L.A. took their water and land a century ago. Now the Owens Valley is fighting back

The Los Angeles Aqueduct, which transports water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles, was built in the early 1900s. (Los Angeles Times)

By Louis Sahagun
Los Angeles Times

BISHOP, CALIF. -- A century ago, agents from Los Angeles converged on the Owens Valley on a secret mission.

They figured out who owned water rights in the lush valley and began quietly purchasing land, posing as ranchers and farmers.

Soon, residents of the Eastern Sierra realized much of the water rights were now owned by Los Angeles interests. L.A. proceeded to drain the valley, taking the water via a great aqueduct to fuel the metropolis’ explosive growth.

This scheme became an essential piece of California history and the subject of the classic 1974 film “Chinatown.” In the Owens Valley, it is still known as the original sin that sparked decades of hatred for Los Angeles as the valley dried up and ranchers and farmers struggled to make a living.

But now, the Owens Valley is trying to rectify this dark moment in its history.

Officials have launched eminent domain proceedings in an effort to take property acquired by Los Angeles in the early 1900s.

Owens Valley wants to reclaim its history

It is the first time Inyo County has used eminent domain rules against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns 25% of the Owens Valley floor, officials said Wednesday.

Unlike previous battles with the DWP that focused on the environmental and economic damage caused by L.A.'s pumping of local water supplies, the county seeks to pay fair market value for property and water rights needed for landfills, parks, commerce and ranchlands along a 112-mile stretch of Highway 395 east of the Sierra Nevada.

“We’re using a hammer the DWP has never seen before in Owens Valley,” Inyo County Supervisor Rick Pucci said. “Our goal is the future health and safety of our communities.”

The move comes after years of efforts by Los Angeles to make amends for taking the region’s land and water. In 2013, for instance, the city agreed to fast-track measures to control toxic dust storms that have blown across the eastern Sierra Nevada since L.A. opened the aqueduct a century ago that drained Owens Lake.

As a gesture of conciliation, the city a year ago erected a $4.6-million monument of granite and sculpted earth that now rises from a dry bed of Owens Lake. It features a public plaza with curved granite walls inspired by the wing shapes of shorebirds. Sculptures of earth and rock have been made to resemble whitecaps like those that graced the lake’s surface before it was transformed into a noxious dust bowl.

L.A. concerns about giving back land

But in Owens Valley, Angelenos bearing gifts have always elicited skepticism, and occasionally sparked eruptions of violence. The aqueduct was dynamited repeatedly after increased pumping exacerbated a drought during the 1920s that laid waste to local farms and businesses.

Inyo County officials see their effort to take back DWP land as an important step in taking back local control.

That worries DWP officials, who acknowledged they were caught off guard by the action.

“This is brand new. It could be a slippery slope and where it would lead us I don’t know,” Marty Adams, chief operating officer at the agency, said. “The county also wants the water rights on certain properties, which could have a cascading effect. We’re very concerned about that.”

The Inyo County Board of Supervisors directed its staff to study the use of eminent domain after the DWP a year ago proposed a fourfold rent increase of more than $20,000 annually at a landfill in Bishop operated by the county on land it has leased from the DWP for decades, Rick Benson, assistant county administrator, said.

The proposed lease included a clause allowing the DWP to terminate the agreement for any reason with a 180-day notice, he said.

After months of heated negotiations, the county approved the new three-year lease agreement in January because, Benson said: “We had no choice.”

“We’re mandated by the state to provide environmentally sound means of disposal,” he said. “But the cost of abandoning that landfill and building and certifying a new one elsewhere would be astronomical.”

Beyond that, he said, the California Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery refused to renew an operating permit for the landfill until a new lease was in place on the property.

Valley towns struggling to survive

In March, Inyo County Administrator Kevin Carunchio notified the DWP of the county’s decision to condemn that landfill site and two others in the towns of Independence and Lone Pine. That would set in motion legal proceedings that could lead to its taking ownership from the DWP.

A county appraisal concluded a fair market value for the total 200 acres of $522,000, county officials said. On Monday, the DWP declined that offer, saying it had yet to complete its own appraisals.

Some officials are already raising the possibility of mounting crowd-sourcing campaigns to fund additional acquisitions of DWP land for public benefit.

