Feds approve controversial remote desert solar plant near Baker

A bighorn sheep climbs the terrain of the Mojave National Preserve, about a mile northeast of the proposed site for the Soda Mountain Solar project on Tuesday, July 21 2015 near Baker. (Stan Lim)

By Jim Steinberg
The San Bernardino Sun

Over objections of environmentalists, the Obama administration on Tuesday approved a 287-megawatt solar energy plant for a remote part of the Mojave Desert.

The 1,767-acre project being developed by Bechtel Corp. is located on land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, about six miles southwest of Baker.

“Soda Mountain is another step forward toward diversifying our nation’s energy portfolio and meeting the state of California’s growing demand for renewable energy,” said BLM Director Neil Kornze.

The project is consistent with BLM’s landscape approach for the California desert, which supports careful development of renewable energy while protecting the resources and places that make the desert special, Kornze said in a statement.

“The approval of Soda Mountain Solar is a stark contradiction by the Obama administration,” Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement.

“Less than two months ago, we lauded the administration as conservation heroes after they designated national monuments in the desert to protect and connect important landscapes,” she said.

Allowing the Soda Mountain project to proceed “inhibits national park wildlife from migrating and adapting to a changing climate,” Pierno added.

The project will provide enough power for more than 86,000 homes and help toward meeting Obama’s Climate Action Plan goal of 20,000 megawatts of power derived from renewable energy project on public lands by 2020, the BLM statement said.

The agency said it spent more than three years consulting and working with a variety of federal and state partners, members of the public and others to develop a “comprehensive environmental analysis” of the Soda Mountain project area and devise a project design that preserves scenic vistas, reduces potential impacts to wildlife in the area and protects groundwater.

The agency said its approved design removes an array of solar panels originally approved north of the 15 Freeway, eliminating most of the visual effects of the project within the Mojave National Preserve.

Last year, the project was reduced from the originally proposed 2,222 acres.

The agency also said its decision ensures the project will not block future efforts to re-establish bighorn sheep movement across the interstate highway.

But Ileene Anderson, Los Angeles-based senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the massive solar array would block the “last, best linkage” for desert bighorn sheep between the Mojave National Preserve and the Soda Mountain Wilderness Study Area.

Renewable-energy generation “has to be done right,” she said.

The smaller, revised project is located in an area of disturbed lands including an active utility corridor for oil and gas pipelines, electricity transmission and communication lines and facilities, BLM said.

However, the National Parks Conservation Association says the project is in the “undeveloped” South Soda Mountain region immediately adjacent to Mojave National Preserve.

Francis Canavan, a Bechtel spokesman, acknowledged that the company doesn’t yet have an agreement to sell the electricity from the project, but he added that talks are underway with potential buyers.

Bechtel also does not have a signed agreement to use the power lines that run past the project site, which are owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Getting permission to use Los Angeles’ power lines, however, “shouldn’t be a problem,” Canavan said.

Will renewable energy ruin an 'irreplaceable' Mojave desert oasis?

The BLM has called the Silurian Valley an "undisturbed, irreplaceable, historic scenic landscape." But now the federal agency is considering a proposal for two solar facilities amid the oasis

Highway 127 cuts through the landscape in the Mojave Desert, carrying tourists, campers and hikers to Joshua Tree and Death Valley. (Gina Ferazzi)

By JULIE CART
Los Angeles Times

In one of the hottest, driest places on Earth, velvety sand dunes surround dry lake beds that, with luck, fill with spring rains. Hidden waterways attract a profusion of wildlife and birds; submerged desert rivers periodically erupt in a riot of green.

The federal Bureau of Land Management describes the Silurian Valley as an "undisturbed, irreplaceable, historic scenic landscape."

Now, a Spanish energy firm is proposing a wind and solar project that would cover 24 square miles of the Mojave Desert oasis.

Iberdrola Renewables wants to build a 200-megawatt wind farm that would sprout as many as 133 turbines reaching heights of 480 feet. Next door would be a 200-megawatt solar facility with 400 pairs of photovoltaic panels. The industrial facility would operate around the clock and be visible from nearly every point of the valley.

If approved, the project would be the first major exception to the BLM's strategy of guided development across more than 22 million acres of California desert.

The BLM's approach aims to encourage development in less-sensitive parts of the Mojave. But the agency allows developers such as Iberdrola to apply for variances — critics call them loopholes — that let energy prospectors plant their flags just about anywhere in the California desert if they successfully clear hurdles designed to discourage building in environmentally fragile areas.

Iberdrola's experience will help developers determine whether the difficult process is worth their time and money. For environmentalists, it will be a test of the government's commitment to protect sensitive areas of the desert.

In its application, Iberdrola said the plants would create 300 construction jobs and about a dozen full-time positions once the facilities are completed. It would require building 45 miles of new roads, a new power substation and 11 miles of transmission lines to connect the site to the power grid. The two plants would generate about 400 megawatts of power.

There has been wide position to the project, which sits astride the Old Spanish Trail, a historic trade route managed by the National Park Service.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and California's Department of Fish and Wildlife have criticized its proposed location: a valley that serves as a crossroads for three major wildlife corridors and an important avian flyway. They warned that the long-standing migration corridors would be disrupted and wildlife would be injured or killed in the wind project's turbines or the solar project's superheated panels.

This lonely place is a tourist mecca too. The valley's volcanic mesas and creosote forests are bisected by Highway 127, a two-lane black ribbon that connects three jewels of Southern California: Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park.

Mark Butler, who retired this year as superintendent at Joshua Tree, said energy developments in the desert must be smartly placed to protect sensitive ecosystems.

"I believe it would be a mistake to place this in the Silurian Valley," he said. "We need renewable energy — it's just about where it is and how we go about it."

Conservation groups, which have opposed variance exceptions, say the Silurian Valley is a poor testing ground for the process.

"They are proposing something that has such grave impacts, that benefits so few and harms so many and is opposed by so many," said David Lamfrom, the associate director of the California Desert program for the National Parks Conservation Assn., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

Iberdrola representatives declined requests for an interview.

Some local officials have sent letters to Congress opposing the project, in part because they fear industrialization could mar the valley and deter tourists.

Le Hayes, who for 23 years was the general manager for the town of Baker, called the proposed energy plants the latest example of "the ongoing pillage of the desert, scraping off thousands of acres to generate electricity so the metropolitan areas can light their streets, big box parking lots, etc."

Proponents of the projects say the plants will become an engine for job creation in San Bernardino County, while others cite the need for more clean energy sources to combat climate change.

Siting renewable energy on public lands in the West is a priority for the Obama administration, which has pledged to generate 20,000 megawatts of power from federal land by 2020. There have been 375 applications for renewable-energy related projects in California since 2007, BLM State Director Jim Kenna said. The BLM has approved 18 applications.

The proposal comes as both solar and wind facilities are facing criticism over bird fatalities.

Three solar farms were examined in a recent report from the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory. The investigation concluded that one of the plants was a "mega-trap" for insects, attracting birds that later died. The report described birds igniting as they chased after their insect meals and flew into the plant's concentrated solar beam. Workers at the site referred to the smoking birds as "streamers," according to investigators.

At the Ivanpah project near the Nevada border, investigators saw "hundreds and hundreds" of dead dragonflies and butterflies that had been attracted to the luminescence generated by 170,000 mirrors focused on a 450-foot glowing tower.

Other birds, the report said, died after striking photovoltaic panels or other structures. The report did not offer a definitive number of annual deaths, because investigators only observed the sites on a few occasions, but they collected more than 200 birds from 71 species.

BrightSource Energy, which developed Ivanpah, reports avian mortality to the California Energy Commission monthly and said investigators' estimates were greatly exaggerated.

When it comes to permitting renewable energy projects such as Iberdrola's, the BLM employs a carrot-and-stick approach.

To encourage companies to develop projects in less sensitive zones, it offers fast-tracked permitting and streamlined environmental review. The shortened process can take less than two years.

The stick comes down on companies seeking to develop outside designated areas, known as Solar Energy Zones. Those projects are relegated to the back of the line, and the companies must pay for costly environmental analysis.

Iberdrola is the first to use the variance process. Its development plan will have to pass muster on a 25-point review that examines potential effects on air and water, cultural resources, wildlife, parks and other conservation lands. Developers also must demonstrate that they have the financial and technical resources to complete the project. The projects' plans are open to public comment.

"It was always anticipated to be a rigorous process," Kenna said.

The variance decision for Iberdola's Silurian Valley project rests with Kenna, who said he will rule early this month. Should he deny the application, Iberdrola may appeal to the Department of the Interior's Board of Land Appeals.

Iberdrola originally had envisioned completing construction by this December. Three years after beginning the process, not a spade of dirt has been turned.

"Given the often-stated desire of the current administration to responsibly develop more renewable energy on the large amount of federally owned lands, the actual reality of the variance process they've initiated seems to be somewhat at odds with that desire," Iberdrola spokesman Art Sasse said in a statement.

Solar companies argue that the variance process is critical to allow industry to choose its own sites.

Environmental groups are watching to ensure that companies such as Iberdrola meet the strict requirements meant to protect natural treasures like the Silurian Valley.

"There was a high bar put in place and a lot of scrutiny," said Kim Delfino of Defenders of Wildlife. "We … very much feel this is a test for the BLM."

