Farewell to the Archaeological Survey Foundation

The End of the Archaeological Survey Association

By Anne Q. Stoll, President and Executive Director

LaMonk Collection

“The next generation” – a quick look through a recent SCA newsletter suggests this is a hot topic for many of us. The future was certainly on our minds when we board members voted this past April to disband the Archaeological Survey Association of Southern California, Inc. or ASA, as it was fondly known, after 61 years of operation.

Many of you may remember the ASA – some of you are former members. This organization, recognized as the oldest avocational archaeological society in California, covered a lot of ground in the early days. The name often shows up in old reports.

The Archaeological Survey Association was started back in January 1947 at a meeting in the Southwest Museum in Highland Park, near Los Angeles. Mark R. Harrington, Edwin F. Walker, Frederick W. Hodge, and Howard A. Edwards, were worried about the rate at which archaeological sites were being destroyed by Southern California’s post-war development boom. If that first meeting was anything like the one I was at many years later that started the Coachella Valley Archaeological Society, these guys were sitting around talking, eating pizza and drinking beer after spending the day in the field.

At that meeting in 1947 it was resolved to create the ASA to conduct a complete archaeological reconnaissance of California. The vision – and the naïveté – of such a goal are hard to grasp today, but such was the bravado of the times. These men proposed to form a team of professionals from local universities and museums who would use crews of volunteer amateurs to do the work. They drafted a very persuasive letter which they sent out to everyone they knew (and M. R. Harrington knew everybody). The Southwest Museum became the first sponsor but USC, UCLA and the LA County Museum of Natural History participated too. George Brainerd at UCLA served as the first president, followed by Robert Ariss of LACMNH, and then Gordon Hewes at UC Berkeley. Early field leaders included Stuart Peck, Freddie Curtis, Charles Rozaire, Edwin Walker, William Wallace, Ruth DeEtte Simpson (known as “Dee”), and Ben E. McCown.

As we all know, it isn’t hard to recruit volunteers to help dig. ASA was soon a big success with well over 200 enthusiastic members. Between 1947 and 1963, ASA volunteers were at work in the field somewhere between Bakersfield and San Diego nearly every weekend, surveying, scouting, photographing, or digging. Some of the bigger excavations were at Malaga Cove, Arroyo Sequit, Temeku, Phillips Ranch, and Burro Flats. The tough part was getting site maps made, artifacts catalogued and analyzed, and reports written but in the beginning, ASA’s publication record was pretty good, especially during the 16 Southwest Museum years.

In 1963, the ASA moved to the San Bernardino County Museum in Bloomington and the organization changed. The group’s focus turned from coastal sites to the Mojave Desert, and several more big projects were undertaken in Kern, Inyo, and San Bernardino counties. Then followed a few more moves and many changes but somehow, through the efforts of many devoted volunteers, the ASA hung on. Through the 1970s, ASA worked in Black Canyon, near Barstow, surveying and excavating. Much of this project was recorded by ASA photographer Charley Howe, who published the summary report in 1980. Through the end of the 1980s, there were more weekend surveys in the East Mojave. The Mud Springs Lab nights in LaVerne continued through the 1990s, but the group was clearly losing steam. There were just enough members left in 1997 to make the 50th anniversary party worth having. The invitations and catering almost broke the bank, however. When we decided to throw in the towel at our final meeting on October 26, 2002, a grand total of 19 people attended. The vote to disband the ASA was unanimous.

And then – surprise! The ASA hit the lottery. Seriously. Who knew Dee Simpson was worth that much money!? She lived alone in a funky trailer with a half dozen cats in Calimesa. Who knew those stock certificates and bank account books in her kitchen drawers were real? Dee Simpson passed away on January 19, 2000 and when the dust settled three years later, the ASA found she had bequeathed us one-eighth of her considerable estate.

What to do? There was no shortage of ideas. At last, this was ASA’s big chance to track down our scattered collections, find the old field notes, and write up the old reports. We would give grants and scholarships. We would clean up all the old messes and deal with the skeletons in the closet. The new streamlined five-member board voted to stash the money in an investment account and look for good professional advice. Investment managers, lawyers, accountants, appraisers, web-designers – we hired them all.