“The county would obviously like more economic opportunities,” the DWP’s Adams said, “and we support that.”

In the meantime, Owens Valley towns — including Big Pine, Independence, Lone Pine and Olancha — struggle to survive, with most of their developable land and water rights controlled by the DWP.

In 1997, the DWP agreed to relinquish 75 acres in the Owens Valley for residential and commercial uses, and the county amended its General Plan to ensure that land exchanges did not result in a net loss of tax base or revenues. Since then, county officials say, lots on only a fraction of that acreage have changed hands because the DWP has tended to set minimum bids far above market value.

In 2009, a group of Owens Valley residents sent a petition to then-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Los Angeles City Council urging them to force the DWP to compensate for the loss of private land it planned to buy in the region by releasing an equal amount of its own holdings elsewhere. The city never responded, according to activists who helped write the petition.

The DWP has spent more than $1 billion to comply with a 1997 agreement with the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District to combat the powder-fine dust from the dry 110-square-mile Owens Lake bed.

Separately, after decades of political bickering and a bruising court fight, the DWP directed water back into a 62-mile-long stretch of the Lower Owens River that had been left essentially dry after its flows of Sierra snowmelt were diverted to the Los Angeles Aqueduct. But it later balked at removing thick stands of reeds that swiftly choked the renewed river.

The DWP caused an uproar during the drought in 2015 when it gave ranchers 48 hours’ notice of its intention to reduce their irrigation water from the usual 49,000 acre-feet a year to 20,500 acre-feet a year. The agency abandoned the deadline after Inyo County threatened to seek an injunction to stop what it claimed was a violation of long-term water agreements that would devastate the local economy.

Some itching for a fight with L.A.

Farming and ranching generate $20 million a year in rural Inyo County, second only to tourism, officials said.

Jenifer Castaneda, a Lone Pine real estate broker and community activist, had one word to say about the county’s use of eminent domain: “Awesome.”

Castaneda said she only hopes local leaders are ready for a long fight and that they don’t “cave when Los Angeles dangles some kind of big fat carrot in front of their noses."

Highway 395 promoted as Three Flags Highway

Historians work to revive 'Mother Road of the West'

Natasha Lindstrom
Victor Valley Daily Press

It's not nearly as famous as Route 66, but Highway 395 — sometimes called the "Mother Road of the West" — carries its own historical weight.

In the 1930s, Southern Californians dubbed the thoroughfare the Three Flags Highway for linking Mexico, the United States and Canada.

During World War II, Highway 395 provided military convoys with a safe alternative to coastal roads deemed vulnerable to attack.

Even today, the Three Flags Highway offers a scenic ride isolated from the heavy traffic clogging routes through Los Angeles.

The Historic Route 395 Association in Southern California is now trying to revive the Three Flags name as part of an effort to preserve the vintage motor courts, gas stations, restaurants and signs that still dot the old route, which once stretched from the San Diego Bay near the California-Mexico border to the Canadian border in Washington state.

“For the High Desert, it allowed the tourist industry to come up through the Cajon Pass and to explore the Eastern Sierras,” said Jeffrey Harmon, founding member of the 395 association, “and it also provided the only north-to-south route for commercial traffic on the eastern side of the Sierras.”

In June 2008, the California Legislature unanimously approved designating Highway 395 as a historic route from San Diego to the Oregon state line. But legislators left it up to cities and community organizations to pay for putting up historic markers and promoting the designation.

“Everything south of Hesperia has been reassigned to either city streets or completely disappeared all together,” Harmon said. “That history is important to preserve.”

Tracing the thorough fare’s pre-1948 route, the association has already installed about 100 signs in Riverside and San Diego counties, slowly making its way toward San Bernardino County and the Cajon Pass. The group is giving talks at community events to spread the word and accepting donations to put up more signs, which cost about $70 each.

“We’re doing what we can to get people to slow down, get off that interstate, just take a drive on Highway 395,” he said. “It’s just such a beautiful route.”

Meanwhile, locals continue to wait on a Highway 395 realignment that’s been in talks for decades and other improvements to make it safer to travel the local stretch of the 395.

Federal wilderness protection for California land moves forward

The Senate clears the way for passage of legislation that would expand wilderness protection to more than 2 million acres of public land nationwide, mostly in California and the West.