The park service has said the visual impact would be "significant, irreversible and likely unmitigatable."

Baker's thermometer to reopen July 10

World's Largest Thermometer

The world's tallest thermometer in Baker. The thermometer will be rededicated on July 10, after several repairs and improvements. (LARAE HARGUESS)

by MIKE LAMB
Victorville Daily Press

BAKER — When it comes to temperatures, July 10 is a historical date.

In 1913, the hottest official temperature on Earth was recorded in Death Valley at 134 degrees on that date.

At 3 p.m. this July 10, the lights on the 134-foot world’s tallest thermometer in Baker will be turned on once again, according to LaRae Harguess. The event will be held in dedication to Willis Herron, who intentionally built the thermometer 134 feet to match the record hottest temperature.

Harguess, who is one of Herron’s daughters, says the family is holding a soft opening for its gift shop on that day as well. The official grand opening of both the thermometer and the gift shop will be held Oct. 11.

Harguess said her mother, Barbara Herron, was heartbroken over the disrepair of what was known for years as the Bun Boy thermometer and decided to use her own money to repair it. Harguess said her mother has spent $150,000 so far.

“All of the lighting, computer work, electrical had to be reconstructed,” Harguess said. The family was hoping to turn the thermometer back on by Memorial Day weekend.

“We ran into issues with Edison and light bulbs,” Harguess said. “We had a problem getting light bulbs. We needed a whole new computer system and testing. ... Everything happens for a reason.”

The official gift shop opening is waiting on more merchandise, according to Harguess. She said the family hopes to make enough money from sales in the gift shop to cover the costs to keep the thermometer on.

The July 10 event is open to the public.

Iconic ‘World’s Tallest Thermometer’ to light up again in Baker

The World’s Tallest Thermometer, seen in disrepair in Baker recently, is slated for relighting after renovation by the attraction’s original owners. (Photo by Jennifer Cappuccio Maher/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin)

By Grace Wong
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

BAKER--Vegas-bound travelers know it well.

Towering above fast food restaurants and gas stations, the 134-foot red and white thermometer that once greeting passers-by with a glowing numerical indication of the extreme desert temperatures, has stood darkened and in disrepair.

But no more.

After repossessing the landmark in March, the Herron family, who were the original owners of the electric sign, plan to renovate and relight the thermometer in early summer.

“We’ve watched it come into disrepair and it’s been a really sad thing for our family,” said LaRae Harguess, daughter of the late Willis Herron, a successful businessman in Baker. “We’re just really excited to get it back and get it lit for the town of Baker. It was my dad’s dream that it would help the entire town, so we’re going to get it back and get it turned back on.”

Herron and his wife Barbara had seen roadside attractions on their travels and Harguess said he often spoke of wanting to do one himself.

“It was a dream of my dad’s,” said Harguess of Willis Herron. “He wanted to have a roadside attraction that would actually bring people to the town of Baker, where he had several businesses.”

In 1991, Herron finally erected the World’s Tallest Thermometer in Baker and since then, the sign has been a popular tourist attraction and pit stop for travelers.

“This thermometer is a really an iconic piece of Baker and Baker’s history,” said David Lamfrom, senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “It’s iconic of people’s travels through the Mojave. They stop in Baker, get food and gas, but always tend to figure out how hot it is by looking at the thermometer; it roots people in place.”

When Herron became ill, he sold the thermometer to Larry Dabour, who later sold it to Matt Pike.

But as time went on, the thermometer’s glowing numbers went dim and began to show signs of wear. When Herron died in 2007, his wife went to visit the thermometer. What she saw made her even more sad.

“It was starting to become in disrepair and it was really saddening for her,” Harguess said. “Obviously seeing your mother upset, it upsets the children. It was just sad to see something so important to my dad go into disrepair.”

Barbara Herron, Willis Herron’s wife, decided that she and the family were going to repossess the thermometer and get it lit up again, in memory of her late husband. The family also has plans for building a memorial to Willis Herron. Harguess’ nephew has even created a website and Facebook page so that people can track the progress of the thermometer’s restoration.

“I know that our California economy has been bad and it’s definitely hurt every business in California, so I’m hoping with the relighting of the thermometer, it will do what my dad always intended: get people off the freeway to stop in Baker. We see a lot of people stop while it’s dark, so hopefully more people will stop to see it lit up. We’re hoping that my dad’s original dream of getting people to stop in the town will be reaffirmed.”

The thermometer has drawn visitors to it in the past and businesses anticipate more visitors once it’s lit.

“It’s great to hear that the original owners are taking over the thermometer and making the necessary improvements in (again) making it the landmark that it is,” said Diana Romo, Baker Community Services District. “I’m sure it will bring more business to the town and the businesses here will welcome the family back in town.”

For many tourists, taking a photo with the thermometer looming in the background is a testament to surviving the intense heat of the desert, said Lamfrom.

“It’s a piece of the collective imagination of what the desert is; that’s what the thermometer is,” Lanfrom said. “It’s showing the incredible temperatures and people showing they’ve had the desert experience by braving the heat, which is interesting because it’s such a small part of the desert experience. It really captured peoples’ imaginations, and is actually one of the reasons people fear and don’t understand the desert: they think it’s always hot. It’s an embodiment of peoples’ perception of the desert and it plays on the perception of that in a incredible and wonderful way. It’s a statue of temperature.”

Park service says project would harm Mojave preserve

Soda Lake in the Mojave National Preserve is the point where the Mojave River, which flows from the San Bernardino Mountains, reaches its end. A commercial solar project planned within a mile of the lake bed has triggered worries about water depletion in spring-fed ponds and the fate of an endangered fish, among other concerns. (DAVID DANELSKI)

By David Danelski
Riverside Press-Enterprise

The National Park Service has lodged strongly worded objections to a proposed 6.5-square-mile solar development about a half-mile from the Mojave National Preserve, saying the project would harm wildlife and suggesting that it be built elsewhere.

Preserve Superintendent Stephanie Dubois submitted an eight-page letter to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the public land where the Soda Mountain solar project is planned and which is handling the environmental analysis of the development.

A subsidiary of the Bechtel Corp., one of the world’s largest construction companies, wants to put solar panels on both sides of Interstate 15 about six miles south of Baker and just outside the northwest corner of the national preserve, where the bright white Soda Lake is a striking landmark. The lake, mostly dry, is bordered by springs, seeps and ponds, providing a small oasis for wildlife.

Dubois' letter says the BLM failed to adequately examine the project's potential to harm groundwater, threatened and endangered species, and scenic views, among other issues. The project would be detrimental to the desert tortoise, bighorn sheep and protected birds in the area and could reduce water supplies that support one of the few populations of an endangered fish, she wrote.

“We urge the BLM to reconsider the potential for this project to be sited on other BLM lands, private lands, or other degraded lands where renewable energy projects would present fewer adverse impacts to natural and cultural resources,” Dubois wrote in her March 3 letter to the BLM.

BLM spokeswoman Martha Maciel said Dubois’ letter is just one of many written comments the agency received as part of the process to evaluate Bechtel’s requests for a right-of-way permit the company needs in order to build on public land.

"We will consider all the comments and adjust our analysis where appropriate," said Maciel, reached by phone at her office in Sacramento.

In a withered desert town, he envisions an otherworldly hotel

Luis Ramallo, owner of Alien Fresh Jerky in Baker, Calif., checks out aliens inside a "Back to the Future"-type car in front of his store. Ramallo wants to build a UFO-themed hotel to try to breathe some life back into the struggling desert town, whose biggest tourist attraction is a giant thermometer that's now gone dark. (Gina Ferazzi, Los Angeles Times)

Rick Rojas
Los Angeles Times

BAKER, Calif. — On the aging main drag here just off the route to Las Vegas, Luis Ramallo ticks off the worn buildings of Baker Boulevard by what they used to be.

There's the old IHOP and the Starbucks. The Chinese restaurant with broken windows and a weed-filled parking lot. In front of the closed Bun Boy, Baker's onetime biggest attraction — the World's Tallest Thermometer — has gone dark but still, in a way, tells the temperature of a town withering under the desert sun.

Yet on this recent weekday afternoon, a stream of drivers pull into the dusty parking lot of Ramallo's store, Alien Fresh Jerky. Inside the stucco box with a UFO out front and a bug-eyed extraterrestrial dangling his legs off the roof, customers peruse walls covered in dozens of flavors of dehydrated meats.

Ramallo, 56, believes his pluck has allowed him to thrive in a place where bigger businesses have failed.

"They don't take care of business," he boasts with a grin. "We take care of business."

The Argentina-born electrical engineer's next venture could test that claim: Ramallo is planning a multimillion-dollar, 31-room hotel in the shape of a flying saucer that has hovered in his mind for a decade.

He hopes the hotel will inject new vigor into a community of about 730 people that doesn't have a pharmacy or grocery store.

"Sometimes I can see a business where other people don't see it," Ramallo says. "I want to make improvements and put Baker on the map again, and we will." In business, he says, "you have to believe in your idea, and — 200% — I believe in my idea."

::

In the back of the store, Ramallo pulls out rumpled folders filled with newspaper clippings, sketches and a Popular Mechanics with a UFO on the cover. He finds the stack of renderings, the many iterations the UFO hotel has taken since he first hired an architect in 2009.

