightning is going to hit these fine fuels that ignite easily."

Before, even if lighting struck a tree or patch of shrubs, that small area would burn but there was no way for the flames to move between plants.

The Sawtooth Complex Fire, which destroyed several dozen homes in Pioneertown, is an example. Drive through the burn area and there's mostly a fine layer of ash on the otherwise bare ground where grasses had carried fire to the widely spaced Joshua trees and other native plants.

"Oaks, juniper, Joshua trees don't appear to do well in response to fire," Zarki said.

The ecosystem that exists in the desert now took hundreds of years to get established. A pine forest will look pretty normal a few decades after a fire.

However, desert trees can take hundreds of years to grow.

If the grasses lead to fires every five, 10 or 15 years, the landscape could be altered permanently in a phenomenon called "type conversion," Zarki said. With frequent fires, the native trees won't be able to re-establish themselves, turning the desert into a scrubby grassland.

"Talking about the natural ecosystem in California is like talking about the dodo bird," said William Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

That appears to go for climate as well.

Temperatures have been rising in the West since the 1970s, and many temperature records have been set in recent years.

Southern California, despite near-record rains in the winter of 2004-05, is effectively in its eighth year of drought, Patzert said.

Part of the increase in temperatures is because of sprawling development. Heat is trapped by the hundreds of square miles of concrete and asphalt, creating what have been dubbed "urban heat islands."

Patzert called it Southern California's "extreme makeover."

The Inland Empire has seen a 5-degree jump in average temperature in just 50 years, he said.

Kelly Redmond, a regional climatologist with the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nev., said he was skeptical that the temperature increase since 1970 was real.

But after looking more carefully at the data and other climate indicators, such as snow melt and when flowers bloom, he now believes the increase is broad and genuine.

His research indicates temperatures across 11 western states have increased an average of 2 degrees since 1970. June was the warmest in 25 years and July appears to be headed for a record also, he said.

At least part of that increase could be attributable to global climate change, the experts said.

To make matters worse, take blistering temperatures, combine them with non-native grasses and mix in some fertilizer. And air pollution could actually be feeding the grasses and helping them spread.

Air pollution is loaded with nitrogen compounds, providing a readily available fertilizer, some researchers have said.

"Without nitrogen, the grasses aren't doing that well," said Philip Rundel, a biology professor at UCLA. "We're doing a massive fertilization experiment and don't know it."

Under Kelso's dusty top layer is vivid history

A boarded-up post office and restored depot dot the landscape in Kelso. The town attracts as many as 400 people a day to explore the Kelso Dunes and the visitor center. Photo by Greg Vojtko / The Press-Enterprise

By DARRELL R. SANTSCHI
The Press-Enterprise

KELSO - Tim Duncan was not quick to jump nine years ago when the National Park Service asked him to leave his job as a ranger at the Manassas Battlefield in Virginia and move to the dusty and nearly deserted outpost of Kelso in the Mojave Desert.

He had visited California once on vacation, and drove the desolate stretch between Needles and Barstow.

But he took the assignment, in part because one of the Park Service's attractions has been the opportunity to work all over the country, from Alaska to Virginia, he said.

Duncan, 50, has come to love his home in Kelso, hidden against the Granite Mountains. The nearest civilization is in rural Baker, along Interstate 15, some 30 miles to the northwest.

"I enjoy the quietness, I enjoy the remoteness, I enjoy the terrain," he said. "I enjoy the railroad community and the visitor center, which has just been restored."

He was referring to Kelso's 15 other inhabitants: Union Pacific Railroad employees who maintain the track between Barstow and Las Vegas. And to the two-story rail depot officially reopened in March as a visitor center for the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve.

The visitor center, renovated at a cost of $5.5 million, has fostered something of a renaissance for a town that was founded in 1905 as a water stop for steam-driven trains, boomed as a mining town during World War II, and has been little more than a ghost town ever since.

As many as 400 people a day venture off Interstates 40 and 15 on weekends to sift through the artifacts on display here. They also explore the nearby Kelso Dunes, where weather-polished grains of sand emit an eerie, growling boom sound as they cascade during avalanches.

The only other visitors Duncan sees are the motorists who are detoured through town when traffic accidents prompt the California Highway Patrol to shut down one of the interstates.

"The traffic backs up for 50 miles," Duncan said. "It's a slow crawl, and I have to go out and make sure it keeps moving."

How Kelso Came to Be

James Woolsey, chief of resource interpretation and outreach for the preserve, likes to amuse visitors with the not-so-compelling story of how Kelso got its name.

Three railroad surveyors took turns naming the stops, he said. Only two of them were on hand at the Kelso founding and they decided to throw their names, and the name of the third guy, into a hat and choose one for the town.

The name they drew? "The guy who wasn't there," Woolsey said.

He is not certain how often John Kelso visited his namesake, or whether he ever visited it.

When the first trains started running, Kelso had a small store and a few-dozen residents, including a smattering of gold and silver miners.

Soon after, the railroad built a roundhouse to service them and parked half a dozen extra locomotives to help the engines make it up the grueling 19-mile, 2,000-foot grade to Cima.

"That's what made Kelso," said Theo Packard, 95, who moved to the town with his parents in 1920 and stayed for a quarter century.

"Sometimes, the trains were so long, they had to hitch on two or three helpers to make it," Packard said.

Kelso had about 200 residents then.

"It was just a regular, work-a-day town," he said. "Mostly, we worked."

A Busy Little Place

Packard's father opened a general store that doubled as the post office. There were no saloons.

Packard attended Kelso's one-room school, which closed in the 1970s. The building, which still stands, was home to the town's one big social event: a monthly dance where the railroad workers, ranchers and miners converged to foxtrot and waltz.

"They had a kind of a makeshift orchestra," he said. "My mother played the piano."

The school had one teacher who instructed students through the eighth grade, after which they commuted by train to Barstow or Las Vegas to attend high school.

The massive two-story depot, which would eventually house railroad workers, restaurant employees, and telegraph and baggage workers, was constructed in 1924.

Four passenger trains a day, two each in the early morning and evening, stopped in Kelso to load up with water and feed the passengers.

The telegraph operator was something of a gossip, Packard remembers, and would pass the word when celebrities were on the way. Packard ran down to the station one day to meet silent-movie cowboy Tom Mix and look at his horse in the baggage car.

Kelso's "boom" came at the start of World War II, Woolsey said, when iron ore-mines in the area supplied raw material for the Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana. The plant, in turn, turned out steel for the Liberty ships that ferried beans and bullets to Europe during the war. At one point, the town had 2,000 residents.

By war's end, Kelso was on a track to oblivion. Packard left to seek work for a rail delivery service.

'Tin Cans and String'

Today, Kelso has no general store, no restaurant, no movie theater and still no saloon.

Duncan has two freezers and drives to Las Vegas once a month for supplies. He says it's quicker than going south to Barstow and there is a wider variety of stores, which saves trips.

Only a few of the railroad workers are in town at any given time, he said. Their only entertainment, he said, is what it has always been: They get together every now and then to have dinner.

That isn't all that's stayed the same. The telephone at his ranger station has a scratchy signal and frequently cuts out, like poor cell-phone service.

"The lines, the equipment, everything, is 50 years old," Duncan said. "I guess they don't see the need for improvement. We're on tin cans and string out here."

Not exactly the way he likes it.

Video: A history of Kelso, the once flourishing railroad town in the Mojave Desert

Pappy & Harriet's remains standing

Eric Burdon among legends who have taken stage at historic site

Bruce Fessier
The Desert Sun

Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace isn't just a musty historical landmark. It's the pantheon of a vibrant high desert music scene.

Queens of the Stone Age, Eric Burdon, Donovan, Camper Van Beethoven. This is the home venue for rock legends who live in the Morongo Basin.

And that scene was saved on Tuesday when the wildfire passed by Pappy & Harriet's.

When U2 producer singer songwriter Daniel Lanois was performing at the now fire-endangered saloon in 2004, it was almost expected that his friend Burdon would show up. Lanois lives in New Orleans. Burdon sings "The House of the Rising Sun" about New Orleans. So Burdon did show up and he did sang "House of the Rising Sun."

Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin recorded the song "29 Palms." And he stayed at the 29 Palms Inn earlier this year. But he didn't sing in the 29 Palms Inn lounge. He drove to Pappy & Harriet's and sang seven songs at that rustic Western saloon.

Dave Lowery, leader of Camper Van Beethoven and the more recent alt rock band Cracker, is hoping to hold his second annual Cracker/Camper Van Beethoven Campout Sept. 8-9.