We floundered at first. We paid good money for bad legal advice, and spent the better part of the next two years working with another lawyer to unravel the mess with the State and the IRS. Because we no longer had dues-paying members or took public funds, we became by default a private charitable foundation. In 2004 we turned the corner. We officially renamed ourselves the Archaeological Survey Foundation (ASF) and began to enjoy some success. We supported the publication of several long-overdue reports and gave out a number of research grants. Ben McCown’s report of years of survey work at Lake LeConte was finally published. Russ Kaldenberg’s Ayers Rock report went to the printer. Thanks to SRI’s support, we consolidated our collections in Redlands. We subsidized CSUSB students attending archaeology field school in the San Bernardino Mountains. We moved slowly but we were doing good things.

Then the accountants delivered some bad news (non-profits beware!). There are new definitions of what is a “taxable expenditure” for a private charitable foundation. Thanks to the lawbreakers who scammed the IRS by setting up bogus foundations and giving themselves grants, the government changed the rules. No more simple cash grants to private individuals or deserving students. Unless you give to a non-profit, you have to ask the IRS permission BEFORE you give away the money, the recipient needs to prove their qualifications, you have to follow up on how the grant is spent and if misspent, you must try to retrieve the money, you must submit reports to the IRS in a timely fashion for each grant, etc. etc. See Internal Revenue Code 4945 for the rest of it.

The paperwork seemed onerous and was the last thing the ASF needed. We were already starting to bog down with competing demands for our time and too many boxes of orphaned artifacts. It was time to molt and move on.

In the end, the decision was surprisingly easy to make. We voted unanimously to give our entire 119-piece LaMonk art collection and almost all our money -- $340,000 -- to the Foundation for CSUSB to benefit their traditionally underrepresented student population here in the Inland Empire. With the wave of the pen, we created the ASA – Southern California Archaeology Endowment to ensure that the funds will be used exclusively for the benefit of the Cal State San Bernardino Anthropology Department in support of their undergraduate program in archaeology and cultural resource management. It’s the largest cash gift the CSUSB College of Social and Behavioral Sciences has ever received. Everyone is happy -- our legacy will serve the future.

In shutting down the organization, we’ve had the fun of giving two $10,000 distributions to worthy local non-profits, the first to the San Bernardino County Museum Association for the renovation of the Anthropology curation facility. The SBCM has graciously given a home to our archives, business papers and artifacts. The second gift went with the Charley Howe photos to the CSUSB Library, Special Collections, to properly curate the collection and get it online.

So we close the book on the ASA/ASF with a smile. Sixty-one years is a long run for any volunteer group. We hope other avocational societies who are struggling with shrinking membership rolls will consider following our lead and will plan for the needs of the next generation of California archaeologists.

A dozen years of desert protection

Chuck Mueller, Staff Writer

Speeding motorists bent on reaching Las Vegas or Laughlin Nev., as rapidly as possible view the eastern Mojave Desert as a vast wasteland as they zip along Interstate 15 or Interstate 40.

Along the way, they pass endless clusters of creosote bushes, some of nature's oldest plants, growing in the 1.6 million-acre Mojave National Preserve.

"A lot of people don't know what's out here," said Dennis Schramm, superintendent of the vast desert preserve, which marked its 12th anniversary Tuesday. "It contains over 900 species of plants, 206 species of birds, 47 species of animals and 36 species of reptiles."

And it also is resplendent with massive sand dunes, desolate mountain peaks, stands of Joshua trees, Indian wall paintings called petrogylphs, herds of bighorn sheep and the historic Mojave wagon road.

Alarmed by the relentless expansion of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, environmental visionaries mapped out strategy in the 1970s to counter the threat that urban growth posed for the Southern California desert.

In the 1980s, skirmishes between environmentalists and mining, ranching and off-road vehicle interests foreshadowed legislative battles. In a move to placate both sides, a huge expanse of the eastern desert was set aside in 1980 as the East Mojave National Scenic Area, the first designation of its kind.