One version looked like an oddly shaped office building with windows. "You want me to put in windows?" he says he told the architect. "There's nothing to see in Baker!"

In another, the hotel was a khaki-colored oval. "This is a glass hamburger!" he sneers. "Maybe for some people that can be a UFO, but not for me."

Ramallo's son, Martin, 32, walks into the office.

"He believes in it before seeing it," says Martin, who, like two of his sisters, works for his father. "That's the difference between visionaries and spectators. That's him. He's the visionary."

Ramallo had a business doing electrical work in Las Vegas before he started selling jerky.

He started selling outside Area 51 in Lincoln County, Nev. As an immigrant, he would joke: "I was actually the alien in Area 51!"

Ramallo said he decided to leave the roadside stand. But, as a family, they voted to stay in the jerky business and find a permanent location. They also thought the alien theme was one worth hanging on to.

In 2001, he passed through Baker and spotted the six-acre parcel with a little building that would become the first home of Alien Fresh Jerky. The family lived in a small home on the property.

The growing business eventually moved to the larger store it now occupies. In 2004, Ramallo closed his electrical business to focus on jerky.

Jacob Overson, general manager for the Baker Community Services District, recalls many people thinking he was just another outsider whose business would sputter after a few months.

"No one really had much faith in him," Overson says, "but he proved us all wrong."

::

Ramallo has long imagined the graphite saucer of a spacecraft, lined with circuits and tubes filled with blue light, landing in a haze, a few aliens wandering off into the desert.

Struggling to convey his vision, he traveled in 2012 to a convention of theme-park designers. He met David Weiss, a freelance creative director who has designed props and theme park attractions. Weiss eventually nailed it.

Ramallo hopes to begin construction over the summer. The project — which could cost close to $25 million, funded by Ramallo and a small group of investors — cleared its first hurdle in January when San Bernardino County officials approved the land-use plans.

A UFO hotel wouldn't have much competition.

Two motels have closed. Another, next door to Alien Fresh Jerky, has vacancies but isn't exactly a five-star stay. A for-sale sign hangs out front.

But some have hope Ramallo's project wouldn't meet a similar fate.

Nono Khasa, who manages gas stations and fast-food restaurants in Baker, says the town is a stopping point for families, film crews and other motorists traversing I-15 or exploring the Mojave Desert.

"They are always looking for a place to stay," she says. "If there's a decent hotel in town, I think it will work well."

Overson says if the hotel were successful, it would bring jobs and perhaps a renewed optimism.

But he acknowledges Ramallo's risk in investing so much in a place that others have fled.

"It's either going to make or break him," Overson said. "It's a hell of a gamble, but all of his friends say he likes taking those gambles."

::

Ramallo drives past the modest home where he lived with his family when they started and pulls up to a wrought-iron gate, a golden "R" affixed to it.

With "Rancho Ramallo" emblazoned on an outer wall, Ramallo's new home has a manicured garden and a portico stretching over the driveway. At two stories, he brags it's the tallest building in Baker.

"This is my house," he says, brimming with pride. "In Baker."

There's an eight-car garage, a swimming pool, a lawn as green as a golf course and a barbecue pit big enough to roast entire goats for his birthday, just like in Argentina.

He calls Baker "my place," and has already told his family: When he dies, he wants his ashes spread here.

"This city," he says, "has given us a future."

He gives little thought to the possibility of his long-dreamed-of hotel becoming yet another shuttered business on Baker Boulevard.

"If it fails, it fails," Ramallo says. "What are you going to do? I'm not going to kill myself."

He's built all this from the ground up once. If he has to, he figures, he can do it again.

Opposition Mounts to Solar Project On Mojave Preserve Boundary

View of the North Array site's currently undisturbed desert tortoise habitat from the Soda Mountains. (Courtesy Basin and Range Watch)

by Chris Clarke
KCET.org

If discussion at a recent gathering of activists is any indication, a nearly 4,200-acre solar project for a valley adjoining National Park land in California's Mojave desert will encounter near-unanimous opposition from green groups.

The Soda Mountain Solar project, described earlier here at ReWire, would place 358 megawatts' worth of solar panels on 2,557 acres on either side of Interstate 15 between Baker and Barstow. The project would also include about 1,600 acres of support infrastructure, including roads, operations buildings, and an electrical substation. Depending on the plant's configuration, the project's East Array would be built as little as a quarter mile from the boundary of the Mojave National Preserve, a 1.6 million-acre National Park Service unit, near Zzyzx, a former resort turned desert research center.

That perceived encroachment on the Preserve, along with the project's potential effects on desert bighorn sheep and other wildlife, prompted strong statements of opposition at a Sierra Club-sponsored meeting of California and Nevada desert activists over the weekend in Shoshone, a nearby community outside Death Valley National Park.

"This is just a bad project," David Lamfrom, California Desert Senior Program Manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, told the gathering on Saturday. "It's a dinosaur. There's no justification for building a solar power plant in this spot, where it will infringe on the Preserve and damage some of the best bighorn habitat in the Mojave."

Lamfrom's charges came during a presentation on the project at the February 15-16 meeting of the Sierra Club's California-Nevada Desert Committee, which draws desert activists from a wide range of organizations and locales four times a year to discuss topics ranging from wilderness to landfill proposals.

Lamfrom told the group that activists had thought they'd killed a previous version of the project, proposed by the New York-based firm Caithness Energy. Facing opposition based on proximity to the Preserve and the project's likely effects on desert wildlife, as well as problems with selling the project's power based on insufficient transmission through the area, Caithness quietly backed off on Soda Mountain Solar. "But then Caithness sold the project to Bechtel," said Lamfrom. "Bechtel has deep enough pockets to risk pushing it through, so it came back to life."

The project would also abut the Soda Mountains Wilderness Study Area (WSA), a haven for bighorn sheep. The corridor between Zzyzx in the Preserve and that WSA has long been one of the best places in the area for watching bighorn, who have so far escaped the outbreaks of pneumonia that have killed off sheep elsewhere in the Preserve. And according to comments submitted by Mojave National Preserve superintendent Stephanie Dubois during the project's scoping phase, a series of underpasses in the area serve as relatively safe and efficient wildlife crossings for the sheep. The project would block those crossings.

Other wildlife in the area include the federally Threatened desert tortoise, the Mojave fringe-toed lizard, burrowing owls, desert kit foxes, and golden eagles. Water use by the project for cleaning solar panels raises another concern: groundwater pumping will likely lower the local water table. If that pumping cut flows to springs in the Preserve, that might cause big problems for the federally Endangered Mohave tui chub, whose last wild population lives in a small spring downhill from the project site. (A few additional populations of the fish have been planted in other bodies of in the desert.)

Activists are gearing up to oppose the project with a unanimity not generally seen in opposition to other desert solar projects. Some green groups have been reluctant to stand in full-bore opposition to other desert solar proposals given the seriousness of the climate crisis the projects are intended to address. But the problems with the Bechtel project would seem to undo any benefit the solar energy might offer. Aside from the water and wildlife concerns, it may be that the project would be built to no actual end. No utility has agreed to buy a single megawatt of the 358 the project would generate at peak production.

Though two transmission lines cross the Soda Mountain Solar site, one -- the Eldorado-Kramer line operated by the California Independent System Operator (CaISO) -- is at capacity already, and would need expensive upgrades to carry more power. The other line, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's Marketplace-Adelanto line, supplies power to municipal utilities in Southern California. None of those utilities have expressed public interest in buying Soda Mountain's power.

Given what they cast as the likely lack of compensating benefits from the project, groups ranging from NPCA to the national office of the Sierra Club have already gone on record as opposing the plant.

A public comment period on the project's Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) draws to a close March 3. Many in attendance at the meeting in Shoshone said they were awaiting comments by the National Park Service on the Draft EIS, which are rumored to be blunt. With the close of comments on the Draft EIS, the Bureau of Land Management will begin drafting the project's Final EIS, which is likely to take several months.

One thing the BLM will need to address in that new document is a recent San Bernardino County ordinance that would seem to make the Soda Mountain project illegal as designed, by restricting solar development within two miles of National Parks in unincorporated sections of the county.

Some independent activists in attendance at Shoshone aren't waiting to go through the usual EIS process, and have crafted a Whitehouse.gov petition urging President Obama to make a decision up front denying Bechtel the right of way the project will need in order to go forward.

Barring that petition's success, the BLM's approach to the project in crafting the final EIS will likely ride on what the National Park Service's comments on the draft EIS say. The scoping comments mentioned above focused on impacts to bighorn as well as groundwater depletion and the site's top-notch desert tortoise habitat.

Heated debate surrounds fate of Baker's thermometer

Built to attract motorists heading to and from Las Vegas, the world's tallest thermometer in Baker, Calif., seen here in January 2000, has become an eyesore. (Mark J. Terrill/The Associated Press)

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Las Vegas Review-Journal

BAKER, Calif. - A giant thermometer built to attract motorists headed to and from Las Vegas has become an eyesore, and residents in this Southern California desert town are divided about whether to take the landmark down.