Pappy & Harriet's isn't just a place for old cowboys. Its diversity is what makes it so legendary, the public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica often tapes shows for broadcast from there.

Young people, old people, middle-aged hippies. They all mix comfortably at Pappy & Harriet's with an appreciation that the music is honest. It's organic.

It was founded in 1946 by a group of investors including Roy Rogers to serve as a place to make cowboy movies. When television came in and they stopped making "B" Westerns, it fell into disuse, but attracted artists and eccentrics who liked the idea of living in a place that was literally a fantasy land.

A group tried to turn it into an amusement park in the 1960s, but the plans by designer Will Hanson never got off the ground. Tumbleweeds and manufactured amusements just didn't fit.

The '60s troubadour Donovan used to sing there in the late 1970s and early '80s, but the place became known as a biker bar around that time.

Pappy Allen and his wife, Harriet. bought the saloon in the mid-1980s and Harriet ran it by herself after Pappy's death in 1994. But it was Robyn Celia and Linda Krantz who brought in the big-name entertainment and fostered the growth of new talent when they bought the club in 2004.

Now emigrés from Los Angeles and San Francisco are coming to the desert to try out new material at Pappy & Harriet's. The palace offers songwriter showcases and jam sessions with the "house band" Thrift Store All Stars.

Fires spark warnings

Gina Tenorio, Staff Writer

Fire crews throughout the county are being vigilant and feeling fortunate.

Despite warm weather and a number of fires - some caused by humans, some by nature - no serious damage has been done, officials say.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the U.S. Forest Service worked together to extinguish the flames before they crept into the San Bernardino National Forest, said Bill Peters, A CDF spokesman.

Dozens of lighting strikes have sparked small fires. In the Mojave National Preserve, a blaze called the Valley View Fire had blackened 40 acres off Cima Road east of Interstate 15, east of Baker on Wednesday.

As of Wednesday evening, it was 80 percent contained, U.S. Forest Service officials said.

In Oak Hills, crews fought a 50-acre fire. On Wednesday, Forest Service personnel fought small fires ignited by more lightning throughout the area, Martinez said.

They've been fortunate the fire season has been moderate but the bottom line for residents is they need to be careful, Peters said.

Watering holes get new look

By JIM MATTHEWS
Press-Enterprise

Mojave Preserve management, wildlife scientists, environmentalists and sporting groups are actually coming together over the issue of water in the Mojave National Preserve. The result is going to be good things for wildlife.

All of these different groups have been embroiled in a battle over the deactivation of more than 130 different water sources connected to the former cattle operations on the preserve. All of those water sources also supported a vast network of desert wildlife.

Wildlife and hunting groups were outraged the National Park Service violated its management plan and promises made during the drafting of this plan to study the impact shutting off these water sources would have on wildlife before the valves were turned off.

Wildlife biologists who have seen species expand their ranges and populations when water was added to desert mountain ranges said the losses caused by the former park superintendent's demand the water be shut off were likely very significant. But because the promised research on the preserve was never done, no one could actually put numbers on wildlife losses or measure the decrease in range and habitat usage.

Cliff McDonald, a Needles hunter and wildlife activist, and the Safari Club led a drive to restore just 12 of the original wells on the preserve for wildlife use. The preserve staff prepared an environmental assessment that would have allowed that to occur, but everyone involved agreed there was inadequate, comprehensive scientific data to support adding or removing the water.

Lawsuits were threatened on both sides of the debate, and then the park superintendent left. In an amazing transformation, people started talking again, wanting to work together and solve obvious problems, get answers to honest questions and move forward.

The Park Service has proposed a comprehensive study to look at "added water" in the desert and its effect and importance. And professional wildlife biologists from all over the West are enthused about the research because it would involve before and after measurements and data gathering. The research project and the well reactivation have been rolled together. Sort of.

"It's not that the 12 wells idea is dead," said Larry Whalon, chief of resources for the preserve. "But we're not going to hold ourselves to those 12 locations."

The research will determine the best places to put water and then measure the effects once the water is in.

For the first time, we'll really know with scientific certainty the effect adding water has on desert environments and wildlife populations in those environments.

"This has the potential to demonstrate the importance -- or lack thereof -- of water sources on this type in desert ecosystems," said Dr. Vern Bleich, Department of Fish and Game bighorn sheep biologist.

Healing Desert's Wounds

College-age activists camp in the Mojave for months as they work to restore land that has been trashed by garbage, off-roaders and graffiti vandals.

CAMOUFLAGE: Paul Miles, 24, rigs a fake bush to hide an illegal trail.

By Eric Bailey, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

BARSTOW — Twenty miles from town, in a brutally lovely land where the road and sky collide, a ragamuffin tribe of college-age kids is hard at work in the middle of nowhere.

They're healing the desert.

Dan Prell whacks the sun-scorched earth with a sodbuster pick, his dreadlocks shimmying under a blue bandanna. He grins habitually, happy to miss another cold winter in his native Neenah, Wis.

"It's a blast," the 21-year-old said between swings, no trace of irony hedging his words. "It lets me get out of a small city and go camping for eight months. What could be better?"

In Southern California's vast outback, a century of mankind's heedless incursions — from George Patton's tanks in training for World War II to survivalists taking target practice — have left lasting wounds on a fragile landscape slow to mend.

Those infirmities bring young men and women such as Prell and crew leader Mizuki Seita, a 4-foot, 11-inch whirlwind called Miz by her six-person team.

Theirs is a boot camp existence in the middle of the Mojave. For little pay, three square vegetarian meals and a tent overhead, these twentysomethings camp out in California's badlands of biodiversity for months at a time, rising early to wield shovels and rakes in a ritual of surgical repair.

The goal is to make assaulted swaths of desert look as if humankind had never set foot or knobby tire there.

Such repair parties started combing Southern California's arid backyard after Congress passed the Desert Protection Act in 1994.

They come in all persuasions. Suburban sagebrush-huggers spend volunteer weekends pulling up invasive saltcedar, prison crews troll for trash among the yucca, teen groups try their hand at rehabilitation.

But in recent years the most devoted restorative presence has been the Student Conservation Assn., the nonprofit organization that dispatched Seita and her crew to the East Mojave for an eight-month hitch.

Founded nearly 50 years ago and headquartered in New Hampshire, the group sends small teams of college-age adults to ecological sanctuaries all around the country. They first came to the Southland desert in 2001 and have returned every year since. This season 40 workers have toiled in places that include Dead Mountains Wilderness, Stepladder Mountains and the Kingston Range.

They find plenty of scars.

This day, Seita and company pull up into rolling folds of rock hugging the south slope of the Ord Mountains, a craggy range southeast of Barstow. Their main mission: to make a couple of motorcycle trail heads disappear.

Fresh from the usual bagel breakfast and a warmup game of Hacky Sack, the workers bounce up in a bulky bronze Suburban. Clouds embrace distant mountains shouldering snow.

Summer Farmer, 23, of Springfield, Ill., spots the day's first indignity: a boulder painted with graffiti. She grabs a steel-wire brush.

Some guy named Rudy just had to let the jack rabbits and coyotes know he loves the L.A. Dodgers. In doing so, he spoiled the antique sheen, known as desert varnish, running in stratified ribbons across the rock. It could take nature a thousand years to replace it.

Scrubbing under the sun, Farmer talks about snow.

Back on Presidents Day, they awakened to find the desert covered with white. They weren't "Illinois-sized" flakes, Farmer said, "but they were getting there."

Prell, a self-confessed sissy about the cold despite his Wisconsin roots, fled to a car in the sub-zero sleeping bag he had his mom send out. He awoke to find "Good Morning" scrawled on the snow-covered windshield.

It was the work of Paul Miles, 24, late of the University of Georgia. At 6 feet 4, with wire-rim glasses and the dreadlocks he's been cultivating without a haircut for the last five years, Miles would stick out even without a crowd.

He's one of the veterans, on his third gig with the conservation group. The California desert astounds him. So does the abuse it has endured.

"It's spectacular out here," Miles said. "But it's a mess, a real mess." Trampled plants. Scattered shell casings. Abandoned cars. You don't see it, Miles noted, zooming by at 75 mph on the interstate.

Mary Verrilli, 25, scrabbles along, raking out the well-worn trail edge. Puny roadside berms can loom like a brick wall to a desert tortoise, the Mojave's famously imperiled critter.