By Richard Simon
Los Angeles Times


Reporting from Washington -- Large swaths of California wild lands would gain federal wilderness protection under legislation that took a step toward approval in the U.S. Senate during a rare Sunday session.

The measure, which would expand the protection to more than 2 million acres of public land nationwide, may be the most significant conservation legislation in a decade, said Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the bill's manager.

It would designate as wilderness -- the government's highest protection -- about 190,000 acres in Riverside County, including parts of Joshua Tree National Park; about 450,000 acres in the Eastern Sierra and San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles; and about 90,000 acres in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks, including John Krebs Wilderness.

The measure also would authorize $88 million in funding to launch an ambitious effort to restore the San Joaquin River, which has been drained for decades to supply Central Valley farms. More water would be left in the river, and populations of spring-run chinook salmon would be returned under terms of a legal settlement in a long-running environmental battle over the river.

The proposal is expected to win final Senate approval by the end of the week and then go to the House, where it is also expected to be approved.

"We're very excited that these slices of wild California are so close to being permanently protected," said Ryan Henson, policy director of the California Wilderness Coalition.

As part of its wilderness protections, the measure would authorize a study on whether the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans, should be included in the national park system.

"This is a great moment -- for me personally and for California -- to see three important parts of it move closer to becoming law," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called the Sunday session -- and the Senate's first roll call of the year -- out of anger over what he regarded as stalling tactics by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a critic of the bill.

Democrats increased their majority in the November election and were prepared to flex their muscle to prevent a filibuster. But it wasn't necessary. Because the bill includes projects eagerly sought by senators from both parties for their states, it easily cleared the procedural hurdle with a 66-12 vote.

Besides California, wilderness designations would be made in Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Michigan, West Virginia and Virginia. The package of about 160 bills also would designate former President Clinton's childhood home in Hope, Ark., as a national historic site.

The measure also includes initiatives intended to reduce wildfire risk and increase water supplies.

The legislation drew opposition from conservatives and property rights groups, which assailed it as a land grab that would close areas to energy production. Critics also questioned whether Congress, facing massive budget deficits and a backlog of park maintenance, should be taking up legislation now that would authorize, among other things, a commission to plan a 450th anniversary celebration in 2015 for the founding of St. Augustine, Fla.

"We can't continue to pass bills by putting together a little bit of what everybody wants and forgetting what's good for our country," said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).

Mike Matz, executive director of the Campaign for America's Wilderness, said the legislation would be a "most welcome action by many Americans who face so much uncertainty in their lives. It will be nice for them to know they can visit their most treasured spots and see them just as they are. They will be able to continue to hike, hunt, fish, camp or canoe amid this natural splendor, and that is no small consolation in these difficult times."

Following in Colin Fletcher's footsteps

Andreas Cohrs walks California on trek from Mexico to Oregon

Mammoth Times

In March 1958 the American outdoor icon Colin Fletcher set off to walk through California, from the Mexican boder to Oregon. While his initial motive was just getting to know the country he moved to a year earlier, his book about this voyage made him the father of modern backpacking for his lyrical and practical writings on hiking and experiencing our nature.

He inspired generations to journey into the wilderness. The eventually published Thousand Mile Summer documents Fletcher's initiation into the search for a better world. Fletcher became a struggler for environmental orientation and dedication. With his commitment he is now lining up with respectable environmentalists such as John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, or Joseph Le Conte, lyrically with great American authors like Cormack McCarthy and J.D. Salinger.

The man who walked California and the Grand Canyon, the author of the outdoor bible The Complete Walker, got hit by an SUV, that logical contrary concept to walking. The accident forced the walker to change his life and eventually caused his death.

Fortunately men and women like Fletcher supported the idea of not losing touch with our base mother nature, when modern concepts and living style are luring us away from her. Despite an increasing ubiquity of comfort and decadency Cohrs thinks we owe it to people like Fletcher that environmentally-oriented thinking has been catching on and is definitely gaining ground.

In March 2008 entrepreneur and outdoor adventurer Andreas Cohrs is celebrating a 50th anniversary of what became the Thousand-Mile Summer and follow in Fletcher's footsteps, from the Mexican border to Oregon, through desert and High Sierra. On his four-month voyage Cohrs will have a close look at the comparison of California today and Fletcher's California of the 50s.