Erected in 1991 and billed as the "World's Largest Thermometer," the 134-foot-high structure equipped with nearly 5,000 light bulbs was a Mojave Desert beacon. After changing ownership a few times, the current owner has kept the thermometer dark, saying the light bill was about $8,000 a month, according to the Los Angeles Times reports.

Le Hayes, general manager of the Baker Community Services District, says its demise is an embarrassment to the town. He plans to remove a picture of it from the welcome sign on Baker's water tower.

The tower's height was selected because of the 134-degree record set in nearby Death Valley in 1913. The thermometer was the brainchild of local businessman Willis Herron, who built the monolith next to his Bun Boy Restaurant.

Residents are unsure about the thermometer's future.

"I would kind of hate to see it go down because every time I see it I think of Willis, and Willis was a great guy," Hayes told the newspaper. "But if this guy isn't going to maintain it, it's like anything else that's been abandoned. He needs to take it down and get rid of it."

Baker, which considers itself the gateway to Death Valley and is known to travelers for its toasty temperatures, is located between Las Vegas and Los Angeles on Interstate 15. It is a frequent stopping point for travelers making the 280-mile trek, much of it across desert.

The town has been hit hard by the economic downturn. Two of its three motels are shut, and a chain link fence surrounds a Starbucks, which closed four years ago.

But Luis Ramallo, owner of Alien Fresh Jerky, one of the more popular stops on Baker's main road, believes the town can still attract tourists. He has plans to build a three-story, disc-shaped UFO hotel that would have 30-plus rooms. He believes the thermometer is no longer needed in Baker.

"I don't want them to fix the thermometer," Ramallo said. "I want them to tear it down. It's gone from good to bad to ugly."

Murder victim found in desert in 1971 identified

Beddie Walraven

Los Angeles Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survey airplane to scan desert details

Flights to collect seismic, groundwater data

By EUNICE LEE, staff writer
Desert Dispatch

In 1992, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists used this airplane, specially equipped with a magnetometer (white boom at rear of aircraft), to measure variations in the Earth's magnetic field. The USGS uses such aircraft to study geologic hazards, mineral resources, and environmental problems throughout the United States. (USGS)

If you happen to see an airplane flying lower than usual over areas of the High Desert in the coming month, don’t be alarmed, say officials from the United States Geological Survey.

The USGS will be conducting low-level flights in a survey project to gather data on seismic fault lines, magnetic fields, ground water flow and other geological measurements starting Saturday, according to Vicki Langenheim, a geophysicist for the USGS based in Menlo Park.

“We’re basically using it to establish a geological framework for the area,” said Langenheim.

For one month, a small aircraft will cruise between Fort Irwin and the Marine Corps Center in Twentynine Palms’ restricted airspace at speeds of 180 mph to 190 mph at 1,000 feet above ground, said Langenheim.

The flights will pass over areas near Barstow, Ludlow, Baker and the Mojave National Preserve, according to the USGS press release. The plane will make one to two trips per day for about five hours at a time during daylight hours, Langenheim noted.

Langenheim said the flights shouldn’t bother residents too much since the small two-engine airplane will fly at constant speeds and won’t be throttling up or making sudden loud noises.

A magnetometer, which looks like a six- to seven-foot-long pole, will be attached to the back end of the plane.

Langenheim said that collecting data on seismic fault lines will help scientists learn more about how earthquakes happen as well as locate groundwater in the desert.

“It’s kind of the building blocks for doing these kind of predictive studies,” she said.

The USGS recently finished a survey flight along the central coast of California that was scheduled to last two months, according to Spokeswoman Marisa Lubeck.

The last time a survey was conducted in the Mojave Desert area was in the early 1980s, according to Langenheim.

Inland desert power line projects unearthing possible murder mysteries

By DAVID DANELSKI
The Press-Enterprise

As energy officials begin surveying Southern California's deserts to prepare for solar power development, they are making some unexpected discoveries: human remains.

The bones of at least two people were found last month by biologists conducting wildlife surveys required for solar projects in the Mojave Desert, a sparsely populated region that covers thousands of square miles. The survey crews found one set of bones near Baker and another on the extreme edge of California near the border town of Primm, Nev.

Both finds are being investigated. The identities and causes of death have not been determined.

At least one of the biologists, far from being creeped out, said finding human remains is "interesting."

Alice Karl was surveying land May 18 just outside of Primm and west of Interstate 15 when a member of her crew came across the skull and other scattered bones, along with some clothing.

Karl, whose home base is Davis, was working for Southern California Edison, which intends to improve power lines to transmit electricity from solar plants planned in the area.

She said finding human bones isn't much different than finding the skeleton of a large animal.

"No, it is not creepy. ... We are biologists," Karl said. "It is a little unusual."

Not all that unusual, though.

Karl said she has found four sets of remains in her 31-year career. She figures at least one, discovered about eight years ago near Desert Center in Riverside County, had been murdered: The skull had a bullet-sized hole in it.

In the Primm case, Karl said the crew identified the bones' location and called authorities.

Four days earlier, another wildlife survey crew came across a human skeleton near Interstate 15, about 10 miles east of Baker.

On April 2, college geology students doing field work near Interstate 10 about 20 miles east of Desert Center found a human jawbone, triggering an investigation into a possible homicide, Riverside County sheriff's Sgt. Dean Spivacke said.

DNA TAKES TIME

So far, not much is known about the remains found in May, other than both were men, said David Van Norman, a deputy coroner investigator for the coroner's division of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.

It takes a state laboratory more than four months to analyze DNA from skeletal remains and seek matches with DNA records kept in a national database, Van Norman said. In California, state law requires close relatives of people missing more than 30 days to submit DNA samples for the database.

A skeleton found last year in an off-roading area south of Barstow was identified this week through DNA analysis as a missing San Diego County man. Officials are now working to track down his next-of-kin, Van Norman said.

Law enforcement officials said they expect more remains to turn up as energy companies prepare to build solar plants in the desert.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is processing 78 applications to put solar plants on more than 1,000 square miles of public land between Ridgecrest and El Centro. Each would require surveys to determine what sensitive plants and animals are in the project's path.

Having so many people on the ground finding remains will help solve murder and missing person cases, Van Norman said.

The sooner a body is found, the more evidence can be gathered from bones, such as DNA samples, clothing and personal effects, he said.

"I am just delighted by this," Van Norman said. "These remains are people who otherwise would not be found."

Wildlife biologists offer more than just additional sets of eyes scanning remote places.

They are trained scientists who can tell the difference between animal and human bones, Karl said. They walk specified grids. And they carry global positioning devices that can pinpoint the locations of what they find.

Karl said she's happy to help authorities.

"We could close a few cases," she said.

County Efforts Help Secure Funds for Increased Desert Fire Protection

by David Zook
Best Syndication News



Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt.
BARSTOW – San Bernardino County First District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt today announced success in an effort by San Bernardino and other Western counties to secure additional federal funds to offset the costs of providing services in areas with large federal land ownership and low property tax base.

The Supervisor said he intends to ask the Board of Supervisors to use these funds, which could amount to $5.6 million over four years, to build and staff a much-needed fire station along a remote portion of Interstate 40, along with other fire and emergency service improvements. Mitzelfelt has proposed that a new County fire station be built in the area between Ludlow and Amboy, where accident response times from the Barstow, Baker or Needles areas can be as long as 45 minutes to an hour.

The additional funds are a result of the President’s October 3rd signing of the financial institutions “bailout” legislation, which included an unprecedented allocation of full funding for the Department of Interior’s Payments In Lieu of Taxes program (PILT). PILT partially assists counties in funding local services in areas dominated by federal lands, like the Mojave Desert, but it has not been funded to the level authorized by statute since its inception in 1976.

Supervisor Mitzelfelt serves on the National Association of Counties (NACo) Public Lands Steering Committee. The committee has directed the advocacy efforts of NACo, who along with San Bernardino County's public lands consultant and Director of Legislative Affairs and other Western counties helped secure the additional dollars.

"I'm gratified to see our efforts over the past eight years to increase PILT funding helped elevate this issue to a high-profile position within a high-profile legislative package,” Mitzelfelt said.

This progress may be considered the most recent in a series of steps by Mitzelfelt to improve fire safety in outlying areas. Supervisor Mitzelfelt's efforts to plan a fire station to serve Interstate 40 in the area between Ludlow and Amboy first moved ahead on June 24 when Mitzelfelt secured Board of Supervisors approval for $300,000 to go toward design work for the station.

A second proposed station in Goffs would augment fire protection and rescue services to the eastern Mojave Desert and the transportation corridors of I-40, Highway 95 and Route 66 (National Trails Highway). The station would also provide the communities of Baker, Needles, Havasu Lake and Kelso with additional backup resources. The proposed Goffs station took its first step in August when the Board of Supervisors approved the sale of surplus land to the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District. Goffs is situated 30 miles west of Needles and 50 miles east of Amboy.

Supervisor Mitzelfelt credits increased safety along the interstate corridors between Nevada and California to the County’s fire station in Baker that opened in two years ago, along with increased staffing and equipment. These resulted from significant General Fund support. He also credits mutual aid with other agencies, including the Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow Fire Department, which responds to hundreds of calls off the base per year. Mitzelfelt recently recognized Base Fire Chief Robert Wyman for his department’s recent selection as the Best Large Fire Department in the Defense Department.