Besides marring the landscape, the pathways the team is trying to obliterate can have other unfortunate effects on the desert landscape. Errant food scraps draw ravens to prey on vulnerable young tortoises. A traveler can unwittingly carry invasive seeds on tires or shock absorbers for miles, introducing rapacious plants that overtake native flora.

Prell and 21-year-old Aaron Drake of Boone, N.C., are whacking holes in the trail. They're preparing a bit of camouflage, a sort of re-imagineering in a desert Disneyland.

Miles delivers an armload of dead creosote branches. Twisted and blackened, they go into the shallow holes, small rocks anchoring the base.

Seita calls it her desert restoration flower arrangement.

These faux bouquets of creosote and burro weed and other flora are planted a few dozen yards up to where the path disappears over a knoll. Beach ball-size boulders are rolled into the way to complete the effect.

Seita holds her hands up like a cinematographer framing a movie scene. The goal is to make this trail portal vanish, giving nature time to reclaim the land.

"I've done trail building in Tennessee," Verrilli said. "This is the reverse."

The dead branches will stand several years, acting as a little oasis to catch water, deflect breezes and provide shade so young plants take root.

Rangers used to post signs on closed trails, but that proved "0% effective," said Steve Borchard, the federal Bureau of Land Management's Desert District manager in California. Scofflaws riddled the placards with bullets and ran them down with all-terrain vehicles. Hay bales blocking the trails fared a bit better, Borchard said, but the students' pick-and-shovel subterfuge works best.

In the last three years, the Student Conservation Assn. has closed more than 1,700 unauthorized desert trails.

Heather Bosserman, 26, spreads a topographical map on the sport utility vehicle's hood. The pages are laced by a spider web of red lines marking "illegal incursions" — off-road routes that shouldn't exist.

Peering through wire-rim glasses, auburn hair tucked under a Yellowstone baseball hat, Bosserman seems the no-nonsense one. She loves the work but can't help being realistic.

Plenty of days they clean up trash or close a trail only to come back the next day and find everything undone. After cleaning up a campsite one morning, they returned in the afternoon to find an abandoned Porsche.

"You do what you can," Bosserman lamented.

Seita, the shortest and oldest at 28, refuses to go down without a fight. If a cyclist zips by on an illegal trail, she scampers in pursuit, waving her arms until the offender stops.

"Most people are nice about it," she said. "They don't understand that once you've done damage to the desert, it's hard to get it back. They don't think of these plants as unique, like a redwood or sequoia."

After a lunch of pasta salad and hummus on homemade bread, they spread out among the boulders looking for trash.

Farmer comes back with an old VCR. Miles, a merry prankster, trudges to the truck with his head poking out of a latrine lid.

They are, Miles said with pride, "a motley crew."

This sort of job — hard work, a token $160-a-week paycheck, a hardy embrace of solitary wilds — tends to attract nature-lovers looking to break into the environmental field. After half a year working and living together, Drake said, they're all "pretty much family by now."

Seita is the lone Californian. She grew up in Japan, came to the U.S. at 13 when her dad was transferred to Southern California. Seita stayed when her family returned to Japan and has worked three years now in the desert.

"It's hard to explain to them what I'm doing," she said. "They think I'm cleaning up trash in a national park."

As the sun edges toward the mountaintops, the team begins a slow ride back to camp. "The car is pretty stinky on the ride home," Prell said, chortling. "Lets you know you're alive."

Camp is on the far side of the Ords in a canyon that cleaves the ridge. The fading light casts a rosy glow on a mosaic of rock sculpted by time. Dinner in the big, olive-green, Army tent that serves as a mess hall is a hash of potato, cabbage, carrots, onions, yogurt, dill and sunflower that Bosserman and Seita prepare in a Dutch oven over an open fire.

After dinner, Farmer flips through a paperback. Verrilli and Bosserman talk of playing cribbage. Miles mends a sock.

The mice are out; a brave scavenger skitters among chair legs. Coyotes are gearing up to howl as some of the crew members begin heading to bed at 8 p.m.

A new desert dawn, and a new desert workday, will soon be upon them.

Cameo of George Palmer Putnam

George Palmer Putnam
1887 - 1950

HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF THE UPPER MOJAVE DESERT
HSUMD Newsletter
Vol. 21 No. 6 June 2006
HISTORICAL ARTICLE

Amelia Earhart with George Palmer Putnam.

(Following is an article prepared by Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert member and local historian, John Di Pol, drawn from his library of history books. Ed).

With your indulgence, permit me to diverge a bit from our usual fare, although there is a connection of our topic, tenuous as it may be, with the history of our region.

Who was Mr. Putnam? Well, he was the husband of the famous aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, at the time of her tragic disappearance in the Western Pacific while on her around-the-world flight in 1937.

George Putnam was born in 1887 in Rye, NY, to the comfortably wealthy family of the publishing company G. P. Putnam Sons, Inc. George attended schools in New York and Connecticut, then Harvard, but that lasted only a year. Putnam had restless feet and he headed west. Before departing he had met the heiress Dorothy Binney and continued corresponding with her. Marriage was proposed and accepted. George brought his bride out west to Bend, Oregon. There he entered politics, became mayor and publisher and owner of the Bend newspaper. After a few years, including a stint in the Army during WW I, George and Dorothy moved back to New York where George accepted a position in the family's publishing business.

George was a driver and hard worker. He was a member of two Arctic expeditions, in 1926 and 1927, both sponsored by reputable scientific societies. He authored several books and made the "big leagues" when he signed Charles Lindbergh to publish the book "We", Lindberg's account of his solo flight across the Atlantic. Because of his reputation of working with Lindbergh, he was contacted by a wealthy American dowager who wanted to sponsor the first flight of a woman across the Atlantic and commissioned Putnam to find a suitable candidate. And George did so: he came up with the essentially unknown Amelia Earhart. The rest is history.

George was instrumental in organizing the flight, which was made in 1928. Because Amelia was not instrument qualified, two rated pilots accompanied her. No matter, Amelia made the international headlines. George rapidly became Amelia's agent, promoter, publicist, confidant. Successes followed: Amelia's solo transatlantic flight in 1932; first person to solo Hawaii to California and many other honors, with George busy in the background. George's marriage to Dorothy suffered and divorce followed in 1929. His relationship with Amelia had deepened; marriage proposals followed, with Amelia finally accepting and they were married in 1931.

By the mid-1930s, planning started for Amelia's around-the-world flight. On May 29, 1937 Amelia, with Fred Noonan as navigator, took off from Oakland eastbound on her historic attempt. It was July 2nd, on the leg from New Guinea to Howland Island in the Pacific, that Amelia and Fred were lost at sea. George was devastated, as was the rest of the nation, literally. In addition to the search efforts of the U.S. government, Putnam enlisted help of his own and, obsessed with finding her, spent months tracking down every lead.

Putnam rebuilt his life with writing, publishing and lectures. In 1940 he moved to Lone Pine where he purchased a cabin lodge high up at Whitney Portal in the Eastern Sierras. With the advent of WW II, George, at age 55, applied for a commission in the Army Air Corps. He was accepted and served as an intelligence officer in the China-Burma-India theater. After the war George returned to Lone Pine, in poor health. He began corresponding with Margaret (Peg) Haviland, whom he had met while at Intelligence School before "shipping out". This lead to their marriage in late 1945, with Peg joining him at Whitney Portal.

Their life at the Portal was serene, but full, with George writing, doing consulting for publishers, maintaining contacts around the country. But, a problem. Peg could not stand the winter cold, so the following year they spent time at Stovepipe Wells Inn in Death Valley. During these years George wrote two books: Death Valley and Its Country, 1946, and Death Valley Handbook, 1947. The royalties helped him to surprise Peg. He purchased the Stovepipe Wells Inn for her! Peg stayed most of the year at Stovepipe to operate the place, with George at the Portal working on his latest book Up In Our Country, a conversational essay on the inhabitants, flora and fauna of the area. But by 1949 George's health was failing. By winter he was at Stovepipe too ill to travel. Later, after Christmas, he was taken to the hospital in Trona with kidney failure and died there on January 4th, 1950. He was cremated and his ashes are in the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.

Peg continued to operate Stovepipe Wells. As tourism increased she built up the business by expansion and improvements. In 1962 Mrs. Putnam met and married Willard Lewis. She ultimately sold the Stovepipe in 1966 to the Fred Harvey Co., or was it AmFac, or whatever. Mrs. Putnam-Lewis passed away in 1981.

Up In Our Country was published posthumously in 1950. Your writer had found a copy in a used book store several years ago - the only copy he has ever seen. A slim, handsome volume, conservatively designed. He bought it.

