Mojave preserve offers views and plenty of Joshua trees

The world’s largest concentration of Joshua trees grows in the Mojave National Preserve. (DEBORAH WALL/SPECIAL TO VIEW)

By DEBORAH WALL
SPECIAL TO VIEW

Beckoning seductively to city dwellers who long for elbow room, the 1.6 million-acre Mojave National Preserve lies in Southern California, barely an hour’s drive south of Las Vegas. While it has fewer than a dozen developed hiking trails, some of those are great ones. Among the best is the Teutonia Peak Trail, which boasts spectacular views of the east Mojave and beyond.

The moderate 4-mile round-trip trail takes you up to a steep outcropping on Cima Dome, at an elevation of 5,755 feet. The first section of the trail passes through the largest concentrations of Joshua trees in the world. While you will be hiking on the geologically interesting dome itself, the dome is best viewed from afar to see its almost-perfect symmetry, rising 1,500 feet above the desert.

From the signed trailhead, which is at an elevation of about 5,030 feet, follow the abandoned gravel road toward the obvious granite outcropping to the southwest. The first part of the hike is fairly flat and easy, so children will enjoy it. But once you’re hiking up the outcropping, it becomes more strenuous and extremely rocky with uneven footing, unsuitable for small children.

In the first mile or so, you will be surrounded by Joshua trees, remarkably odd but beautiful members of the lily family, with twisted, scaly limbs bearing long leaves only at their tips. They look like the fanciful trees in some children’s book by Dr. Seuss. Joshuas usually grow at an elevation between 2,000 and 7,000 feet, in sandy soil on flat or rolling terrain, so the foot of Cima Dome is one of their favorite places. Some along this hike are more than 20 feet tall. Other vegetation here includes yucca, cholla, blackbrush and Mormon tea.

After about a mile, you will come across timbers and mine tailings, evidence of an old silver claim. Take a glance, but stay away, as many old mines in the Mojave Desert are notoriously dangerous. Leave it alone and continue toward the outcropping.

Once up on the outcropping, follow the faint path along the ridgeline as far as you feel comfortable. The actual summit is difficult to access without a lot of rock scrambling. Indeed, you won’t need to reach it to take in the best of the far-reaching views. To the west, you will see the cinder cones and lava beds, which are part of the Cinder Cone National Natural Landmark, designated in 1973, and within the confines of the park. A bit past that, if you look carefully, you can even make out the world’s largest thermometer in Baker, Calif. Beyond, you can see the outline of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains.

To the south, you can see the Kelso Sand Dunes, and to the north, you can see Clark Mountain, the highest peak in the park, at an elevation of 7,929 feet. Clark sits just north of Interstate 15 near Mountain Pass.

While you are in the park, take time to head over to the Kelso Depot Visitor Center. The Mission-Revival style former train station was built in 1924 by the Union Pacific. The restored depot building is now the park’s main visitor center and has wonderful displays on the early mining and ranching history of this area, as well as Chemehuevi and Mojave Indian tribes. While trains no longer stop here, they roll through about once an hour. It’s a thrill to watch them from the station platform, thundering past at what appears to be full speed. And it’s safe to do so because a sturdy fence protects onlookers without obstructing their view.

The depot is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays through Tuesdays but closed Wednesdays and Thursdays. Its Beanery Lunch Counter is closed, so bring your own picnic supplies. There are picnic tables at the depot, but just about any location along one of the hundreds of side roads in the uncrowded preserve offers an inviting spot to spread a tablecloth. Gas is not available in the park, so before entering it, fill up in Primm or nearby Baker.

Deborah Wall is the author of “Great Hikes, A Cerca Country Guide” and “Base Camp Las Vegas: Hiking the Southwestern States,” published by Stephens Press. She can be reached at deborabus@aol.com.

Opposition Grows To Wind Development Near Mojave Preserve

Avikwame seen from Wee Thump, January 2010. This view would be filled with wind turbines in the distance | Photo: Chris Clarke

Commentary
by Chris Clarke
KCET

To those tracking proposed wind turbine developments in the Mojave Desert, it's become clear that developers are increasingly eyeing the area just north and east of the Mojave National Preserve. There are active wind proposals in the Silurian Valley north of Baker. Element Power has a permit to test for wind resources in Mountain Pass, on a site almost completely surrounded by the Preserve. Oak Creek Energy Systems has a similar testing permit at the northern end of the New York Mountains, just inside the Nevada line, in land that would certainly be part of the Preserve were it not for that state line.

But the application that's farthest along is Duke Energy's Searchlight Wind Energy Project, which would place from 87 to 96 turbines, each 427 feet tall, on almost 19,000 acres surrounding three sides of the little Nevada town from which it takes its name. The turbines would be just east of the Mojave National Preserve, as close as a mile and a half to the boundary of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, and in an area of supreme cultural significance to Native people across the desert.

The BLM issued the Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Searchlight Wind Energy Project in December, and as the project has the backing of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid -- a local, at least on paper -- a Record Of Decision (ROD) from the Interior Department in favor of Searchlight Wind is almost certainly a done deal.