Finally, the Board of Supervisors on September 16 approved a proposal by Supervisor Mitzelfelt to donate a surplus fire engine to the Yermo Community Services District (CSD). The CSD, which provides fire protection services in Yermo and the surrounding area – including the County’s Calico Ghost Town Regional Park – was in need of an additional fire engine after recent breakdowns of other equipment.

'middle of no place'

Life of the San Bernardino County sheriff's resident deputy in Baker:

• One deputy per shift

• 5,000 square miles of the county's most isolated desert to cover

• Backup on major incidents can often be an hour or more away

The Lone Rangers

Greg Vojtko / The Press-Enterprise
San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department resident Deputy Corey LaFever surveys the area he covers along both sides of Interstate 15 between Baker and Nevada.


Resident lawmen cover a vast, desolate 5,000 square miles of San Bernardino County

By PAUL LAROCCO
The Press-Enterprise [Riverside, CA]

BAKER - Shrugs from behind the counter. No blood on the payphone, either.

There wasn't much to the investigation of a 911 hang-up call from the Baker Country Store, but then, when you're the only deputy in 5,000 square miles of remote desert, it's hard to be hot on anyone's trail.

"It was probably a half-hour ago?" asked San Bernardino County sheriff's Deputy Corey LaFever, trying to elicit a memory from the store's clerks.

Nothing. Outside, two payphones sat, seemingly unharmed.

"Unfortunately," he told the clerks, "I get here as soon as I can."

That could be the watchword for LaFever, who, like the colleague he alternates with, is the sole deputy responsible for the vast, isolated depths of San Bernardino County's High Desert.

The territory is about the size of Connecticut, stretching north of Barstow all the way to Nevada; from Fort Irwin east past the Mojave National Preserve.

It's not uncommon for LaFever to put 300 miles a day on his cruiser, visiting rural outposts like Nipton and Kelso before backtracking to his small substation at Baker's Community Services District building.

LaFever, a wiry 26-year-old with spiked hair and three cell phones on his belt -- one for his role as the area's deputy coroner -- accentuates the positive. There's less time chasing calls and more time to try drug interdictions on Interstate 15, or interacting with the fewer than 1,000 people living in the communities.

But then there's the other side. LaFever once went a week without an incident to respond to. The 911 hang-up that took him 30 minutes to investigate -- he was on a dirt road to Sandy Valley when it came in -- was the only call during a 10-hour shift.

"Obviously, there's a lot of time to think," he said on the drive from Kelso to Baker, 36 miles past an endless parade of Joshua trees.

When the peace is shattered, other issues can arise. Backup can be an hour away, "and that's if you're lucky," said sheriff's Lt. Don Riser, who supervises the resident deputies from the sheriff's station in Barstow, 60 miles south.

Not halfway through his two-year assignment, LaFever is optimistic. But Riser acknowledged it takes a special person to wake up in the middle of the night and drive hours for anything from fistfights to plane crashes, to merely checking a car with its headlights on.

"It's crazy what we do to these guys up there," Riser said. "They are in the middle of no place by themselves. And I mean no place."

That doesn't take into account what being in Baker does for your personal life.

"The biggest thing is the wife," Riser said. "How do you talk your lovely bride into working in the middle of hell?"

A Veteran Returns

For Kathy Andrews, it didn't take arm-twisting. Her husband, Bill, is the other resident deputy who rotates with LaFever. The couple lives in a modular home provided by the Sheriff's Department at no cost.

Sure, the closest supermarket is 60 miles away. And yes, the closest large mall is 90 miles. But aside from knowing a good night's sleep is always a call away from being ruined -- sometimes twice in the same night -- she said life in the farthest reaches of the county isn't bad.

You simply have to do your shopping, errands and social outings, like a trip to the movies, in one swoop.

"I like being where it's peaceful and quiet," Kathy Andrews said. "But everything has to be very well planned."

Unlike LaFever and his family, which includes a wife and two toddlers, the Andrewses have done this before. Bill Andrews had his first stint as Baker's resident deputy in the late 1980s, and if anyone thinks it's a lonely existence now, he said they should have seen then.

Cell phones were nonexistent. There were fewer California Highway Patrol officers in the vicinity to offer backup. Simply letting dispatchers know your location could require a 20-mile drive on dirt roads to make radio contact.

"It got pretty hairy," said the 54-year-old Andrews, an 18-year veteran of the Sheriff's Department who requested a return to Baker last year to make extra money, through on-call pay, for retirement. "But you just suck it up."

While Andrews knows how slow the beat can be, he also has a wealth of chaos-packed tales. One involved a robbery/homicide at a Baker gas station where the clerk gave his "dying breath" on the 911 phone call.

First Andrews had to guess if the assailants would flee north or south on I-15. He chose north, hoping the suspects didn't know side roads.

Andrews spotted their U-Haul van near Cima. With no backup, he kept his distance with his flashers off until a passing car shined its lights right on him, revealing his cruiser and spooking the suspects.

They threw a shotgun and money out the window before finally exiting near Whiskey Pete's Casino just over the Nevada state line. Then they jumped a fence and slipped into the casino, thinking they were unseen. But Andrews knew the security guard, and the two watched surveillance that followed the suspects' trail into the casino and down to a table where they sat to gamble.

Las Vegas Metropolitan police made the arrest.

"They had killed the clerk, in cold blood, because they didn't want any witnesses," Andrews recalled. "With no backup, I couldn't risk a traffic stop. It could have been an all-time shoot-out."

Old West Mentality

Incidents like that -- or a recent one where LaFever responded alone to a fatal plane crash and worked 18 hours as both sheriff's deputy and coroner -- prompts Riser to call the Baker resident deputies "Lone Rangers."

"If they were down in Rancho (Cucamonga) and needed backup, they'd have three guys in three minutes, 10 guys in six minutes and 15 guys in 12 minutes," Riser said. "But it can literally be an hour and a half. We just have to hope they survive the encounter."

Baker's deputies also have to be good communicators, Riser said.

LaFever quickly realized that. Calmly reasoning with a suspect is preferable to a confrontation when your backup help is nowhere in sight.

"You tend to learn verbal judo," he said as he traversed dusty, rocky roads on the way to Nipton.

"You've got to be a little more talkative, because if you've got to go hands-on with someone, you probably couldn't do it for 30 minutes."

To residents and shop owners in the tiny towns scattered throughout his turf, LaFever is the affable deputy who regularly stops to chat, and on this day, buy a Snickers candy bar he put next to his cruiser's air-conditioning vent to stop its melt.

At the Nipton Trading Post, LaFever greeted German tourists on their way to Lake Mead and made sure shop employee Linda Lou didn't have any crises.

"Nah, we're fine," Lou said. "You don't see the lights on at night in Nipton. We're all sleeping."

LaFever chuckled, then made his way to the town center: a dirt road directly behind the Trading Post lined with a handful of tiny wooden homes. He found a man able to give him air for his low tire, and all it cost was a minute's small talk about a well that the town is installing to bottle water for sale.

"I'm still waiting to try that Nipton water," LaFever said as he got back in his car and pulled away.

Two hours later, he was back in Baker. The final tally of stops was Nipton, Kelso, Cima, and Sandy Valley -- where he passed a ranch with a mannequin being hanged out front, the word "Litterer" on the post above its head.

"A lot of these towns have the mentality of the Old West: 'I'll handle my own business,' " LaFever said, noting that some residents don't report thefts because they figure his drive would be too far.

But he still travels the long roads, hundreds of miles at a time. He still pumps his own gas at the same stations he watches over, waves to children as he jogs along Baker Boulevard in his free time, and scouts out dunes for his personal hobby of taking his Jeep off-roading.

"There's a lot of experience I can get there that I can't get elsewhere," LaFever said. "But at the end of my two years, will I be ready to go? Sure, because if I'm not growing or learning, I'm standing still."

With that, LaFever points out the window of his patrol car. It's at a massive Sandy Valley hay farm known for its rancher who recently vanished without a trace.

He is surrounded by acres and acres of nothing on every end.

Man Killed In ATV Accident

National Park News
Mojave National Preserve

The park received a report of an ATV accident and an unresponsive victim before noon on Saturday, November 11th.

Responding rangers were directed by park visitors to an area about four miles east of Kelbaker Road on a natural gas pipeline road. The road proved impassable, so the rangers walked to the scene and were met by a park visitor who was transporting the victim – Randy Perkins, 56, of San Marcos, California – in his pickup.

Perkins’ son and riding companions had performed CPR on him, but without success.

Once the party reached a paved roadway, Perkins was transferred to an ambulance from Baker, California. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Investigation revealed that the four men were riding non-street legal ATV’s across the park on the gas line road. Perkins was fourth in line. When he failed to catch up with the first three riders, they backtracked until they found him underneath his overturned ATV on a rough section of the road.

The California Highway Patrol is investigating.

Far More Than Creatures of Habit

A biologist contends that individual tortoises have their own personalities. Such thinking is part of a controversial trend in animal behaviorism.


Emotional? Tortoise No. 29 is known unofficially as the "cad" and "fearless kingpin." He is more than 80 years old. SPENCER WEINER Los Angeles Times

By Louis Sahagun, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

BAKER, Calif. — Among the tortoises — out in their Mojave Desert kingdom of arroyos and burrows fringed with creosote — the hormones were running high.