Ref: THE SOUND OF WINGS, The Biography of Amelia Earhart, Mary S. Lovell, 1989. L.A. TIMES, April 22, 2001.

UP IN OUR COUNTRY, George Palmer Putnam, 1950

LLEWELLYN BARRACKMAN DIES

OBITUARY
LLEWELLYN BARRACKMAN

Needles Desert Star

Beloved and respected long-time Mojave leader, Llewellyn Barrackman passed away on May 21, 2006, in Bullhead City, Ariz. Mr. Barrackman was nationally recognized as a force in American Indian politics and local economic development. Llewellyn was born in Needles, Calif., on July 4, 1918, to Roger Barrackman and Mabel Kempton.

After losing his mother as a young boy, he was raised by his grandmother until he was captured and forcibly sent to the Fort Mojave Boarding School in 1927. When the school closed in 1930 he transferred to Phoenix Indian School, where he graduated in 1938. Given his military training from boarding school, he readily enlisted in the U. S. Army during WWII. He served in the Engineering Corps, which built the Trans-Alaska Highway. In 1944, he married his sweetheart Betty Vanderbilt, who he remained married to for 62 years.

After the war he worked at Sierra Ordinance Depot in Herlong, Calif., until 1958 when he brought his young family back to Needles. In those years he volunteered his time and automobile to the Tribal Council and earned the lasting trust of the senior Mojave leadership. His energy and love for the community was fulfilled through is involvement in coaching local sports teams and playing the trombone in the Fort Mojave Band. Also, Llewellyn and Betty served as foster parents to many orphaned and abandoned Mojave children.

In 1962, he was elected to the Fort Mojave Tribal Council, where he served his people for over 40 years. In 1965, Mr. Barrackman became chairman and set in motion a bold and unique economic development plan that resulted in the enormous economic success of the tribe today. Under his leadership fort Mojave developed an irrigation system for agriculture, planned and implemented numerous economic enterprises, and built its own casino and gambling industry. Mr. Barrackman constructed new housing for tribal members, created numerous employment opportunities, and instituted a per capita profit sharing for each member of the tribe. In his later years, Llewellyn served as vice-chairman until his retirement in 2004.

Throughout his political career Llewellyn served on numerous national, state, and private boards and commissions, including the Nevada Gaming Commission.

During his lifetime, Mr. Barrackman and his wife Betty preserved and promoted both Mojave language and culture. His motto "Time doesn't wait for anyone," led to great success in teaching younger tribal members. His direct involvement in traditional affairs created a Mojave cultural renaissance.

Llewellyn shared his immense knowledge with many and ensured that Mojave culture and history will not be forgotten. Llewellyn and Betty's efforts were recognized by the Smithsonian Institution in 1993 and the Mashantuckett Pequot Museum in 1996.

In later years, Llewellyn was consulted and recognized by world-renowned linguists and anthropologists.

Mr. Barrackman's greatest pride was in the Fort Mojave Band, which remains a vital part of the community due in large part to his efforts. Llewellyn recently organized the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the band and its illustrious history.

The entire tribe as well as the Laughlin-Bullhead area benefit today from the strong and thoughtful leadership of this legendary man. Llewellyn Barrackman is remembered for his powerful presence, eloquence, quiet dignity, generosity and humility.

Llewellyn is survived by his loving wife, Betty; daughters, Barbara Barrackman and Iris Scerato; son, Joe Scerato; granddaughter, Melanie Otero; and great-grandsons Keenan Jenkins and Joaquin Otero. He is also survived by his aunt, Faith Wilson; and his brother, Lionel Barrackman.

Fort Mojave Indian Tribal traditional services were held on May 24 at the Fort Mojave Tribal Mourning Hall. Fort Mojave traditional rites were held May 25 at the Fort Mojave Indian Cemetery.

Arrangements were handled by Dimond & Sons Needles Mortuary.

Barstow students buy acre of desert land

Chuck Mueller, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

BARSTOW - Appreciation for nature begins in childhood, and a group of youngsters has demonstrated how anyone who cares can help protect a small patch of the Mojave Desert and its creatures.

After collecting aluminum cans and plastic bottles for a year, 80 first-graders at Lenwood School raised $214 to help buy an acre of land at Mojave National Preserve.

"With their effort, coupled with an $86 contribution from San Bernardino County's waste-management department, we presented a check for $300 (recently) to the National Park Service to add a bit of land to the preserve," teacher Ginger O'Brien said.

"Students in four classrooms brought recyclables from home and turned them in for vouchers. It was a part of our program to teach children to understand and appreciate the desert. Hopefully they will continue this appreciation throughout their lives."

Superintendent Dennis Schramm and resource chief James Woolsey of Mojave National Preserve accepted the check. "We welcome the efforts of these young people," Schramm said. "We want children to learn about the natural world early in their lives so they can enjoy it throughout their lives."

Lenwood School's nature-awareness programs, which include field trips to Barstow-area museums and hands-on involvement in caring for a cactus garden, awakens the children to the wonders of the vast Mojave region.

"Children are our future," Woolsey said. "If we don't teach them early about our environment, they may never appreciate it. We have millions of acres of wild lands around us. For youngsters not to go out and enjoy them would be a shame."

Since the 1.6 million-acre Mojave National Preserve was established in 1994, an ongoing effort has been made to acquire parcels of privately held land within its borders. Private land within the preserve has dropped from 220,000 acres to just under 100,000 acres.

"Every year, we ask landowners if they want to sell their property," the superintendent explained.

"The National Park Foundation, chartered by Congress to support the park system, negotiates to buy land. Whatever it acquires is donated to the park system."

Several thousand private landowners hold chunks of land in a checkerboard pattern scattered throughout the national preserve. Among these parcels are state-school lands that sometimes are exchanged for surplus federal property, Schramm said.

Mojave National Preserve contains the world's largest Joshua tree forest, lofty sand dunes, the historic Mojave wagon road, Indian wall paintings known as petroglyphs, and hundreds of wild creatures like the desert tortoise and Mojave ground squirrel.

It is the only place where three desert ecosystems meet the Mojave, the Great Basin and the Sonora.

"Lenwood School's efforts match up with the goal of Park Service Director Fran Mainella to improve the relevance of the park system in the 21st century," Schramm said. "Many children don't have the chance to sit around a campfire in the wilderness today. We want to attract more of them to our parks to help amplify the marvelous heritage they represent."

At Lenwood School, two first graders shared their feelings on the fund-raising effort.

"I brought in a lot of cans and bottles to buy more land for the desert tortoise," said Karina Cruz, 6, daughter of Manuel and Maria Cruz.

Michelle Kounovsky, also, 6, daughter of Brian and Kimberly Kounovsky, said the yearlong effort was fun. "We want to help the national preserve get bigger," she explained.

In addition to O'Brien, first-grade teachers Wendi Matley, Melissa Moor and Debbie Williams, helped spearhead the conservation program.

"The children took home bags with brochures about the desert tortoise to share with their family and neighbors," O'Brien said. "And they drew pictures of various Mojave creatures to fill a book in which they described the animals."

Among the children's comments that accompanied the drawings:

"Kangaroo rats hop on long back legs and use their tails to balance," said Gabriel Alvarez.

"Cactus wrens build a nest like a football. They eat lizards. They take dust baths," Faith Aguirre said.

"Burrowing owls live in the ground and come out during the day," Delena Chavez said. "They are not smarter than other birds."

"Cougars jump high. They walk quietly. They make a purring sound," Vernon Colbert said.

Applauding the conservation program, Lenwood School Principal Tom Reynolds said first-graders are eager to learn about the environment. "By learning about it early in their lives, their appreciation of the natural world will stay with them," he said. "It's important that our children appreciate the desert around us and help conserve it."

Fighting to save the desert tortoise

Population has declined 90 percent since 1980s

By TRACIE TROHA Staff Writer
Barstow Desert Dispatch

VICTORVILLE — Wildlife experts say the threatened desert tortoise has virtually disappeared from the High Desert, and efforts to save it are being hampered by constant construction and the spread of disease.

Once common and widespread, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the desert tortoise population has declined 90 percent since the 1980s, when it was first listed as a threatened species.

Randy Arnold, a biologist and head of the Hesperia consulting firm RCA and Associates, has been doing desert tortoise surveys for the last 20 years and says these days its rare to find one in the Victor Valley.

"Part of the reason is because development activity has resulted in a reduction of their habitat," Arnold said. "They also suffer from a respiratory infection. It is a fairly nasty disease that has hit the tortoise population pretty hard."