By the early 1990s, a proposal to protect the desert slowly began to move through congressional committees, culminating in the passage of the California Desert Protection Act on Oct. 31, 1994.

The act, which preserved 7.7 million acres of scenic wildlands, established the Mojave National Preserve, elevated the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments to national- park status and created 69 new wilderness areas.

"The preserve protects the largest piece of the Mojave Desert for posterity," Schramm said. "Whatever happens in Southern California in 100 years, the preserve will still be here."

Among the preserve's most-prized historic structures, the Kelso depot was restored and opened as a visitors' center. The vintage train station, opened by the Union Pacific Railroad in 1924 and closed in 1985, serves as a window into an era when the railroad opened the West.

There was talk of demolishing the structure after it was shut down, but concerned citizens rallied to save it and Congress allocated $5.5 million to restore it, Schramm said.

The National Park Service also has restored historic Fort Piute, which served as a military outpost in the 1860s along the old Mojave Road to protect the U.S. mail and wagon trains.

"Its walls were crumbling, but now we've stabilized the remaining walls," said Park Ranger Linda Slater.

The Park Service also is working with a consortium of California state universities to stabilize older buildings at Zzyzx, near Baker, which is run by universities as a desert studies center. It celebrated its 30th anniversary last month.

Since the preserve was created a decade ago, the National Park Service has reduced mining claims from 9,000 to a few hundred.

"And no active mining is going on," Schramm said.

Cattle grazing also has been trimmed by about two-thirds, and only one cattle ranch is left.

Meanwhile, the preserve's annual budget rose from $600,000 in 1995 to this year's $4.1 million, and the park staff increased from seven in 1995 to the current 41.

The number of park visitors jumped from 280,000 in 1997 to 632,000 last year.

"They're attracted by the region's solitude and isolation," said Slater.

Over the past few years, the Park Service replaced the former fire center at its Hole-in-the-Wall camp site and rebuilt the water system and roads serving campgrounds at Mid Hills and Hole-in-the-Wall.

High school students affiliated with the Youth Conservation Corps rehabilitated a fire-ravaged, eight-mile hiking trail last year between the two campgrounds.

And volunteers surveyed 114 springs in the preserve to determine their water levels, finding that 80 percent had surface water last fall, Slater said.

In addition, a dozen big horn ewes were transferred earlier this year from the preserve to help replenish a dwindling herd at the China Lake Naval Weapons Station near Ridgecrest.

"We've had an active 12 years," Schramm said.

Healing Desert's Wounds

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

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

By Eric Bailey, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

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

They're healing the desert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They find plenty of scars.

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

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

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

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

Scrubbing under the sun, Farmer talks about snow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seita calls it her desert restoration flower arrangement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You do what you can," Bosserman lamented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Day at Black Rock

Bryan’s Misguided Search for a Green-Approved Legacy

by Gerald Hillier
Nevada Journal

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

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

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

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

BLM Already Has Authority
Over Applegate-Lassen Trail

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

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

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

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

How the Restrictions Come

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ongoing Mischief

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

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

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

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

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

The Latest Version of the Bill

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

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

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

Another difficulty is the bill's language on roads:

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

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

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

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

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

The Issue of Legacy

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

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

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

Don't fence him in

Dennis Casebier preserves the human resources of the East Mojave

Stuart Kellogg, Staff Writer
Victor Valley Daily Press

Yes, it was rude, but I had to ask: What’s it like to live 30 miles from nowhere?

“We are here,” replied Dennis Casebier, founder of the Goffs Historic Cultural Center six miles north of Interstate 40 and half an hour west of Needles.

“You are the one who lives far away.”

So it came as no surprise when, two seconds later, he admitted a fondness for “desert rats,” heirs to the original mountain men.

“Desert rats aren’t exactly rebellious,” said Casebier, 65. “It’s just that they won’t be told what to do.