Among them was an old male courting so many females that scientists dubbed him a "cad." An unusually cooperative female they called a "hussy." Then there was a bully who thrashed competitors, but was no stud, and a huge female who showed little interest in guys.

Recent dawn-to-dusk observations have led U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kristin Berry to the provocative conclusion that Gopherus agassizii is anything but a slow, dull homebody. Tortoises don't just demonstrate behavior, she says, they show personality.

"They are not the same inside their shells; they are individuals interacting in complex communities," she said. "And there may be behavior occurring in ways we haven't yet learned to observe, or interpret. How does a tortoise exhibit joy, or play, or express frustration?"

Asking such a question was once heresy in scientific circles. But Berry and a growing number of researchers are rejecting the decades-old notion that nonhuman creatures are instinctive automatons devoid of feelings.

Where even some skeptical scientists were comfortable acknowledging that dogs, dolphins and chimpanzees show signs of personality, this new field sees a spectrum of temperament and emotions among almost all animals: octopuses and lizards, crayfish and spiders. Even fruit flies.

"Ours is a holistic view," said Andy Sih, a biologist at UC Davis, which has become a major center of research into what Sih prefers to call "behavioral syndromes in animals."

"Some scientists study bird songs, or prey behavior, or mating behavior. We are saying they are all related," he said. "Individuals who are aggressive toward other males, for example, also tend to be more aggressive in their hunting styles, and more coercive rather than nice toward females."

"It makes things a lot more complicated," he added, "but if that is the reality, you have to account for that."

His colleague, biology professor Judith Stamps, was more blunt: "Instinct is out of favor."

"This field opens us up to thinking that there are other life forms as varied as we are," she said. "Anyone with a dog or a cat at home knows this. In some places, it is important to be shy. In other places, it pays to be aggressive. Animals that live in groups might work better with a combination: some attacking, some laying low, others finding food."

That kind of talk is nothing new. Even Charles Darwin argued that emotions exist in both humans and animals.

But in the 1930s, to avoid anthropomorphizing, scientists began focusing on how animals react to stimuli, rather than broader personality traits, such as a tendency among certain alpha male tortoises to fight all day long.

All that began to change in the 1990s, when it become acceptable again, as UC Berkeley biologist Samuel D. Gosling puts it, to think of personality traits in animals as a reflection of behaviors that persist over time and in different situations.

Gosling mapped the landscape of personality in captive spotted hyenas, for example, and discovered five basic dimensions: dominance, excitability, sociability, curiosity and tolerance of humans.

"If we are to take evolution seriously," he said, "it would be a disaster to think that personality suddenly emerged when humans departed from chimpanzees."

Even colonies of brainless sea anemones fight as organized armies with distinct castes of warriors, scouts and reproducers, according to a new study by David J. Ayre from the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Richard Grosberg from UC Davis.

"Some have better memories. Some are more aggressive. Some are wimps," Grosberg said. "So, do sea anemones have personalities? Sure enough."

Implications of animal behavior that goes a step beyond what can be quantified ruffles the feathers of biologists who insist that data be repeatable in controlled conditions.

Among the skeptics is Peter Marler, professor emeritus in behavioral neurobiology at UC Davis, whom younger colleagues respectfully refer to as the alpha male of traditional animal behavior research.

"It is very difficult to develop a means of measuring personality and temperament in animals in a repeatable way," Marler said.

"So when you start talking about animal friendliness or shyness without an objective index to measure it," he added, "you're heading into the wild blue yonder."

Yet, even Marler recalled a thought-provoking study of white-crown sparrows: "We had a male who burbled a soft rendition of a particular song while going to sleep. Of course, you don't know what was going on inside his head. But it was a song he sang to a specific female he had mated with five years earlier."

Was the sparrow reliving a happy liaison? It's impossible to say, and that's why some scientists remain skeptics.

Glen Stewart, a professor of zoology at Cal Poly Pomona and an expert herpetologist, draws a line on referring to tortoises, which have pea-sized brains, as studs and hussies.

"Kristin Berry is a solid scientist and one of the real authorities on desert tortoises," Stewart said, carefully weighing his words. "But when it comes to reptiles, it may be a little inappropriate to use terms like hussy and so forth, and more appropriate to say things more objectively."

But Marc Bekoff, a proponent of animal personality at the University of Colorado, found that the motions and postures of canines at play are part of a complex social language.

"Evolutionarily, it makes sense to have diversity in personality," Bekoff said. "And we clearly see that animals have distinct personalities, and their motivations to do different behaviors vary from day to day, moment to moment."

Added Bekoff: "You can't have a wolf pack of all alpha males."

In the Mojave, tortoises display such a wide variety of personalities during courting season that it is hard to fully understand them. Yet, in the battle of the tanks vs. tortoises at Ft. Irwin, about 30 miles northwest of Baker, their survival depends largely upon whether scientists can discern what makes a tortoise tick.

The military plans to expand the area used for battlefield exercises to accommodate a new generation of weapons and tactics. Those plans include relocating about 1,500 of the reptiles, which are protected by state and federal law, to new environs where they won't be squashed by military equipment.

In the largest relocation of reptiles ever attempted in California, the first wave of 300 tortoises is expected to be trucked out early next year to similar terrain several miles away.

"Social behavior is something we're seriously looking into in our translocation plans," said Mickey Quillman, natural and cultural resources manager at Ft. Irwin.

"We'll be taking tortoises from the same general vicinity — big ones and little ones — and moving them together in one fell swoop," he said. "Kristin Berry's studies suggest there's a good chance those tortoises have intermingled in the past, and we don't want to break up that behavior."

Tires crunched on gravel as Berry stopped her truck and gazed across a designated Army tortoise research site of arroyos, alluvial plains and hills buttressed by the Soda Mountains.

On this arid stage, Berry has outfitted 28 tortoises slated for removal with radio transmitters in order to learn all she can about what she called "one of the few populations left in California that is remote, stable and relatively intact."

With a wave of her hand, Berry said, "From that ridge all the way over to that one, a magnificent 10-pound alpha male tortoise we know as No. 43 reigns supreme."

"He's not good at mating — too eager. He just looks at a female and turns to mush," she said with a laugh. "But he's a heck of a fighter and patrols a huge territory. We've seen him make long, arduous journeys across a wash and halfway up a mountain just to beat up a smaller male."

Berry trudged to the top of a hill and used a hand-held antenna to pinpoint the locations of other tortoises.

On that day, all the action was below the surface in burrows connected by dusty paths tortoises have used for perhaps hundreds of years.

Peering into one of the caves with light reflected off a small mirror, she said, "There's a little guy in front and a big mama in back. It's a big female who prefers boys to big alpha males."

Female tortoises are choosy about their mates.

Take tortoise No. 41, a very old, reclusive and small female with osteoporosis. She has four boyfriends, none of them among the alpha males who occasionally visit her.

Tortoises spend most of their lives underground.

But when mating season reaches its height — August through early October — they lumber forth in the mid-morning and late afternoon to forage for wildflowers, and display a suite of courting and dominance behaviors based on constant fighting.

When male tortoises face off, they bite, claw and ram, and use a horn under the chin to flip a foe over on its back.

Then, in a humiliating coup de grace, the winner mounts the loser.

Their aggression is not surprising. Male tortoises in mating season are operating under the influence of extremely high levels of testosterone.

In the afternoon, Berry caught up with a tortoise she officially knows as No. 29, and unofficially as the "cad" and "fearless kingpin."

He probably hatched from an egg when Calvin Coolidge was president. As the big male was weighed and measured by an assistant — about 11 inches long and about 9 1/2 pounds — she gazed into its eyes and said, "There is so much we still don't know about these creatures."

"At a time when disease is spreading among them and there are plans for translocation, we're only beginning to study their social lives," she said. "Determining how complex these creatures actually are can help us understand better how to save them."

No. 29 stared back at her, eyes blinking.

Welcome back, Kelso

Restored depot proves popular

Chuck Mueller, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

KELSO - With renovation work barely complete, the 81-year-old Kelso Depot already is drawing throngs of visitors from around the world who want to step back in time.

The stately depot, surrounded by a mosaic of mountains, serves as the main visitors center and museum for the 1.6 million-acre Mojave National Preserve 60 miles east of Barstow.

It is attracting as many as 300 visitors on Sundays and about 100 on weekdays. And since 1998, the total number of visitors to the park has soared from 315,000 annually to 615,000.

"The building has been restored virtually as it was when the Union Pacific Railroad closed it in 1985," said James Woolsey, the preserve's chief of resource interpretation.

The exterior of the structure gleams in a sandy decor with turquoise trim as it once was. Inside walls are pale yellow with dark stained woodwork.

Kelso is on Kelbaker Road about 35 miles southeast of Baker. It can be reached from both Interstate 40 and Interstate 15.

International travelers like Keith and Christine Mitchell of Brighton, England, interrupted their trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to visit the preserve Thursday. They were happy they did.

"The desert is fantastic," said Keith, port supervisor with a British ferry service. "There's nothing like this back home except for the white Seven Sisters cliffs at Veachy Head."

As the couple entered the depot, Christine exclaimed, "This is really unique. It brings back a touch of the Old West."