With periodic reports from the hike he will tell about the state's hidden beauty and the affection of the people he passes. Book publication is scheduled for winter 2008. Cohrs' travel reports are telling about the normal America that is not featured by popular press, with a benign look at people and nature alongside Californian highways, paths and trails.

With his anniversary trip through California, Cohrs is calling for responsibility by telling about the beauty of the land and the people living there. "We have to protect our lands, which we need more and more and which is endangered by other causes, becoming a very instable pattern," he said. "America is still losing wildlife and wild country to an increasing degree."

- Andreas Cohrs, excerpts from his Web site
1000milesummer.com

Old wagon roads of Sherwin Grade

Along the Trail

By David McNeill
Mammoth Times

These deep ruts in the solid Bishop Tuff rock were formed by the braking action of heavy freight wagons. Photo by David McNeill

To stand down at the bottom of Sherwin Grade on U.S. 395, some 10 miles north of Bishop, Calif., and look up is impressive. Cars and trucks zoom by at high speeds and accomplish in 10 minutes, what it took pioneers in wagons an entire day to negotiate. Huge wagons weighing tons ground their way up and down the volcanic Tuff rock leaving a permanent mark in history with their deeps ruts.

There has been a progression of about five or six different roads up the grade to get to where we are today. One of the first roads was for logging made by James L.C. Sherwin in 1870. The logs for lumber were cut at Swall Meadows, known formerly as Sherwin Meadows, and hauled down to a sawmill at Rock Creek Canyon. They dammed up the creek and made a large pond in which to float the logs. In 1879 Sherwin built what was called the High Road through Rock Creek Canyon, Long Valley and Mammoth City. This toll route ran by the old ranger station at Witcher Spring to Rock Creek Station, Little Round Valley, Whiskey Creek, McGee Meadows, Laurel and Sherwin creeks, and Mammoth City.

Sherwin's grandson Fred Brooks used to recall, "My grandfather, James L.C. Sherwin, came to Round Valley in 1866. I used to go with my grandfather on his trips to Mono Mills and Bodie when I was a boy, that is, when we could get through." Sherwin brought his wife, Nancy, and two daughters, May and Nannie, from Virginia City, Nev., where they had arrived from back east in 1859. He chose to build a home on beautiful Rock Creek, bordering the Inyo-Mono county line, and grew wonderful produce and fruit.

When deep snow closed the "High Road," Sherwin built another road to the east called the "Dry Road" that started at the old Roberts Creamery just below the county line. Sherwin employed a lot of the local Paiute Indians to help with all kinds of labor from digging irrigation ditches to building roads and farming. There was never a shortage of labor or a means to make a living for anyone at that time.

I have walked all the old wagon roads in their entirety from the bottom of Sherwin Grade to Sherwin Summit and Tom's Place. The roads are about 10 miles long and average 3,000 vertical feet.

The Dry Road is the most outstanding example of a historic wagon road to be found anywhere in the West. It remains so because nobody has traveled on it since the 1970s, when the four-lane highway was built and freeway fences closed off all access.

At the top of the grade where it comes out on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Gorge Road, rock slides have closed it off, and very few people know where it is anymore. It crosses the new highway at the bottom and midway up. Most people drive right by a short section that runs through the median and never see it. Yet, there it is after 138 years. The road parallels the new highway to the west for about five miles and goes through a half mile stretch of solid Tuff rock with deep ruts. This is very noticeable from the air. The ruts were formed when the heavy wagons braked and ground their wheels into the rock. Some of the ruts are up to two-feet deep, and the wagons could not get out to pass another oncoming wagon. They had to look ahead, listen for the bells and try to find a place to turn out with the big teams. As you can imagine, it took a lot of cussin' on the part of the muleskinners to get those animals to respond.

They were out there in all the elements of extreme heat, cold, snow and blow with nowhere to hide. They had to put their head and hat into the wind and take the brunt of it. It was a tough business to be a teamster in those days. It was hard on the animals and the men, but the goods had to get through to the mines and towns along the way.