“People who live in the back country unconsciously erect barriers to confound city folk. That barrier — whether 30 dogs or junk in the yard — serves as a filter.

“The average flatlander is intimidated. But once you pass the desert rat’s test, you can’t get away.”

Lamenting that the classic desert rats have all gone, Casebier blamed the Bureau of Land Management (“Once the BLM got interested in resource management, the desert rats were doomed”) but also the fact that “today it’s an unlucky combination to be both self-reliant and intolerant of regulations.”

This from a 30-year Navy man.

Goffs was established in 1883 as a siding for the Southern Pacific Railway. It increased in importance when, in 1907, a short-line railroad connected it to the rich mines at Searchlight, Nevada.

By 1911 there were enough children living in Goffs (sons and daughters of railway employees) to require a school. Classes began in a rented, frame structure.

Three years later, a handsome mission-style schoolhouse was built. It served a total of 412 students before closing down in 1937, supplanted by a new school in Essex.

Searchlight had fizzled by 1923. Route 66, which once brought traffic through town, was redirected six miles south in 1931.

By 1937, Goffs had gone bust.

But 20 years later, a kid from Topeka, Kan., was assigned to the Marine Training Center in Twentynine Palms.

“Kansas isn’t the desert,” Casebier conceded, “but it, too, is big and empty. And it, too, had been homesteaded — Twentynine Palms was settled by World War I veterans gassed by the Germans.

“Back then, you could still drive all over Joshua Tree National Monument, so a friend and I explored the old mines. We’d sleep out at night and, in the morning, dump scorpions out of our boots.”

No wonder Casebier fell in love with the desert.

In 1960 he returned to California to work as a physicist on the Navy’s guided missile systems. By then, however, Joshua Tree was choked with tourists and government regulations. So Casebier looked around and discovered the East Mojave.

“It reminded me of the desert I used to know,” he said. “But more desert, and more Joshua trees.”

His work for the Navy meant Casebier spent a third of his time in Washington, D.C. While there, he researched the East Mojave in the National Archives, combing through pension files and muster rolls:

“The Army’s muster rolls detail everyone who ever served here — what he looked like and what he’d been doing just before he enlisted.”

Casebier’s research focused on the 1850s through the 1880s, and especially the Old Mojave Road, an ancestor of Route 66 that runs 15 miles north of Goffs.

“Until 1883,” he said, “the Old Mojave Road was the major route through this latitude for people traveling between Prescott, Arizona, and the Port of Los Angeles.”

Over the course of 25 years, Casebier filled 50 reels of microfilm with records from the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

In 1981, while still living in Corona, he founded the Friends of the Mojave Road with fellow devotees of that road and other back-country trails.

Today the Friends boast 850 members, chiefly in California, Nevada and Arizona. “But the other day,” Casebier said, “someone wrote from Switzerland requesting a (newsletter) subscription.”

Why do people join the Friends?

“Because they think it matters to create something bigger than yourself.”

This “thing that matters” is the cultural center, built around the old Goffs schoolhouse on 113 acres bought by Casebier and his wife, Jo Ann, in 1989.

In 1993 the Friends gained nonprofit status as the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association.

Working from old photos and interviews with more than 40 former students — and funded by $133, 850, all from private donors — MDHCA volunteers restored the schoolhouse to its original, 1914 splendor.

That schoolhouse may be the centerpiece, but the cultural center boasts other gems as well: for example, the tiny Danby courthouse, which once stood next to Judge Johnny Neilson’s service station; a building from the Golden Queen Mine near Mojave; an Atlantic & Pacific boxcar, 100 years old, now used as a cookhouse; and a complete 10-stamp ore mill from Rosamond.

Casebier explained that gold miners used stamp mills to pulverize rock: “Stamp mills won the West, but they contained so much metal, most got scrapped out. Today hardly any are left.”

Another building at the site, now used as a library, has had a most adventurous life.

Built in the ’20s as a maintenance station for the California Division of Highways, it was moved 18 miles to Essex after the realignment of Route 66.

In 1992 the Friends moved it back to Goffs.