Arnold's company conducts biological surveys for a majority of the development projects in the High Desert and said the discovery of a tortoise does not stop the project. The tortoise is just relocated to land operated by the Bureau of Land Management.

While the move may be helpful to the tortoise, its habitat is being destroyed, said Michael Connor, executive director of the Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee.

"The desert is getting smaller and smaller everyday," Connor said. "Big cities are slowly spreading into the desert."

In an effort to save the desert tortoise, non-profit organizations like the Preserve Committee are working with government agencies to protect the tortoises' habitat.

Connor said the Preserve Committee is currently working with BLM to retire a grazing permit on a portion of the Blackwater Well Ranch in northwestern San Bernardino County in order to restore a critical habitat.

"Right now we are trying to reduce the grazing of domestic livestock in the desert," Connor said. "The tortoises can be trampled, their eggs get damaged and their burrows get damaged. Cows and sheep will eat anything green out there and compete with the tortoise."

By saving the habitat, Connor said, the organization is also saving other threatened species as well, including the Mojave ground squirrel and the burrowing owl.

Connor said educational programs are also an important part of saving the desert tortoise.

Members of the High Desert Chapter of the California Turtle and Tortoise Club often visit schools and other groups to talk about the need to save the desert tortoise, according to member Judy Rogers.

The club, along with the Joshua Tree Turtle and Tortoise Rescue, also adopt tortoises to "caregiver" families.

Yet as long as construction work continues in the High Desert, the desert tortoise could eventually disappear, according to Rae Packard, director of the Joshua Tree Turtle and Tortoise Rescue.

"Environmental encroachment is the number one threat to the desert tortoise," Packard said. "And the respiratory disease really did a lot of damage to the healthy population that was left."

Connor said trying to save the tortoise habitat is a long and tedious process.

"We are not going to see an immediate impact. It's going to take 20 years or more," he said. "People should take after the tortoise. They are slow moving and patient. We should do the same. We have to be patient."

Severe Drought Traced Along Colorado River

Analysis of tree rings from 1490 to 1997 shows that dry spells are a 'defining feature.' It raises questions about growth in the region.

By Bettina Boxall, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

A new study of tree ring records in the Colorado River basin reaffirms that one of the West's most important water sources is no stranger to severe drought.

Analyzing tree cores that reflect how wet or dry the climate was, scientists reconstructed the Colorado River's flow from 1490 to 1997. During that period, they found evidence of as many as eight severe droughts that lasted five consecutive years.

In a dry spell from 1844 through 1848, the average Colorado flow was even less than during the drought that gripped the basin recently and left some of its biggest reservoirs half empty.

The recent drought "is not without precedence," researchers wrote. "Overall these analyses demonstrate that severe, sustained droughts are a defining feature" of the Upper Colorado, which supplies most of the river's water.

The study echoes other research showing that, when the Colorado water was divided among seven Western states in 1922, it was an unusually wet period, resulting in overly optimistic water allocations.

"There's not a limitless amount of water for growth in the Southwest," said David Meko, study coauthor and an associate research professor at the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. "If everybody uses what they're entitled to, there's a shortage. On top of this, we have these climatic episodes."

Meko and coauthors Connie Woodhouse of the National Climatic Data Center and Stephen Gray of the U.S. Geological Survey Desert Laboratory concluded: "The long-term perspective provided by tree ring reconstructions points to looming conflict between water demand and supply."

About 1,400 miles long, the Colorado supplies water to 25 million people and several million acres of farmland from Denver to Southern California.

The basin drought that began in 2000 — the driest since record keeping began in 1906 — has eased somewhat. But Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the river's two major reservoirs that supply Arizona, Las Vegas and the Los Angeles region, remain low.

Powell is 49% full and Mead is at 56% capacity. Moreover, last year's bountiful flows into Powell from the upper basin are expected to fall below normal again this year.

Federal water managers are drawing up guidelines that would determine how a shortage would be handled if one were officially declared on the river, which is governed by complex water laws involving the states and the federal government.

In the meantime, the states have recommended some changes in how Powell and Mead are operated. And they want to explore ways of boosting the river's flow — for instance, through cloud seeding that would increase snowfall in mountains that drain into the basin.

The tree ring study, published in the May issue of Water Resources Research, built on a similar 1976 effort. That earlier study found the highest sustained flows over a more than 400-year period, from 1520 to 1961, occurred in the early 1900s, when farmers were pouring into the region and states were dividing up the Colorado's liquid riches.

The 1976 tree ring study also detected a drought that persisted for about 20 years in the late 1500s.

The new research relies on different ring samples, drawn from both living trees and dead ones, as well as data from the past three decades.

Of the eight droughts the study chronicled since the Columbus era, one was worse than the recent drought. Researchers said two, in the early 1500s and early 1600s, have a 25% chance of being as severe. The others have a 10% chance of being drier than 1999-2004.

The reconstruction also found that below-average flows lasted for longer periods, in one case, 11 consecutive years.

In one bit of good news, the researchers concluded the Colorado's average annual long-term flows are not as low as estimated in the 1976 study.

That research suggested an average flow of 13.5 million acre-feet a year, compared to the new estimate of 14.6 million. (An acre foot is enough to supply two Southern California families for a year.)

Still, that is less water than has been legally allocated to the states and Mexico.

Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in Colorado, said politicians are still relying too much on the unusually wet records of the 1900s in shaping water policy.

"The study gives you a good indication that the past wasn't exactly like the 1900s, and they ought to be very, very cautious" in predicting future water levels, Kuhn said.

Kelso Depot back on track

Memories revived by restoration

By HENRY BREAN
Las Vegas REVIEW-JOURNAL

Theo Packard.

MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE, Calif. -- Trains don't stop much at the Kelso Depot these days, but Theo Packard remembers when they did.

Packard lived in Kelso from about 1917 to 1935. Until the Great Depression cost him the job, he briefly worked as a cashier at the depot's lunch counter a few years after it opened in 1924.

Back then, Kelso was a bustling little railroad town, where trains would stop to take on water and let their passengers off to eat and stretch their legs.

Packard, now 95 and living in Studio City, Calif., said the tracks in front of the depot also were busy with "helper" locomotives that were used to get trains up the steep grade between Kelso and Cima, 18 miles and a 2,100-foot elevation gain to the east.

Though he didn't work the rails, Packard got to know that stretch of track pretty well.

"In the early days, you used to be able to ride along on the helper engines," he said.

Packard was among more than 600 people who traveled to Kelso on Saturday to celebrate the building's grand reopening, not as a depot but as the central visitors center for the 1.6 million acre Mojave National Preserve.

The National Park Service spent three years and $5.1 million restoring the three-story, Spanish Mission Revival-style structure, which cost $88,000 when it was first built.

George Lowell and his wife, Lisa, came from Apache Junction, Ariz., to see how the renovation turned out.

It wasn't Lowell's first time at the depot, but it might as well have been. The last time he saw the building, he was 4.

"I've just got pictures to look at and the stories my sister tells. She's the historian of the family," he said. "This is my first time back since 1949, and believe me, it's a thrill."

Lowell brought along an antique wax stamp that was used to seal envelopes in Kelso's post office during the 1920s and '30s. He gave the stamp to the Park Service along with some old family photographs from Kelso.

Lowell said his father worked as a mechanic for the nearby Vulcan Mine. His grandfather, Charles Frank Lowell, drove one of the "helper" engines.

Packard remembers Lowell's grandfather well. "He rescued me one time," he said. It happened early one morning when Packard was driving to Kelso from Las Vegas and fell asleep at the wheel of his 1932 Ford coupe. The car drifted off the road and crashed, so Packard used his headlights to signal a passing "helper" engine.

Charles Lowell stopped to pick him up and take him the rest of the way to Kelso, where he showed up at his mother's door with blood all over his face. "She nearly fainted when she saw me," Packard said.

Though the depot began to fade with the advent of the diesel locomotive and the decline of mining in the area after World War II, the tracks remain busy today.

Bob Bryson, who works out of the Park Service office in Barstow, Calif., said that if there isn't a freight train rumbling past the depot when you get there, just wait for 15 minutes or so.

"This is Union Pacific's main route from Las Vegas and Salt Lake City down to Los Angeles," he said.

The first train Katherine Shotwell remembers seeing at the Kelso Depot is the one she was on when she arrived there with her family in 1944.

"I stepped off of that train and onto that platform, and someone had to come out and unlock the depot" because it was late, said the 70-year-old Shotwell, who drove down from her home in Las Vegas for Saturday's event.

