Mountains of problems for travelers

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HISTORY

It wasn't until well into the 20th century that engineers finally made the journey between Los Angeles and Bakersfield fairly easy and safe.

By Cecilia Rasmussen, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

Whether they've taken the Ridge Route, Highway 99 and Newhall Pass or Interstate 5, for more than 150 years travelers making their way between Los Angeles and Bakersfield through the San Gabriel and Tehachapi mountains have found the route a pain in the neck.

The current 40-mile stretch of the Golden State Freeway, which includes the Grapevine, is plenty steep and winding, but drivers should know that it is a big improvement on its predecessors.

It is the fourth in a series of highways cut through the rugged mountains. Entrepreneurs forged the first route, in 1854, by digging a 60-foot-deep, 240-foot-long gash on the eastern edge of the Santa Susana Mountains called the Newhall Pass, where the current Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways join.

Beale's Cut, as it came to be called, created a narrow, steep passage for horses, stagecoaches and foot traffic, and is credited with spurring the development of Los Angeles.

But the first automobile to cross the mountains, in 1902, had to travel upward in reverse to keep gasoline flowing to the engine -- and the cut's 30% grade was too steep for early cars.

Beale's Cut can still be found between Sierra Highway and the Antelope Valley Freeway, south of Clampitt Road. It was all but abandoned in 1910 when the 435-foot-long Newhall Tunnel was dug about a quarter of a mile west, with an incline of only about 7%.

Still, even the tunnel didn't solve the problem. It was too narrow and traffic jammed up at one end. Meanwhile, after voters in 1910 approved an $18-million state highway bond issue, California's engineers began planning a shorter, more direct route over the mountains, one that would save travelers 58 miles.

The 48-mile Ridge Route opened in 1915 at Castaic Junction, about five miles northwest of the Newhall Pass. It had 697 curves.

The Ridge Route was considered a major feat of highway engineering -- the first modern highway directly linking Los Angeles with the San Joaquin Valley -- and it helped link Northern and Southern California.

Horse-drawn graders had carved out the 20-foot-wide dirt road that zigzagged along the ridge tops so that it resembled a giant grapevine. But the 6.5-mile "Grapevine" segment of the route, from Fort Tejon to the San Joaquin Valley, had already been so named for a different reason by Spanish Lt. Francisco Ruiz, who, after hacking his way through thick patches of Cimarron grapevines in 1806, called the area Cañon de las Uvas, or Grapevine Canyon.

In 1915, the Automobile Club of Southern California called the Ridge Route "the last word in scientific highway building." But four years later, about the time the paving was completed, the club wrote that because of the route's "tortuous" curves, steep grades and sharp drop-offs, it was "potentially one of the most dangerous in the world."

A maximum speed limit of 15 mph was supposed to provide safety. But scores of drivers ignored the limit and their cars tumbled into the canyons below. For those who made the trip safely, the Sandberg Hotel, built by Norwegian-born rancher Harald Sandberg, was a welcome sight near the top.

In 1921, the fancy Lebec Hotel opened in Kern County, about five miles north of the Sandberg, with 300 registered guests. It became a famed hideaway for such celebrities as Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Clara Bow, Buster Keaton and Bugsy Siegel.

Charles Lindbergh landed his plane in a wheat field near the Lebec Hotel in 1929 and spent time there experimenting with flying a glider. His wife, Anne, was quite fond of the hotel's chocolate malts, according to Harrison Scott, author of "Ridge Route: The Road That United California."

The hotel -- and the town that grew up around it -- got its name from a carving in the trunk of a massive oak: "Peter le Beck Killed by a Bear Oct. 17 1837."

Depression-era migrants flocking to California's fields in overloaded jalopies thought of the trip over the mountains as a route to a better life.

In "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck describes the Joad family's brutal trek, one taken by many of those Great Plains refugees known as Okies.

Steinbeck described the moment when the Joads' car crested the top of a mountain road, and they saw the Central Valley:

"Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, 'Jesus Christ! Look!' he said. The vineyards, the orchards, the great flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses."

He could have been talking about the view from the Ridge Route, or the one from Highway 99, which opened in 1933. Highway 99, or the Ridge Alternate, was significantly shorter and much less curvy, though still steep and treacherous.

It cut the eight-hour Ridge Route drive in half time-wise, but still was the site of many a breakdown and much discomfort.

"In 1954, I drove my 1931 Willys Roadster up the Castaic Grade and on through the more modern Ridge Route [Highway 99], much of which is now covered with Pyramid Lake," retired veterinarian Charles Jenner of Los Alamitos said in a recent e-mail. "That was a tough drive as the Willys kept overheating." It took him two days to get from Los Angeles to Davis, he said.

In 1970, today's eight-lane, 40-mile section of Interstate 5 was completed.

Few people remembered the old roads that had gone before -- at least until Scott came along.

In 1991, the retired Torrance phone company engineer decided to drive the old Ridge Route for the first time since he was a teenager. He soon launched a one-man crusade to get a 17.6-mile stretch through U.S. Forest Service property from Castaic to Gorman onto the National Register of Historic Places. He succeeded in 1997. He also published his own history of the road.

"Only foundations, walls and steps are left from places like the Tumble Inn and Sandberg Inn," Scott said in a recent interview. The Lebec Hotel, he said, burned down in 1971.

Scott and a nonprofit group that he founded, the Ridge Route Preservation Organization, are working to maintain the roadway, which he describes as "poor and decaying." The group holds monthly work parties, helping the Forest Service clean drains full of dirt and debris.

The volunteers have put up nearly a dozen stone monuments paying tribute to area pioneers and colorful sites.

Scott is working to gain federal Scenic Byway status for the Ridge Route. It would be, he said, "just another notch on the gun belt that would allow our organization to build a museum and parking areas along the route."

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."