Unique it is, indeed.

Interpretative exhibits on the first floor highlight the region's natural features, such as the Kelso dunes and Joshua Tree forest, and displays of wildlife like the desert tortoise. Native wildflowers and models of park creatures like the sidewinder rattlesnake and kangaroo rat are exhibited.

Visitors can press a button to hear a booming and moaning sound that radiates from the 700-foot-high dunes as thousands of grains of sand rub together.

Also on display is a vintage ticket and telegraph office, with the photocopy of a 1905 train register and hoops to allow depot crews to exchange messages with passing trains.

"We tried to keep the character of the structure, with much of the original building intact and lovingly restored," Woolsey said.

He and Park Ranger Linda Slater searched far afield for authentic artifacts, century-old photographs and original furnishings.

"We talked to desert oldtimers and went to eBay, other railroad museums and the Union Pacific," Woolsey said.

A painting of a buffalo that once hung on the wall over the Beanery, the depot's U-shaped lunch counter was found and brought back to Kelso.

The $5 million renovation project, funded by Congress, began in 2002 after three years of planning and research, Slater said.

"We got a lot of cooperation from many people - oldtimers, ranchers, railroaders, miners and Indian tribes - in putting the exhibits together," she said. "We're all proud of our achievement. It took a lot of dedicated effort."

Larry Whalon, the preserve's acting superintendent, said Kelso Depot provides a close look at the history and lifestyle of the region between 1920 and 1980.

"What makes this building special is its authenticity," he said. "It's important to tell about Mojave National Preserve and its people. The exhibits here do that, and that's why they are so relevant."

The stories of homesteaders and ranchers are told in the recorded voices of people like Cima Postmaster Irene Ausmus, store owner Theo Packard and rancher Tim Overson.

And the voice of Curtis Howe Springer, a radio evangelist who praised healing salts mined at Zzyzx, tells visitors about the heyday of the resort off I-15 near Baker.

Widespread response to Springer's radio broadcasts from Zzyzx between 1944 and 1974 turned Baker into California's busiest post office.

The depot housed up to 40 railroad workers from 1924 to 1985, Woolsey said. For recreation, they played billiards and card games in the basement.

Marine Staff Sgt. Joe Ramirez paused Thursday to scan the volumes in the depot's bookstore.

"I'm a history buff, and I enjoy stopping here while driving to the base at Twentynine Palms," he said. "I'm pleased that the Park Service has restored this landmark for posterity."

Within a year, visitors to Kelso Depot can expect to munch on peanut-butter cookies and apple pies like those featured a half-century ago at the Beanery.

Said Slater, "We're doing our best to bring back the depot's rich past for everyone to share and enjoy."

Historian Lowe, member of pioneer family, dies

Celesta Lowe was not only a descendant of a pioneering Nevada family, she lived Nevada history and chronicled what she learned of growing up in Death Valley, Calif., for periodicals including "Desert Magazine" and "Old West."

As a child, Lowe experienced the hardships of being raised in a Western desert town, residing for a while in Shoshone, Calif., in a house made of tent canvas and stacks of sand-filled, five-gallon gasoline cans.

Friends say Lowe often regaled them with tales of the Old West that she heard from her grandparents, pioneers Celestia Adelaide "Ma" Fairbanks and Ralph Jacobus "Dad" Fairbanks, for whom Fairbanks Springs in Nye County is named.

Celesta Adelaide Lowe, the first director of the UNLV library's Special Collections and an inductee into the Nevada Women's History Project Roll of Honor, died Thursday in Henderson. She was 87.

Services for the Las Vegas resident of nearly 70 years will be at 10 a.m. Wednesday at Bunkers Mortuary.

"What Celesta knew was very broad and deep, and she used that information to guide her research interests," said Southern Nevada historian Liz Warren of Goodsprings.

"She was a primary source. She experienced so much in the recorded history of Southern Nevada. But not only did she live it, she would find out more about it and give readers as accurate and as true a picture as she could."

Lowe wrote of diverse subjects ranging from 19th century Mormon silk worm raising in homes to noted 20th century Western character, prospector and showman Frank "Death Valley Scotty" Scott, who had attended her wedding.

Some of Lowe's work has been featured as part of the The Pioneering Women of Death Valley exhibit at the Shoshone Museum, including a display of research materials for her biography of female Western author B.M. Bower.

Born Celesta Lisle, Lowe lived for a while on a Fernley ranch. Her grandfather had the contract for grading the railroad bed from Milford, Utah, to Las Vegas. Her father, John Quincy "Jack" Lisle, was a prospector and copper miner. Her late brother, Ralph Fairbanks Lisle, was a Nye County commissioner.

As a child, Celesta also lived in Baker and Tecopa, Calif. She graduated from El Monte (Calif.) High School in 1934.

A year later she married David Walker "Deke" Lowe, a station agent for the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad. The couple, in the 1940s, owned and operated the Goodsprings Hotel. He preceded her in death.

In the 1950s, Lowe attended Nevada Southern University, now UNLV, and took home economics classes, before becoming secretary to the school's librarian, James Dickinson. Lowe became the first Special Collections librarian when the department was created in 1967, said UNLV manuscripts librarian Su Kim Chung.

In addition to writing for magazines, Lowe wrote a column for seven years in the Sunday supplement of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Lowe was a charter member of the Las Vegas chapter of the National League of Pen Women and a founding member of the Southern Nevada Historical Society.

She is survived by four children, David Lowe of Sandy Valley, Lisle Lowe of Amargosa Valley, Janet Lowe of Santa Fe, N.M., and Carlsbad, Calif., and Dale Lowe of Las Vegas; nine grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.

Mojave milestones

Braving the perils of the historic road -- and nearly succeeding.

By Susan Spano, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

A bullet-riddled street sign on Old Mojave Road marks a turn near the Piute Range. (Robert Gauthier / LAT)

Baker, Calif. — Some people love the desert. They love it at 110 degrees with the AC off. They love rusted junk, abandoned mines, sand traps, rattlesnakes, old bones and dry washes. You're pretty sure they're touched until you go there with them, as I did in October with my brother, John.

He'd been wanting to drive the 130-mile Old Mojave Road, a dirt, rock and sand path across Mojave National Preserve that passes landscapes you don't get to see on paved roads. It was the historic route from the Colorado River to Barstow for Native Americans, explorers, stagecoach drivers and the Army.

When the railroad laid tracks to the south, the old road was all but forgotten until Dennis G. Casebier, a Navy physicist from Corona with a passion for desert history, decided it should be re-opened for recreation.

In the early 1980s, the Friends of the Mojave Road, founded by Casebier, mapped, repaired and erected stone cairns along the desert route. But with the creation of the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve in 1994, the group's custodial role diminished.

Now Casebier has moved on to tending a historic schoolhouse museum in the Mojave Desert hamlet of Goffs and collecting oral histories from people who once lived in the East Mojave Desert. But he still sometimes checks the mailbox his group installed near Kelbaker Road, where people record their passage over the old road. Casebier estimates that several thousand make the trip annually.

One tends to think all deserts are the same, places that get only a scant amount of rain. But in North America there are four kinds: the Great Basin, Sonoran, Chihuahuan and relatively small Mojave, all in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.

Deer keep their distance at the Mid Hills Campground in the Mojave National Preserve. (Robert Gauthier / LAT)

Sailing the desert in an SUV

The Mojave National Preserve has some of the tallest sand dunes and thickest Joshua tree forests on the continent and, better still, a combination of elements — lava cones, dry lake beds, basin and range topography that make it a kind of desert primer.

If a desert has something to teach, I want to learn. Then too, I like tagging along with John on hiking and backcountry driving trips. He has the skills and gear, although when camping he would eat protein bars for breakfast, lunch and dinner if I didn't bring along some real food. For protection in the wilderness, he takes my grandfather's World War I saber, about as deadly as a papier-mâché prop in an operetta. He pores over maps before setting out and then basically ignores them in order, I think, to give expeditions a sense of discovery and adventure.

John told me this would be a very rough trip — two days of driving and one night of camping — and that I better not wimp out, the way I did a few years ago when I made him turn back on the appallingly rugged road that leads to the Maze District of Utah's Canyonlands National Park.

I rented a beige Ford Expedition with four-wheel drive and left a day ahead of John so I could see a few sights, including Kelso Depot. This desert oasis at Kelbaker and Kelso-Cima roads (two of the paved arteries that cross the preserve) was born with the completion of the railroad between Salt Lake City and L.A. in 1906, when there was considerable mining in the area.

But passenger trains began bypassing the little settlement after World War II. The handsome early '20s Spanish Revival train station, with its restaurant and regal stand of palm trees, was left to molder.

Now the National Park Service is in the final stages of renovating the building as an interpretive center and museum, scheduled to open this summer. It's a good rest stop between visits to the Cinder Cone Lava Beds about 15 miles north and Kelso Dunes to the south.

Then I headed up Kelso-Cima Road, which rounds the south side of gently sloping, astonishingly symmetrical Cima Dome, a 75-square-mile area of volcanic uplift in the wild heart of the preserve. The two-lane highway, often used as a shortcut between Palm Springs and Las Vegas, is straight and flat, paralleling railroad tracks before branching off across the Ivanpah Valley.