She vividly recalled the day when a huge locomotive nicknamed "Big Boy" broke loose from a siding and derailed in front of the depot.

"Its boiler broke and flooded the street," she said. "But the real show was watching the cranes lift it up and put it back on the tracks. That was my 9-year-old memory."

Like Lowell and others, Shotwell brought along an envelope full of keepsakes from her days in Kelso. Mixed in with some old photographs was her war bond booklet, which showed her address as "Trailer #17, Kelso, CA."

Shotwell also showed off her report card from the 1944-45 school year. It describes the then-Katherine Dell as a "good conscientious pupil" and gives her high marks in everything but being "neat and orderly."

"I haven't changed a whole heck of a lot," she said.

The Kelso Depot closed in August 1964, though the restaurant continued to operate until July 1985. Union Pacific donated the building and sold the land to the Bureau of Land Management in 1992. The Park Service took over the property when the national preserve was established in 1994.

The depot first reopened to the public in late October, and it has drawn pretty good crowds ever since, said park ranger Linda Slater.

"You think you're out in the middle of nowhere, and then you've got all these people," she said. "It's cranking all day long out here."

The visitor center is now open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m daily.

Slater said it probably will take another year for the Park Service to reopen the depot's lunch counter and find someone to operate it. In the meantime, she said, visitors are welcome to bring along a lunch and eat it at the counter.

Packard is just glad the counter is still there. He said he used to wonder if the old building ever would be brought back to life.

"I certainly wished for it," he said.

Now it looks just like it did when it was first built, he said, right down to the color of the paint on the walls. "It's unbelievable."

In the Desert, Ancient Signs

National Park Service archaeologist David Nichols hikes through the Mojave National Preserve.

New York Times
By STEPHEN REGENOLD


On the northern border of a vast desert preserve, halfway up a dusty hillside and overlooking a great forest of Joshua trees, David Nichols knelt to brush off a flat gray stone.

"Yep, this is one right here," he said, motioning toward a sheet of exposed bedrock. A group of small, closely spaced stones, like tiny turrets in the sand, formed a vague ring at his feet. "These supposedly kept the rodents out."

Mr. Nichols, one of two full-time research archaeologists employed at Mojave National Preserve, was showing off a recent discovery. On a nondescript hill, a quarter-mile off a four-wheel-drive dirt track, the remnants of a prehistoric way of life lay scattered in the sand.

Throughout Mojave National Preserve, a 1.6 million-acre park about 140 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the subtle traces of a bygone civilization are all around. Pictographs painted on cave walls, dart tips in the sand, shelters, fire rings and pottery shards are common in the area, where generations of prehistoric people lived and died. Indeed, Mojave National Preserve is an amateur archaeologist's dream, with undocumented sites open year-round for visitors to explore in the empty, undeveloped park.

The Drying Pallet Site, as Mr. Nichols has come to call his new hillside finding, features 21 limestone slabs encircled with rocks that were carefully placed hundreds of years ago. The indigenous people, Mr. Nichols told his small tour group, used the sunny protected rock platforms to prepare Joshua tree blossoms.

"It was dried like beef jerky," he said of the white blossoms, which each spring still daub the land below in one of the world's largest and densest forests of Joshua trees. "Food in the desert was dried for preservation; it was the only way."

Mr. Nichols, a 39-year-old Los Angeles native, has discovered more than 50 significant sites since coming to work for the park in 2001. The Drying Pallet Site was identified just four months ago. Dozens of others, he said, most likely pepper the preserve's hills and canyons.

In recent years, noteworthy findings, including pictograph-packed caves, have been discovered by visiting hikers and amateur archaeologists. But while the park staff encourages people to explore the backcountry, collecting artifacts or disturbing historical sites in any way is forbidden. Take only photographs, leave only footprints, as the axiom goes.

Rangers at Mojave National Preserve do not provide directions to most documented archaeological locations, though some staff members and volunteers, including Mr. Nichols, may give clues. "We call Mojave a 'discovery park,' " Mr. Nichols said of the Delaware-size preserve, which has only 30 miles of established hiking trails. "I might suggest features to look for in the hills, but people are on their own to get off trail and see what they can find."

The official park map is nearly devoid of references to archaeology, as is the park's Web site. Signage is scant. Tours are limited to an occasional offering from California State University, Fullerton, which operates its research-oriented Desert Studies Center in the park.

Mr. Nichols's recent tour was a rare occasion, as he leads fewer than 10 trips a year, primarily to educate fellow park staff members or visiting researchers. His tours are not available to the general public.

Like most activities in Mojave National Preserve, exploring the park for uncharted archaeology is a do-it-yourself adventure. Visitors coming to see petroglyphs and arrowheads need to plan ahead, researching the area's history and culture to become educated on where to start the hunt. Visitors also need to be prepared for an immersion in the desert wilderness — snakes, scorpions, sun, heat and all.

Mojave National Preserve is the meeting place of three great North American deserts: the Great Basin, the Sonoran and its namesake Mojave. The area is a vast hinterland of dunes and cinder cones, tumbleweed plains, mesas and mountain forests. Turquoise deposits brought journeying Anasazi to the area hundreds of years ago.

Temperatures are extreme all year, with cold nights and blazing days. Elevations range from 800 feet to higher than 7,000 feet. It is exceedingly arid, with some parts of the park seeing only three inches of rain in a year.

Yet life thrives, as it has for thousands of years, among the Joshua trees and juniper. Quail, hummingbirds, mule deer, bighorn sheep, roadrunners, coyotes, badgers, rattlers, sidewinders and giant centipedes share a dry, dusty habitat. Sagebrush, creosote and yucca dot the land. Golden eagles and red-tailed hawks swoop above in the desert thermals.

Human habitation is limited to a few park staff members and a handful of land owners whose private ranches were grandfathered in when the preserve was created in October 1994. Mr. Nichols lives in a small green trailer in the middle of the park, Edward Abbey-style, with a water tank on the roof and no indoor plumbing, though with satellite Internet and HBO.

At the second stop of the day, deep in the park's interior and not too far from Mr. Nichols's green trailer, the small tour group walked two miles across the desert. A rocky flat-top ridge was in the distance. Barrel cactuses and yuccas grew sparsely on the red-brown landscape. Rocks and sand stretched to the horizon.

A slight hill dead-ended at a cliff, and Mr. Nichols stopped to look up. The rock wall above, a gray, disintegrating mass, held a mosaic of tiny dancing figures.

"Wow, look at these petroglyphs!" said Mary Ann Guggemos, a 48-year-old park volunteer from Buffalo. Carved in a veneer of rust-brown desert varnish were the depictions of bighorn sheep, masked human figures and male stickpeople with no necks but fingers and small phallic appendages. Concentric circles dotted the stone. Diamonds, ovals, a square, pits, grooves and other abstract images hovered nearby.

The Pinto House Site, as this find has come to be known, was inhabited by ancestral Mojaves or Chemehuevi, according to Mr. Nichols, and they lived and worshiped in the dusty dwelling. Pottery shards mixed with small stones and animal dung in the dirt. A faint ring of rocks encircled a small shrub. Eleven slick metates, worn stone pallets used for grinding piñon seeds, acorns, juniper berries and other grains, sat under the overhanging rock face. And the assemblage of petroglyphs looked down upon it all.

"The sacred and the mundane were mixed in this culture," Mr. Nichols said, standing beside rock rings and milling stones. He said the etchings above were probably made during a ceremony, perhaps dreams manifested and scratched on a wall. "They didn't go to a church to worship," he said.

A hawk hovered in a wind gust above the cliff face. Petroglyph men stared down four modern-day visitors. The Pinto House Site, a bare forgotten diorama, cradled a human presence once again. Dust kicked up, and a second hawk moved into the updraft, paralleling its mate, two desert beings silhouetted and still on a pale blue sky.

Human remains identified

Desert Dispatch

BAKER -- The human remains found by a family of hikers last week have been identified and the Coroner's office determined the cause of death to be blunt trauma.

An autopsy was performed Friday on the remains found on May 14, when a family from Las Vegas was hiking in the Mojave National Preserve near Cima and Excelsior Mine roads west of Interstate 15 and north of Baker and found what looked like human remains.

A representative from the Coroner's office released the cause of death as blunt trauma, and investigators believe the victim died at another location and was later left at the Cima Road location.

On Monday investigators were able to determine that the body was that of Lawrence Thomas, 47, of Henderson, Nev., who was reported missing on April 22 in Henderson, according to information from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Homicide Detail. He was last seen on April 13.