The High Road was the route used most often and also has many deep rutted sections in the solid rock. Near the turnoff to Swall Meadows the road is visible right off the highway. It actually crosses the old Rock Creek Road in two places before dropping down into the Gorge. Mountain bikers now use the old wagon road as a trail that starts at Swall Meadows and goes down to Paradise.

It is really hard for us to conceive today what the experience of traveling the old wagon roads was like. From the idyllic ranches and stage stops of Round Valley to the lush meadows of Long Valley and Sherwin Creek, the buggies, small wagons and large freight teams of 18 mules labored along. All that is left now is a few historic buildings and the ruts in the road. They will tell a story for centuries to come of a unique time in our western history along the old wagon roads of Sherwin Grade.

David McNeill has lived in Bishop since 1974, working for the Water District and the Forest Service for most of that time. At home in the wilderness, he does a lot of hiking with Windy, his Springer spaniel. With a taste for writing he explored during stints at Mammoth's Channel 5 and the Mono Herald, he has a drawer full of stories.

BLM: so much area to cover, so little time

BLM battles bullets, trail cutting, motorcycles, cherry bombs to stop “trashing of America”

Along the Trail
By David McNeill
Mammoth Times

I was out on the Chalk Bluffs near Bishop over the Martin Luther King holiday, and was surprised at what I saw. Just a week earlier I had observed about 10 people blowing off M-80 firecrackers in the rocks for hours. It was unnerving to say the least and ruined a good hike. On this day things got way out of control. The parking areas were full with 50 carloads of rock climbers at the bottom of the Bluffs. Cars were coming into the top entrance of Sad Boulders all day long, where there is very little parking. That increased the chance for damage to the brush all along the road from overflow.

Things were going about how they usually do on a holiday weekend in winter at the Chalk Bluffs, as I climbed up onto the big petroglyph panel called Sky Rock. I heard some motorcycles in the distance and didn't think too much of it, since there are roads out there. The next thing I knew, four guys on motorcycles were illegally going cross-country across the fragile high desert land. That was the first time I have ever seen anything like that in 30 years of hiking out there. It is common to see a solo track here or there on the Volcanic Tableland from some outlaw rider, but never a team effort. Of course I ran after them, and of course they got away. I phoned up law enforcement officer Mike Hubbard at the Bishop BLM office, and he invited me to come down and do a story on what they face out in the “wild west” with so much area to cover and so little time.

The Eastern Sierra is an off road paradise that is unsurpassed in beauty and different types of terrain. Despite this wonderful asset, there are still outlaw riders, who defy the rules and rough ride over the land. It is vicious and a number one problem for BLM, as careless Off Highway Vehicle people continue to erode the land foot by foot each year. This is the problem that Mike and his partner in Lone Pine, Ron Stormo, face each day trying to patrol an area 750,000 acres in size that extends from Cartago in the south northward to Topaz Lake, a stretch of nearly 250 miles. This is an area of diverse desert landscapes, volcanic rock and hot springs in Long Valley near Mammoth Lakes.

About 10 years ago, Mick Ryan and other climbers from the Eastern Sierra started advertising in magazines, guidebooks and the Internet that Bishop, Calif., was the new place to go for bouldering and rock climbing. Things had tightened up down in Waco Tanks in El Paso due to archaeological site damage from the climbers, and they were looking for new territory to establish. As thousands of people converged on Bishop to climb in a Haight-Ashbury type movement, BLM, Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power and the U.S. Forest Service had to react quickly with trail systems, signs, parking barriers, toilets and increased law enforcement. For BLM this was all extra work that the two overburdened law enforcement officers and the recreation department inherited.

To keep people centrally located instead of camping all over the place, Mike, along with geologist Cheryl Seth, helped set up a campground called the Pit in an old borrow pit that was used for the Pleasant Valley Dam construction. This was a perfect location for the campground and an excellent choice. The Pit is wintertime camping only and a great deal at $2 per day, including a host. There is no water and the fees cover the cost of the toilets, trash collection and recycle bins. Climbers were driving all over the place damaging brush, and the recreation department had to place barriers and configure parking areas. At the same time all the petroglyph and archaeological sites had to be identified and protected as best as could be done. Currently, the recreation department headed by Diana Pietrasanta, has six employees who work hard to do as much resource protection as they can.