“In fact, there are two of these houses,” Casebier said. “The other, built under the same contract, is still in Newberry Springs.”

The library is home to MDHCA’s 6,000 volumes of desert lore, 35,000 historical photographs and 600 oral histories.

Of those oral histories, half were done by Casebier, and half by Harold and Lucile Weight of the late, great “Desert Magazine.”

“The Weights were doing oral histories a generation before I started,” Casebier said. He also acknowledged the work of volunteers who transcribe recorded interviews.

The center’s purview stretches from Barstow to Las Vegas, Arizona and Twentynine Palms. “Vegas is just at the edge of our turf,” Casebier said, “though if I heard of a 97-year-old with a clear mind who lived in Vegas in the ’30s, I’d certainly interview them.”

He’s even interviewed people younger than himself, “if they were significantly involved in a core business or in the highway itself.”

Any tips on collecting an oral history?

“During the interview itself,” Casebier said, “I talk as little as possible.

“We start with vital statistics, such as the person’s full name. If that name is unusual, I’ll ask about it. Then we go on to where and when the person was born, their parents’ names, etc.”

When he interviews an elderly woman, her grown daughter — worried about having a strange man in the house — may sit in the same room. “Then,” Casebier said, “the daughter may finish her mother’s sentences instead of giving her time to collect her memories. That’s hard.”

At other times, two may be better than one:

“I interviewed a man and a woman who’d gone to school together in 1914 — in Lanfair Valley, an elevated, better-watered valley north of here that enjoyed a homestead boom starting in 1910.

“By interviewing them separately, and then together, I got much more than I could’ve out of either one alone.”

Should scholars approach him, asking to read a transcript, Casebier first tries to discover their intentions. “Especially until someone passes on,” he said, “I feel responsible for what they have told me.”

Sometimes friends or family suggest a really good interviewee. Then Casebier sends the prospect an MDHCA newsletter, “to let them see what we’re up to.”

At other times subjects show up on his doorstep:

“During World War II, 16,000 troops were stationed at Goffs. Every once in a while, a guy will come by looking for his roots.

“We’ll sit on the porch and I’ll ask him, ‘Could you see the water tanks? How far were you from the railroad? How would you get into Needles?’

“From this I can figure where his particular camp was.

“You can still see rock streets those boys built during the war.”

The Mojave National Preserve: 1.4 million acres of contradictions

Postmistress and shopkeeper Irene Ausmus in front of the Cima store.
by Elizabeth Manning
High Country News

CIMA, Calif. - Like most of her neighbors, Irene Ausmus never wanted the East Mojave Desert to become a national preserve, let alone the national park that environmentalists first wanted. "We live out here because we don't want people bothering us," says the 64-year-old Cima postmistress and owner of a sparsely stocked general store where you can buy chocolate syrup, Spam or a radiator hose.

But after living inside the Mojave National Preserve for the past two-and-a-half years, Ausmus says she doesn't mind the Park Service being here anymore. "Time will tell," she says, but for now she likes the new rangers and no longer worries that the federal government will confiscate her property. The only drawback has proved to be the tourists who get angry at her for not providing public restrooms.

"They're all looking for bathrooms and there are no facilities," she says. "I have my own bathroom and that's all I want to keep clean."

It's funny Ausmus should mention bathrooms. The lack of facilities, including restrooms, was one of the first things I noticed during a trip to the Mojave National Preserve last December.

Other than two campgrounds built by the Bureau of Land Management, which used to oversee the area, the only amenity for tourists is a half-doughnut-shaped visitors' center off Interstate 15, at the base of the world's tallest thermometer in Baker - a 130-foot-tall tower to match the area's highest recorded temperature. There are no entrance booths to the preserve, no new hotels and no shops hawking rubber tomahawks. So far, the Mojave National Preserve seems completely unlike most national parks.