Anyone with further information on the case is urged to contact homicide investigators Detective Jon Billings or Sgt. Frank Bell at (909) 387-3589.

Information can also be left anonymously by calling WeTip at (800) 78-CRIME. WeTip informants are eligible for up to $1,000 reward if their information leads to an arrest and conviction.

Power Lines and Pipelines Draw Closer to Parklands

Under orders from Congress to move quickly, the Department of Energy and Bureau of Land Management will approve thousands of miles of new power line and pipeline corridors on federal lands across the West in the next 14 months.



By Janet Wilson, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

Under orders from Congress to move quickly, the Department of Energy and Bureau of Land Management will approve thousands of miles of new power line and pipeline corridors on federal lands across the West in the next 14 months. The energy easements are likely to cross national parks, forests and military bases as well as other public land.

Environmentalists and land managers worry about the risk of pipeline explosions and permanent scarring of habitat and scenery from pylons and trenches. Military officials have expressed concern that the installations could interfere with training.

But industry lobbyists and congressional policymakers said expedited approvals for new corridors were vital to ensuring that adequate power from coal beds, oil fields and wind farms in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho reached the booming population centers of the Southwest.

In California alone, officials predict they will need an additional 14,000 megawatts of electricity per year, over the current 57,000 megawatts, to serve an expected 13 million more people by 2014.

ExxonMobil, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas and Electric and others have proposed corridors in the state across Death Valley, Joshua Tree and Lassen Volcanic national parks as well as the Mojave National Preserve, several military bases, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and seven national forests.

Elsewhere, routes near Moab, Utah, the Cascades and Rocky Mountains have been proposed, some up to five miles wide and 2,000 miles long.

"We are concerned about our lands," said Lee Dickinson, head of the National Park Service's special uses division, who is on a joint federal agency task force designed to resolve conflicting needs. "They know that we are not thrilled."

Department of Energy officials declined to provide an internal working map of which corridors were under consideration, saying it would be released only after environmental review. At that point, a map will be released showing possible routes, including those recommended by the department, and the public will have a chance to comment.

"We don't want to confuse the public," said David Meyer of the department's Office of Electricity Deliverability and Energy Reliability.

Not all routes being considered will be approved, and attempts are being made to avoid sensitive areas "unless there's a dire need," said Julia Souder, who is managing the project for the department.

Acting at the behest of the nation's largest utilities, Congress in its 2005 Energy Policy Act gave federal agencies until August 2007 to review and adopt major energy corridors across 11 states.

"That's warp speed," Scott Powers, a BLM official, said at a planning session last winter.

The legislation was designed to fast-track construction by requiring a single, overarching environmental review of the effect of dozens of energy corridors across federal land. The aim is to avoid time-consuming project-by-project reviews. Federal energy regulators were also given authority to designate power lines in the "national interest," which would allow them to overrule federal agencies or states or counties that withheld approval for segments of projects.

"They've taken away our sovereignty," said John Geesman, who sits on the California Energy Commission. "We're looking down the barrel of a gun."

Geesman said state officials were partly to blame for not designating more corridors sooner. But he said the law Congress passed went too far. As challenging as it is to find room for long corridors, Geesman said, they should not cross sensitive public lands.

Hotly contested proposals such as those across Anza-Borrego and the Cleveland and San Bernardino national forests could now be approved by federal officials if California said no.

Environmentalists say existing energy corridors on public land, most of them authorized before laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act were passed, present a cautionary tale. Fuel pipelines have exploded or leaked because of sabotage or natural disaster, said Bill Corcoran of the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club. In March 2005, a landslide in the Angeles National Forest broke a crude oil pipeline, dumping 126,000 gallons into Pyramid Lake, which supplies drinking water to Los Angeles.

Environmentalists and some federal scientists say the huge number of potential new corridors and accelerated timeline are a recipe for ecological devastation. They note that the government's hurried environmental review of the proposed corridors, to be completed by year's end, will miss key breeding seasons of affected fauna.

"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. They want to get by with a lot of sloppy, dirty work," said Howard Wilshire, a retired U.S. Geological Survey scientist who for 20 years studied human effects on public lands.

He said that with an environmental study of the arid Southwest scheduled for the hot summer months, many species would not be documented because plants will have died back and animals will be underground. Wilshire said his studies and others on the effects of roads, power lines and other linear development across the Mojave found that endangered species such as the desert tortoise were killed during construction, and that the projects permanently fragmented and eroded critical habitat.

Although power lines appear to sail through the air, every 160-foot-tall pylon is built on a concrete pad with a spur road connecting to a longer maintenance road, creating an artificial barrier across the fragile desert floor. Wilshire said bulldozing trenches for pipelines had similar effects.

"We're talking about millennia, if ever, for recovery of an ecosystem," he said.

Heath Nero of the Wilderness Society said that although it was good to study cumulative impacts, each project should also be examined.

"There potentially is greatness to this if we can get them to keep the corridors relatively narrow and placed in appropriate areas, which … are along already disturbed areas like freeways," he said. "There's two things that could go wrong…. One is to inappropriately site them in national parks…. Problem No. 2 is the categorical exclusion of specific projects from full environmental review."

Military officials have different concerns.

"Although I have yet to see a full map, the small-scale map I did see appeared to show the corridors running through military training grounds," wrote Army official Stephen Hart of Ft. Lewis, Wash., in public comments to energy task force staff.

Project staffers said they were trying to bundle most projected lines near existing power lines and freeways, and said they would use data from agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and BLM to protect species and habitat. Energy officials did not return calls for comment about military concerns.

Dickinson of the National Park Service said energy officials were trying to address her agency's concerns and that Lassen, Death Valley and Joshua Tree had been spared "at this moment." The Mojave preserve is still on the map, she said, as are Canyonlands National Park in Utah and Lake Mead National Recreation Area near Las Vegas. Corridors may also be designated on federal land next to parks that would affect visitors' views, she said.

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who wants corridors built in his state, said he didn't like the federal government usurping state authority. He said western states had worked for years to map future lines.

He said he would sue if necessary, depending on which corridors were picked.

"I'd rather not have to get to lawyering, but we may have to," he said. "Washington, D.C., is seldom helpful for those of us who live in the West, and this is another example…. The good news is their reach is so inefficient, they may never get it done."

But energy lobbyists and policymakers said that because the White House and Congress imposed a tight deadline, federal agencies were moving with unprecedented speed.

A bipartisan majority headed by Sens. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved the power corridor legislation.

"We're very encouraged," said Meg Hunt, lobbyist for the Edison Electric Institute, which represents utilities in the U.S. serving 71% of all consumers. She said designating corridors regionally had been in the works for 20 years but had repeatedly stalled when field staff in federal or state agencies didn't like particular projects.

"Shortly after President George W. Bush came into office, there was a renewed recognition that there was going to need to be a major build-out in transmission infrastructure to meet western needs," she said. "I do think the time constraint Congress imposed was the genesis."

California state parks officials are separately considering dozens of development proposals of all kinds, including toll roads and power lines.

Geesman said it was unclear who would ultimately pay for the new utility lines, and the public might have to pay the tab, through construction subsidies or bill increases. Utilities prefer public land because access across it is free or cheap, requiring modest lease payments at most, and poses fewer problems than securing rights from multiple private properties, he said.

Marny Funk, spokeswoman for Republicans on the Senate energy committee, noted that three-quarters of some western states were public land.

Corridor width is also an issue. Southern California Edison wants a mile-wide corridor across the Mojave, for example. Hunt of the Edison Electric Institute said bundling many lines close together could jeopardize safety and reliability. But she said energy companies would be willing to share corridors if exempted from full environmental review on specific projects.

Funk of the Senate energy committee, which oversaw the bill, said that was one of the law's main thrusts.

"Environmentalists use these reviews as a way to stall projects for years to keep them from ever being built," she said.

Others said that although it was difficult to balance competing needs on increasingly scarce public land, that was no excuse for shortcuts.

"It's a rushed process with little opportunity for the public to comment on or even know what highly public lands are at risk for development," said Corcoran of the Sierra Club. "The federal government should not make our public lands legacy a dumping ground for industry."

Once the western lands project is complete, Congress ordered it to be replicated across the rest of the contiguous U.S. by 2009.

Blythe Calif Station Burns

Author: Winks
Blythe area paper

The historic Santa Fe Depot, a Blythe landmark that has graced the city since 1926, was destroyed by fire the afternoon of May 2. No one was injured in the fire. Witnesses told police they saw sparks from overhead electrical wires and that is believed to have been the cause of the inferno. Despite being closed for years, the depot still had electric and gas turned on.