Another difficult area for BLM to manage is the hot springs and tubs in Long Valley as Wild Willys and Travertine near Bridgeport. Since Hot Creek is still closed, there has been increased use at the BLM tubs. One trail counter at Wild Willys hot tub recorded 30,000 visitors in one year, an astounding number of people going to a small area in one year. That is why the BLM and USFS installed a quarter-mile-long boardwalk to protect the sensitive ground out there.

Archaeological site vandalism has been going on for a long time in the Eastern Sierra. People drive out on ATVs and dig up the rock rings where the ancient people had their shelters. Thankfully the petroglyph target shooting practice has subsided, but people are still picking off pieces of petroglyphs and pictographs, at the same time picking away the pieces of our great land's heritage.

Mike and Ron have been staying on top of another situation involving partying high school kids at a place called the Quarry on top of the Chalk Bluffs. It is the usual stupid situation that many of us did as high school kids — throwing beer cans, breaking glass, making huge fires and leaving them burning. Mike picked up 500 beer cans after one night's party and plastic protectors from liquor bottles. Very clever how they get those bottles out of the store. There is a lot of potential for trouble out there from fires to vehicle accidents and underage drinking.

A change of the guard will be coming for both Mike Hubbard and Ron Stormo — Ron retires in April, Mike in December. Mike ends a long productive career that started as a firefighter after graduating from Humboldt State with a B.A. in wildlife management and outdoor planning. When a job opened up in the Eastern Sierra, he jumped on it. He grew up in Garden Grove in Southern California and vacationed with his family in the Eastern Sierra in the 60s. In 1988, he got a job with BLM as a law enforcement officer. Ron Stormo is also an ex-firefighter, former Hot Shot and worked for the park service. He lives down in Lone Pine and keeps the southern end under control.

It is hard to replace these guys, who have vast amounts of experience and common sense. They will be missed when they pass the baton. They will do everything they can to break in the new officers and give them a good orientation to their new duty station in the most beautiful place on Earth: the Eastern Sierra.

The BLM office in Bishop is very down home and public service oriented. Under the capable leadership of Bill Dunkelberger, all the staff are always accommodating to any valid concern that the public might have. When I have had a concern about some land use issue, they always met with me and never blew me off. They gave me an opportunity to talk about it and that means a lot to me. So they encourage you to keep your eyes on the long falling skies, and don't let our land get hurt. If you see something that isn't cool, they welcome you to give them a buzz. They rely upon us to do our part as good stewards of the land and to take part in the protection of it. Do your part to help stop the trashing of America.

David McNeill has lived in Bishop since 1974, working for the Water District and the Forest Service for most of that time. At home in the wilderness, he does a lot of hiking with Windy, his Springer spaniel. With a taste for writing he explored during stints at Mammoth's Channel 5 and the Mono Herald, he has a drawer full of stories.

They're All Over the Map

COLUMN ONE
The Auto Club's intrepid cartographers traverse the rural Southwest cataloging the uncharted features of a changing landscape.

John O'Dell
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

VIRGIN MOUNTAINS, Ariz. — Shane Henry steered his truck along a dusty road, emerging from a steep, cool pine forest and dead-ending on the edge of a precipice. The uncharted spot provided a breathtaking, 30-mile-wide panoramic view of the Virgin River Gorge, stretching northeast into Utah.

For Henry, a field cartographer for the Automobile Club of Southern California, it was a great day of discovery. After finding the overlook, he spotted ruins of a forgotten century-old cattle ranch near a pair of freshwater springs. Between overlook and ruins, he had also found 10 miles of a drivable dirt road. None are on the Auto Club's current "Indian Country" road map, but all his finds will be on a new version due out in two years.

Despite the popularity of Global Positioning System navigation and earth-blanketing satellite photography, there are still places few have seen and roads few have traveled. Henry and his senior road-mapping colleague, John Skinner, are helping to find them.

The duo of Skinner and Henry doesn't have the same poetic ring as Lewis and Clark. But 200 years after the famous explorers began their mapping trip through the American West, Skinner and Henry are doing much the same work, traveling the rugged backcountry of the Southwest, looking for something new.