One reason for this is politics. During its first two years in existence, enemies of the preserve hacked at it through its budget. It received only $600,000 in 1995 and managed to beg, borrow and steal $800,000 from other parks the following year, after California Republican Rep. Jerry Lewis nearly succeeded in allocating the preserve just $1. Only in fiscal year 1997 did the preserve get adequate funding of $1.9 million. Mojave National Preserve Superintendent Mary Martin says she now has 17 people on staff and more arriving, up from a low of six employees in early 1996.

"In some ways, we're a couple of years behind where we should be," says Elden Hughes of the Sierra Club, an environmentalist who has fought steadily for a park in the East Mojave. "People are coming and the place isn't ready."

But even when the East Mojave is ready, Dennis Schramm, Park Service lead planner for the preserve, says it likely won't look much different. He calls the Mojave "a park for the 21st century," a primitive area with little development inside the preserve's borders. The Park Service would like to renovate the historic Kelso Train Depot inside the preserve as a visitors' center, he says, but mostly it will rely on border towns along Interstates 15 and 40 - the two highways that define this lonesome triangle on the north and south - to provide food, gas and shelter for travelers.

But the main reason the East Mojave doesn't seem like a park is that it isn't a park. It's a preserve, and it's making itself up as it goes along. Right now, Park Service officials are in the midst of crafting its general management plan, due out in December 1998. Schramm says his planning team has three guides: the preserve's enabling legislation, the Park Service's purpose and mandate and other laws pertaining to national park units.

The result is 1.4 million acres of contradictions: Inside the preserve, rangers lead nature walks, off-road enthusiasts drive on hundreds of miles of dirt roads, and hunters shoot coyotes and rabbits. Ranchers run cattle and miners extract rocks from the earth while trains whistle through here as they have for nearly a century. Dozens of people still live year-round on private land inside the preserve, yet nearly half of this park unit is wilderness.

That's the way Congress declared it. The preserve was created as part of the California Desert Protection Act of 1994, which also upgraded and expanded Death Valley and Joshua Tree to national parks and created 69 new wilderness areas on Bureau of Land Management land.

When President Bill Clinton signed the act into law, environmentalists applauded it as the single largest wilderness designation in the continental United States and the only environmental legislation to survive Congress that year. But those who conceived and promoted the preserve saw some painful concessions. Due to lobbying from local landowners, bighorn sheep hunters, the mining industry and ranchers, the act allows hunting, grazing and mining to continue inside the preserve.

"We wanted a 1.5 million-acre national park without hunting, grazing and mining," says Peter Burk, a high school librarian who first conceived the idea of a national park in the East Mojave 20 years ago during America's bicentennial. "What we got was a 1.4 million-acre preserve. I just hate the C-word: C-O-M-P-R-O-M-I-S-E."

In recent months, Burk, also president of the Citizens for Mojave National Park, has become critical of the Park Service. He says the agency could be doing more within the existing laws to curtail ranching in desert habitat, to rid the area of non-native burros and to halt mining. Instead, Burk feels that Park Service officials are bending over backward to mollify preserve critics. "The Park Service is giving the cowboys everything they want," he says.

In particular, Burk is worried about the make-up of the 15-member planning advisory committee appointed by Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt. Burk says Babbitt loaded the committee with "wise users." Some of the tougher issues the committee must tackle include how much grazing and four-wheeling will be allowed in threatened desert tortoise habitat, what to do about the burro population that exploded under the BLM's management and whether to open Zzyzx Mineral Springs to the public. Zzyzx, now a research station for California State University, was once a health spa owned and operated by "radio minister" Doc Springer.

Like many environmentalists, Burk would like to see a new desert economy based on tourism, not resource extraction. Most environmentalists hope the Mojave will someday become a full-fledged park. Burk just wants it to happen sooner than later.

"Let's face it, the Mojave is an urban desert," says Burk. "No one wants the ORVers, scam mining artists, the cowboys or the ranchers tearing the desert up. My wife, Joyce, and I adhere to the myth of the Garden of Eden, the idea that pristine landscapes are more attractive to people than spoiled ones. It's stronger than the myth of the frontier. We love our national parks to death."

Other environmentalists are more patient. "I'd much prefer it to be a park than a preserve, but I'm not in a hurry," says Hughes of the Sierra Club. "I don't know if it will happen in my lifetime."