Jim Green, manager of the Blythe Food Pantry, which sits adjacent to the former depot, said he and a friend were working on his car out back of the Pantry facing the depot when they smelled smoke.

"I said 'darn, it smells like rubber burning,'" Green said. "I ran around to the other side of the car and was fixing to look at the vehicle when I noticed the smell coming in from the southwest. I looked at the dock of the building and flames were coming up from under the loading dock."

Green's friend dialed 911 and Blythe Volunteer Fire responded.

Fire Chief Billy Kem said it was the first big fire he's been on since being appointed to the position last month.

"It was a shame," he said about the fire that took down the 80-year-old building. "It was just an old wooden structure-type building that had been there a long, long time. We don't know the cause and there was no putting it out - it got up into the top real quick."

Kem said the blaze started at the south end of the building and burned through to the front.

Located at Rice and Commercial streets, the building was first constructed in 1926, 10 years after rail service first came to Blythe. The depot was listed in Riverside County's Historic Resources Inventory by the Riverside County Historical Commission in 1983.

Quirky desert town takes pride in what it has to offer

NIPTON - They came here for the gold.

By MARK MUCKENFUSS
The Press-Enterprise

Not that they found much, at least not enough to get rich.

But that didn't keep them from staying in this speck of a town in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Nipton is California's last outpost off of Interstate 15, just 2 ½ miles from the Nevada state line.

Heading south on Nipton Road from the interstate, the town is a small puff of green in the road on the far side of the valley that bleeds into Ivanpah Dry Lake.

Its 30-some residents live in a brutal yet scenic landscape, where the wind whips west from the Mojave National Preserve's barren New York Mountains and trains thunder by on their way to and from Los Angeles.

Coming into town, visitors cross the rails to find a dirt parking lot on one side of the road where the Nipton Trading Post is flanked by a café and the Hotel Nipton. A dusty RV park sits on the other side of the road.

Nipton was once touched by celebrity -- silent-film star Clara Bow occasionally stayed in its tiny hotel. Now it is a curiosity for tourists, a road stop for bikers and a place for people with little love for the city to hide away.

Jerry Freeman, who bought the town in 1984, is working to make it an inviting place for artists. He has begun an artist-in-residence program with the help of the national preserve and hopes to expand it.

While any large mining operations around Nipton have pretty much dried up, Freeman still finds the gold connection interesting.

The first man to settle here, at the turn of the 20th century, was Samuel Duncan Karns, a man who made millions in Pennsylvania oil and then lost it by investing in railroads. He came west to look for gold and established the Nippeno Consolidated Mine, reportedly borrowing a Pennsylvania area Native American name.

Karns died in 1909, four years after the railroad came through and dubbed the spot Nipton.

In 1913, another prospector showed up. Harry Trehearne was a miner from Cornwall, England. He never had much luck finding precious ore, but he opened a store in Nipton, selling supplies to other miners.

That building, not much more than a shack, still stands on the property, behind the Hotel Nipton and across from a dirt road that Freeman says was once a stage route linking Searchlight, Nev., -- 20 miles east -- with the rail line.

A trained geologist, Freeman first came to Nipton in the late 1950s when he was a college student. For a time after he graduated, he would show up most weekends, looking for gold.

"I'd take the train and arrive here in the early a.m.," he says. "I had a Jeep parked here and I would spend the weekend prospecting. At that time, the hotel was in service."

But things were on the decline. Trehearne, who took over construction of the hotel from the railroad and later added the trading post, had died in 1949. Subsequent owners let things fall apart.

By the early 1980s, when Freeman noticed a sales ad for the property and drove out to look at it, Nipton was more desolate than he remembered.

"The hotel was a wreck," he says. In fact, the county had condemned it.

"We bought a ghost town and decided to transform it," he says, "to take this clay and reshape it into something I consider more useful and interesting and enduring."

He stops talking as one of the many daily trains rumbles down the track.

"Out here the protocol is don't try to talk when a train goes by," he says. "Nothing you have to say can't wait until after the train goes by."

After investing lots of time and money in the hotel, Freeman and his wife reopened it in 1986 as a bed and breakfast. It has only five rooms. Four eco-cabins have been added out back.

A cactus garden with a geometric design fronts the small hotel, which was built sometime between 1905 and 1910. On its front porch are old round-back wooden rockers. Inside, historic photos dot the walls. An old wood stove is the centerpiece of the long narrow lobby.

Freeman points out Room No. 3.

"Clara Bow, she was the most famous celebrity to visit here and this was her favorite room," he says.

She and her husband lived on the Walking Box Ranch near Searchlight. "Her husband drove their cattle here to load them on the train and they would stay here."

When the hotel first reopened, Freeman says, business was understandably slow. But with the establishment of the Mojave National Preserve in 1994, things picked up. The hotel is usually booked for most of the spring.

Warm Welcome

People began moving in and making Nipton their home, as well.

Initially miners populated the RV park when the area enjoyed a brief boom in the late 1980s. Most moved out, but others came. Those who live here say it has a charm that may not be immediately evident.

Cindy Adams, 57, remembers her first visit. She and her husband moved here six months ago from Colorado when he took a job at the mining operation in nearby Mountain Pass.

They pulled up one evening, hauling a trailer with their belongings.
"I leaned down and looked out the window and then at my husband and I said, 'Is this it?' " she says.

The friendly greeting they received improved her outlook.

"I went into the store and they were like, 'Oh yeah, we knew you were coming,' " she says.
She's now adjusted to the isolation of the desert, even though sometimes it's a little too slow for her. She works in the Trading Post two days a week and helps out at the café.

"Every two weeks we have big excitement," she says, laughing. "The bookmobile shows up on Wednesday and everybody comes down and gets coffee at the store and their books. And on Friday, the Schwan's man comes.

"But there're days when it's very quiet and we're all, 'Hmmm ... ' "

Rosie Davidson and her husband Donald are Washington, D.C., residents who are in their third extended stay in Nipton. Donald is part of the Artists in the Parks program and is working for the Mojave National Preserve as Nipton's current artist- in-residence.

"I fell in love with it the first time I saw it," Rosie says of the town. "I think this place is idyllic in many ways."

Donald says he finds beauty in the stark desert surroundings. He spends most days in the field, cataloging and doing pen and ink drawings and watercolors of native flowers. He may drive as much as two hours into the desert to find the particular species he's looking for.

"There's so much to preserve here," he says. "It's one of the most unsullied desert environments that the public has access to. The programs that I am part of and that I promote are more needed out here."

In addition to providing artwork and information to the park service, Davidson conducts educational workshops, teaching adults and children how to recognize and draw native plants.

"Visitors no longer just want to walk through a park," he says. "They want to engage in an experience such as a hands-on workshop where their work can make a contribution."

Some of Davidson's work hangs in the Trading Post, which is filled with curious items such as old lanterns hanging from the ceiling, American Indian dolls, papier-mache camels from India and plush scorpions and tortoises. If you want to buy a Nipton postcard you have one choice, showing the hotel, of course.

Desert Dwellers

Next door, the Whistlestop Oasis boasts a rooftop sign that says, "Best Burgers Around."

Being as there isn't much else around for 20 miles that might not mean much. But Bill Sarbello, 60, who runs the place, says customers drive from as far as Henderson -- 50 miles -- to eat in the casual hominess of the diner. Then they leave, which is just how he likes it.

"Come in and have a couple of beers, something to eat, play a game of pool and go away," Sarbello says.

The ex-New Yorker by way of Florida came to Nipton three years ago to take over the café.

"I'm making something grow out here in the desert," he says.

He'd been to the area before and knew what to expect when he arrived, not only from the town but the residents. He'd seen the same thing when he lived on St. John, one of the Virgin Islands.

"St. John is a desert," he says, with the only source of water being rainfall. "Everything that grows there has a thorn or a barb, and so do the people. Nipton's the same way. If you're going to come here and live, you're probably going to have some kind of thorn."

Larry Jordan, who has been running the Trading Post for six months, has seen it, too.

"Desert dwellers, they're kind of not in the mainstream," he says. "Maybe they're here because they couldn't make it anywhere else in society and they kind of keep to themselves."

Jordan and his wife are temporary residents. They are part of a program that provides store managers and workers to national parks and private campgrounds. They plan to be gone when the full heat of summer hits.

Until then, he says, he tells friends, "We're conveniently located in the middle of nowhere."