The sun was setting in a pink puddle by the time I reached Nipton, on the northeast side of the preserve, with its bushy tamarisks, pint-sized hotel and general store. I chatted with the clerk and drank a soda before heading for the Avi Resort & Casino, on the Colorado River about midway between Needles, Calif., and Laughlin, Nev.

I am not much of a gambler and had never been to the Needles-Laughlin area, where the tamed Colorado River is a bathtub favored by motor boaters and water skiers. But the eastern portal of the Old Mojave Road is near the Avi, which is owned by the Mojave Indians who settled the river's flood plain and helped blaze the trail that became the road.

They led Spanish explorer Father Francisco Garcés across the desert in 1776 and did the same for the American trapper Jedediah Strong Smith in 1826. But eventually, relations turned hostile between newly arriving white people and the Indians. As a result, in the 1860s the U.S. government built a chain of forts along the old desert trail, which by then had become a rump-blistering wagon road carrying supplies and mail.

I doubt the people at the Avi, propped at slot machines with plastic cups full of quarters, were thinking about history. Together with the casino's garish lights and the gorging at the Native Harvest Buffet, they vaguely depressed me, so I went to my room — big, clean, simply furnished, not bad for about $25 on a weeknight — and went to sleep, anticipating a rendezvous the next morning with John, who wasn't able to leave L.A. until after work.

I banged on his door at 9 a.m. and had a map spread out on a table in Avi's Feathers Café when he showed up for breakfast. Our plan was to drive half of the road that day, camp overnight and finish the next day, coming out at Afton Canyon just south of I-15 between Barstow and Baker. Then we would head back to the Avi, where we were leaving John's car, for a dip in the pool, another go at the buffet and beds with clean sheets.

But we were in no hurry, because two days of driving would easily get us over the road, with time to stop and explore such features as Soda Dry Lake on the west side of the preserve. After rainy weather, it becomes a vast, tire-swamping mud flat. When John saw the Expedition, he said it was probably too heavy to make it across the playa, but he cheered up when I told him it was insured for every conceivable mishap.

We packed the water, food and gear John had brought, spent a cool $50 filling the gas tank and set out. The unmarked turn-off west across the desert was about three miles north of the Avi; we found it with the help of Casebier's "Mojave Road Guide," annotated mile by mile. John made me manage the wheel at the beginning, to prove I could do it. Like most novice dirt-road drivers, I tended to take my foot off the gas when we came to sand. But my brother kept saying, "Follow the ruts. Keep going. Don't stop."

Then he cracked open a liter of Coke and yelled out the window, "No problem anyway! We're fully insured!"

That day was a pure desert joy from start to finish. The temperature was about 80 degrees when we left, and the sky was mounded with clouds. A lop-eared jackrabbit jumped out of a nest of creosote, birds tittered, the air smelled like a spice rack.

And, suddenly, everything sharpened up, as it will in the desert, from the yellow rabbitbrush to the brittle Piute Mountains, as if I'd just had Lasik surgery.

About 23 miles west of the Colorado River (using Casebier's distance calculations), we reached Ft. Piute, one of the military redoubts built on the road in the 1860s. It sits in the shadow of Jedediah Smith Butte, above dependable Piute Creek, and once harbored 18 enlisted men of Company D of the 9th U.S. Infantry.

John went looking for Native American petroglyphs in the creek bed while I ate a packaged cheese-and-cold-cut snack on the knee-high stone walls that are the remnants of the fort. Just before we relaunched our Old Mojave Road sortie, he did a saber dance in front of the Expedition with Grandpa's sword.

The setting sun colors the Marl Mountains in the central section of the Mojave National Preserve, about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles.(Robert Gauthier / LAT)

Mysterious turnoffs

With John driving, we climbed 3,412-foot Piute Pass, infamously rough in the old wagon road days. The view west swoops over the Lanfair Valley, where homesteaders tried to make the Mojave bloom in the early 20th century, to range upon range of desert mountains, separated by basins, in a Western geography lesson.

From there, we tooled across the valley, so thick with Joshua trees you would think they had been propagated. Here and there we saw old stuff scattered over the desert, including a wrecked school bus that made me think of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine."

There were also mysterious turnoffs that John said could lead to crystal methamphetamine labs. He likes to put me on edge. When I asked if we needed gasoline, he routinely said we were about to run out.

We crossed paved Ivanpah Road at Casebier mile mark 41.7 and caught graded Cedar Canyon Road west to avoid a more treacherous stretch of the Old Mojave Road along Watson Wash. Eventually, we reached Government Holes, where one of the last gunfights in the West took place in 1925. It's a pretty place in the Round Valley, with a windmill and abandoned corral, and we considered making camp. But it was starting to get chilly and there were no windbreaks, so we turned south on Black Canyon Road, heading for Mid Hills Campground in aromatic forests of pinyon pine and juniper.

There we claimed site No. 25, with the preserve's best view of Cima Dome. A fire pit was stocked with wood, left by some friendly earlier camper, and there was a nice flat place for my tent. John set up his cot outside so he could see the stars. We had steak and apples for dinner, talked for a while and then went to sleep.

I slept like a sunken ship and awakened in time for sunrise over Cima Dome.

Another day in the desert ensued, not quite as good as the last. We lost our way, making an unintended detour north toward Death Valley Mine on a track that kept getting fainter and fainter. Finally, we reached the paved Kelso-Cima Road, where there's a little convenience store and post office run by tiny, wizened Irene Ausmus, who came to the Mojave with her husband in the 1960s and refused to sell out when the National Park Service arrived.

It wasn't hard to find the Old Mojave Road again, with Casebier's help. In fact, the road's rutted route can be seen for miles as it pushes west across Kelso Wash and rounds the Beale Mountains, named for explorer Edward F. Beale, who tried to introduce camels to the Mojave in 1857 but had to abandon the experiment because they frightened the horses.

The views north to Cima Dome and south to Kelso Dunes only got better. But just east of Marl Springs, John realized we had a flat, necessitating an hour of hot, dirty work mounting the humongous spare. There was some cursing, after which we decided to get to Kelbaker Road, about 20 miles west, as soon as possible, so we could drive to the town of Baker on I-15.

With the rigors of Soda Dry Lake ahead, it seemed prudent to get the blown tire fixed so we'd have a spare.

In Baker, we stopped at the Park Service information office, where a ranger gave us more bad news. Autumn rains had made passage over the playa dicey. Several vehicles had gotten stuck there recently, languishing for days awaiting rescue as the salt crust of the dry lake corroded their undercarriages.

John wanted to risk it, but the day was more than half gone. Over a lunch of hummus, fried calamari and gyros at the Mad Greek restaurant, I persuaded him to abort and head back to the Avi. So we can't say we drove the whole road. Our names don't appear in the record book at the Old Mojave Road mailbox, which we bypassed in our rush to Baker.

But John plans to return and conquer the playa. Maybe I'll go with him. I'm starting to understand why he loves the desert. Besides, I'd like to see him brandishing Grandpa's saber again.


Rocking and rolling across the Mojave

GETTING THERE:

Mojave National Preserve is about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. From L.A., take Interstate 15 northeast to Baker and turn south on Kelbaker Road, or take Interstate 40 east from Barstow and turn north on Kelbaker Road, to reach Kelso Depot, a major historical site in the preserve. The eastern portal of the Old Mojave Road is on Needles Highway about halfway between Needles, Calif., and Laughlin, Nev.

Spring and fall are the best seasons to drive the Old Mojave Road. Consult the Mojave National Preserve or "Mojave Road Guide," by Dennis G. Casebier (Tales of the Mojave Road Publishing Co., Essex, Calif.), for information on how to prepare for the trip.

WHERE TO STAY:

Two campgrounds in Mojave National Preserve, Mid Hills and Hole-in-the-Wall, have drinking water and toilet facilities. Sites are $12 per night. Roadside car camping is also permitted, with restrictions.

Avi Resort & Casino, P.O. Box 77011, 10000 Aha Macav Parkway, Laughlin, NV 89029; (800) 284-2946, http://www.avicasino.com/. This complex on the west bank of the Colorado River has rooms in a new tower or an older poolside building. Doubles start at $19 Sundays to Thursdays, $49 on weekends.

Hotel Nipton B&B, 107355 Nipton Road, HCR-1, Box 357, Nipton, CA 92364; (760) 856-2335, http://www.nipton.com/. This homey desert enclave is on the northeast side of the preserve. It has a general store and five guest rooms with shared baths. Doubles are $69.50, including breakfast.

WHERE TO EAT:

Laughlin and Needles have a range of casino and fast-food restaurants. But if you're driving through Baker on I-15, don't miss the Mad Greek, (760) 733-4354, for serendipitous gyros, souvlaki and fried calamari in the desert. Lunch for two about $20.

TO LEARN MORE:

Mojave National Preserve Headquarters, 222 E. Main St., Barstow, CA 92311; (760) 255-8801, http://www.nps.gov/moja, or the NPS Baker Information Center, 72157 Baker Blvd., Baker, CA 92309; (760) 733-4040.

Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Assn., Goff's Schoolhouse, 37198 Lanfair Road G-15, Essex, CA 92332; (760) 733-4482, http://www.mdhca.org/.