A lovely, bitter pill

Ecologically, the East Mojave marks the convergence of three deserts - the Mojave with its Joshua trees, the Sonoran with its teddy bear cholla cactus and the Great Basin with its sagebrush. Within the preserve are alkaline lake beds, jagged mountain ranges, the world's largest Joshua tree forest and the Kelso sand dunes that boom when you walk on them. Some 800 plant species and 300 animal species are here, including at least two threatened species - the Mojave tui chub, a native fish that ekes out a living in brackish desert springs, and the desert tortoise, indicator species for the Mojave desert.

The history of this land ranges from early Indian habitation to the region's present-day ranches, mines and occasional methamphetamine labs. Once described as the empty space that keeps Las Vegas and Los Angeles from becoming one giant metropolis, the Mojave has always been used and occupied more intensively than one might think. Farmers homesteaded in Lanfair Valley during a wet period between 1910 and 1920, and many moved to the desert during the Great Depression, "figuring it was better to eat jackrabbits and beans and scratch at the rocks than starve in the cities," according to desert historian Dennis Casebier.

Independence and a frontier spirit still exist among today's East Mojave residents. It helps explain why the preserve was such a bitter pill.

But things are better now and the rumors are less outrageous. (At first, residents heard that the Park Service was going to fence the entire preserve and charge private landowners $200 to get to their property.) It may have helped that the Park Service went through such a difficult time itself a year ago. Kirsten Talken, the preserve's chief interpretative ranger, says Baker residents called her during the three-week federal furlough to see if park employees had enough food to eat. "When push comes to shove, people come together," she says.

Some former opponents have even become Park Service allies. Rob Blair, a fourth-generation rancher who runs cattle on 163,000 acres of public land inside the preserve, says the Park Service has been an easier landlord than the BLM. Blair says the Park Service approved a permit to reconstruct a water line in three weeks; the same permit had been delayed for six years under the BLM.

Another ally is Jerry Freeman, a former mining prospector who now owns the town of Nipton, along with its historic adobe hotel where silent-film star Clara Bow used to stay. Freeman is glad the desert's old industries and the "salt-of-the-earth" people who depend on them are protected under the California Desert Protection Act, but he's also happy that they'll be held to tougher rules under the Park Service.

"Some degree of regulation has to happen," says Freeman. "This isn't the Wild West anymore. It's the 20th century, and the Mojave could be permanently ruined very quickly."

Still, there are a number of residents here who will probably never accept the preserve. Casebier, the desert historian who has renovated a historic schoolhouse in Goffs and has written four-wheel guide books for the region, is one. He is particularly angry about the roads closed by wilderness designations and sees park tourism as even more destructive than the old resource economies.

"You're going to get a different type of person coming out here, and more of them," says Casebier. "You're going to get the type of person that uses parks. I see wilderness areas in the desert as death traps. Something will happen and they will tighten restrictions. Then the people who used to come here will be driven away or they'll leave."

Even though park officials say tour buses are unlikely to stop here anytime soon, Casebier is sure that will change: "The Park Service is at the base of the world's largest thermometer off one of the nation's busiest freeways. It's too easy for them to scoop people off I-15."

Camping statistics for March are already proving Casebier right: Dave Paulissen of the Park Service says some 1,400 people camped in the preserve's two campgrounds over the previous three weeks, most of those during spring break.

"I don't see the gain by creating the preserve," adds Casebier. "There was nothing being lost anyway."

Burk disagrees: "Without the California Desert Protection Act, we wouldn't have had a revolution in consciousness in the Mojave Desert." From his suburban home in Barstow, Burk sweeps his hand to the east. "Those mountains would have been leveled to make latex paint."

Driving away from the desert, with the lights of Los Angeles approaching, I thought about something Jerry Freeman said: "The desert is a fragile place. The ecosystems are delicate but so are its culture and people. It's something that has to be approached gently."

Out of choice and necessity, the National Park Service seems to be following Freeman's advice.