The two explorers are a rarity in the modern world of mapmaking. Rand McNally Co. and the various AAA groups are the primary publishers of U.S. road maps. Most full-time field researchers work on roadways in urban and suburban areas.

Skinner and Henry "are probably the only ones in the U.S. doing what they do" with backcountry mapping, says Bill Scharf, head of the Auto Club's cartography division. The Los Angeles-based club publishes 90 different maps and distributes 7 million road maps annually. It tries to update them every other year.

Every dirt road and trail shown on them will eventually be driven and rated by the Auto Club's field cartographers. But they rarely work together.

"There's too much work to do to team up," Skinner says.

They spend 10 months a year on the road, racking up about 60,000 miles each in four-wheel-drive trucks. The Auto Club provides the trucks, which are adorned with the club's logo and a banner: "Map Unit."

Their territory is vast. Skinner and Henry cover the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, rural regions of 13 Southern California counties and all of Baja California. They also map the Four Corners area — a 130,000-square-mile region surrounding the point where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah all touch — which is included in the club's celebrated Indian Country map.

That map is a fixture in tourists' cars and ranchers' pickups alike. Its accuracy is why "everyone around here uses it," says Ed Chamberlin, curator of the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site museum on the Navajo Reservation in Ganado, Ariz.

Novelist Tony Hillerman, whose mysteries featuring Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn have brought the Four Corners region alive for millions of readers, has also made the map a key part of his fictional cop's crime-fighting arsenal.

Henry, 42, a former actor, has been on the job for three years; Skinner, 59, is a trained geographer who has been riding trail for the Auto Club for 22 years.

John Skinner reviews a map while working near Barstow. (John O’Dell / LAT)

Skinner quit in the '90s and moved to Arizona for three years in pursuit of a romance that ultimately failed. When the heartbreak healed, he asked for his old job back and hit the road again.

"This job is not good for relationships," says Skinner, who has been engaged three times but has never married.

Skinner and Henry work in trucks loaded with GPS navigation systems and highly detailed federal topographical maps to trace their tracks. Backseats and cargo areas are filled with piles of extra maps, cellphones, tents and food. They carry jacks, flares, survival kits, tire pumps, extra fuel lines, transmission oil and fan belts.

As they drive, Skinner and Henry continually check special odometers, accurate to within one-thousandth of a mile, to verify that the distances already listed on maps are precise. They also rate road conditions to ensure that routes haven't been washed out by flash floods or altered by construction. Their discoveries may include stone quarries, mines, washes, overlooks, abandoned towns and a dizzying variety of unpaved roads.

Dirt roads on AAA maps are rated from graded and gravel-topped thoroughfares to badly eroded and rutted tracks best suited for four-wheel-drive enthusiasts.

"We want to make sure that if a mom in her Volvo decides to take one of these roads, she'll be able to make it," Henry says.

On the job, Skinner and Henry usually sleep in motels, not tents. Still, notes Denis Cosgrove, a cultural geography professor at UCLA, the two are throwbacks who resemble "the early topographers, trekking out into inaccessible places and trying to reduce a part of the world to a page on a map."

The job has its perils.

Skinner and Henry have had encounters with mountain lions and rattlesnakes. And they give wide berth to desert compounds littered with the glass vials and metal cooking pots that mark the illegal drug-making operations of modern outlaws.

The mapmakers say their work requires a big helping of self-confidence. Henry was on a rough dirt road in the mountains northwest of Lake Powell in Utah when he saw the road ahead disappearing between some rocks. Usually he would get out and walk the route to see where it went before proceeding, but it was late and he was tired, so he just drove on.

As Henry passed the curve it turned into a narrow, terrifying stretch made up of loose rock rubble with a 200-foot drop on one side. He kept going, in part because an Auto Club map indicated that the road led across the mountain summit.

But about 200 yards from the top he found himself trapped. The road's loose rock had turned into a series of 18-inch-high granite ledges.

"Those steps were just a little too high for my truck tires to roll over," Henry says.

He couldn't make a U-turn because the road was too narrow. One option was to back downhill, but he faced a mile-long path of scree with the long drop on one side. So he decided to keep going up. He exited the truck very carefully, so he wouldn't slip off the precipice, then gathered rocks to build a little ramp so he could drive over the step. Then every 30 feet or so he stopped because of another granite step and had to build a new ramp. It took Henry four hours to drive 200 yards.

"This is a good example of why we drive all these roads," he says. On the older map it showed as a rough but usable dirt road across the summit. "But it had deteriorated so badly it was impassable for most people, so I took it out" for the new map, he says.

Skinner and Henry can trace their jobs back to 1905, when AAA published its first road map and helped pioneer the industry at a time when motorists were few and marked roads fewer. In those days, maps were basically logbooks written to describe trips with descriptions of key geographic spots, gas stations, historic buildings, river bends, anything to guide drivers.

Later, auto clubs and other promoters invented names for roads and posted road signs for travelers to follow. But there was no uniformity. The same road could be called one name by a city, another by a real estate developer who had published his own map and something else by a local travel and touring club.

It wasn't until 1916, when Rand McNally started its own route numbering system, that travelers heading south from Boston to Florida could follow a route that retained the same name from state to state — as long as they used Rand McNally maps. Finally, in 1924, the federal government adopted a uniform numbering system so that major travel routes would retain their identities across the country.

Both Skinner and Henry took circuitous routes to land their current jobs.

Skinner was a ship navigator in the Navy, then earned a degree in geography from Cal State Fresno. He worked four years for a local AAA office as a tourist counselor, offering maps and advice on trips. When a job opened up as a field cartographer in 1979, he took it.

Shane Henry inspects a U.S. Geological Survey marker. (John O’Dell / LAT)

Henry grew up in rural Oregon and earned a master of fine arts degree in classical theater at the University of Alabama. He spent 15 years traveling the country as an actor and dancer in regional theaters. He met Skinner by chance when Skinner was on a mapping trip in Los Padres National Forest and was fixing a flat tire. Henry was out hiking and struck up a conversation. Skinner told him about an opening for another map researcher.

A typical day of mapping covers 30 to 50 miles of dirt roads.

On trips to Baja California and Indian Country, Skinner and Henry often travel for three weeks at time. But the Auto Club requires them to take off one day in seven.

"It can be a real pain when you are out in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing you can do with your day off is sit around a lonely motel or campsite," Henry says.

Although he and Skinner meet plenty of storekeepers, restaurant workers and travelers in their work, their return visits are so far apart that friendships rarely form.

"You do have to like to work by yourself," Henry says.

Yet of the 10 field cartographers the Southern California club has hired in the last 35 years, only one has quit for good to pursue a more normal lifestyle. That was Dan Goodwin, now a 44-year-old environmental health and safety manager for a manufacturer in Pasadena.

In 1986, with a newly minted geography degree from UC Santa Barbara, Goodwin thought the job would be perfect, but eventually the loneliness got to him.

"I found myself wishing that I had someone with me on those road trips to share it with," he says. Goodwin quit in 1989.

The club prides itself on the accuracy of its maps, but errors do occur. Sometimes a field researcher fails to properly record the distance between road junctions, or omits a creek or gives a bad road a better rating than it deserves.

"Every once in a while we'll get a call or a letter from someone who took a car or a Winnebago too far down a road and got stuck or found that the road was a lot nastier than the map suggested," says Jim Kendall, the local Auto Club's map research chief. So when Skinner or Henry makes a rare appearance at the club's Costa Mesa office, he is often handed a pile of complaints to check out before the next map is printed.

Sometimes the cartographers find the mistakes on their own.

On a trip near Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah last year, Henry drove across a little creek and stopped for lunch. Then a sudden thunderstorm hit and dumped enough water to swell the creek into a torrent. A creek that had been 6 inches deep was now 3 feet deep, and it would have flooded Henry's engine had he tried to drive back. But his Auto Club map showed he was near a dirt road leading to a highway, so he took it.

Unfortunately, the map failed to show that the road crossed the same creek again before reaching the highway. When he arrived at the second crossing, the water was deep and running fast. But Henry carries a pair of 6-foot boards in his pickup for just such emergencies, and he spent several hours piling up rocks so he could lay the boards over them as a makeshift bridge.

After driving across, Henry says, "I saw a homemade sign someone had put up that said, 'Creek may rise without warning.' "

That second crossing is now on the Auto Club's Indian Country map.