That's angered a number of locals, as well as frequent visitors who appreciate the views across the Southern Nevada desert. Those views are more than just scenery to some. From much of the area of the Preserve, including the Wee Thump Wilderness Area northwest of Searchlight, the turbines would intrude on the view of Spirit Mountain. Also known as Avikwame, that mountain -- a striking white massif rising above the desert -- is the center of the origin myth for a number of desert Native people from the local Mohave to the Quechan farther south, as well as the Yavapai, Hualapai, and Havasupai of Northern Arizona.

What Federal land planners somewhat prosaically call "visual resources" are of supreme importance to the tribes along the Colorado River: being able to see and describe the surrounding mountain peaks is an important part of Native ritual, as for example in the Chemehuevi's Salt Songs. As Avikwame is traditionally considered the home of Mastamho, the son of the Creator, Spirit Mountain plays about the role in local religion that the Vatican or Mecca play in certain other faiths.

Judy Bundorf of the grassroots group Friends of Searchlight Desert and Mountains related to me two weeks ago how the BLM had answered her queries about the impact of the Searchlight Wind project on native practices. "They told us that the sightlines between Spirit Mountain and the Native people wouldn't be affected, because the turbines would all be north of the mountain, and the reservation is in the other direction."

I ran into Bundorf at an event in Ward Valley commemorating the 15th anniversary of the defeat of the nuclear waste dump once proposed for that site. Also in attendance was my friend Rev. Ronald Van Fleet, an elder in the Fort Mohave Indian Tribe. I asked Ron whether the view of Avikwame from the reservation to the south was the only one that mattered to the Mohave. He just laughed.

Added to the cultural impacts of the project are the likely effects on large birds, especially eagles. The Searchlight Wind project would place turbines on either side of the pass leading down to the Colorado River along Cottonwood Cove Road, a potentially important migration corridor for birds and bats heading between the Eldorado and Newberry Mountains to travel between the river and the vicinity of the Mojave Preserve. Both Duke Energy and the BLM state that raptor populations in the area are relatively low, with only three golden eagle sightings recorded in the vicinity of the project site since 2007. (I lived in the area for much of 2008 and saw that many golden eagles in a week, although admittedly not directly on the project site.) The project area, largely composed of Joshua tree forest, is also habitat for desert tortoise, with 122 torts found in the project area during a 2011 survey. Eleven species of cactus grow in the area, and I've had personal communications from locals citing individual Gila monsters seen along roadsides in the area.

Though a green-light from Interior is near-certain given Reid's backing, Friends of Searchlight Desert and Mountains hasn't given up on its opposition: it's organizing a demonstration in Searchlight on Saturday, February 23 to urge the BLM to go back to the drawing board with the EIS. The group wants a wider range of alternatives considered in the document, including distributed generation, siting on private lands moving the project away from private property and valuable habitat.

It would also be sensible for the BLM to pay closer attention to potential cumulative impacts of the Searchlight site combined with those proposed for the Castle-New York Mountains, Mountain Pass, and the Silurian Valley. Fringing the northern edge of the Mojave Preserve with 200-foot turbine blades just seems on the face of it to be something we could think through a bit more carefully.

They Kept Ward Valley Nuclear-Free

COMMENTARY | THE HIDDEN DESERT

Ward Valley (Photo: Center for Land Use Interpretation/Creative Commons License)

by Chris Clarke
KCET.com

It's an embarrassing admission for a confirmed California desert rat like me, but I've never been to Ward Valley. Not really. Oh, I've crossed the valley near its north end on Interstate 40 dozens of times. I've done the same thing where Route 62 crosses the south end of Ward Valley. But I've never gotten off the highway, never walked out onto the valley floor among the low creosote and yuccas and chollas and just breathed.

There's no particular hurry: Ward Valley's hundreds of square miles of open desert will be there when I get around to visiting. 20 years ago that wasn't a sure thing.

Ward Valley is a broad, sloping basin that runs north-south for about 65 miles, an undeveloped stretch of desert that connects the eastern ends of Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. It's essentially a big bowl of creosote, undisturbed except for a few dirt roads here and there and by World War II-era tank tracks still struggling to heal after 70 years, flanked by the Old Woman and Paiute mountains to the west and the Sacramento, Stepladder, and Turtle mountains to the east. Homer Wash, a broad, meandering and braided seasonal watercourse fringed with acacia trees and ocotillo, runs along the floor of the valley. Dropping 3,000 feet in its journey of more than 50 miles, it eventually drains into Danby Dry Lake.

Uphill from the wash is creosote and gravel, dissected by smaller tributaries that feed Homer Wash when in flood. At an altitude running from 3,000' at its north end to around 600 at its south, Ward Valley is thus excellent habitat for desert tortoises. Thirty years ago tortoise population densities ran as high as 120 adults per square mile.

It's one of those places in the California Desert where you can find yourself 20 miles off the pavement without much problem, camping out in the open without seeing another human being for days, aside from those traveling overhead on their way in and out of LAX. Or so I've been told.

This is where California almost put its final dump for low-level nuclear waste.

"Low-level nuclear waste" sounds relatively innocuous, as such things go. "Low level" can't be as bad as "high-level" waste, right? One imagines a bit of medical waste, a contaminated rubber glove or a boot here and there, set safely out in the middle of the desert for a few years to allow its radioactivity clock to run down. The truth is a lot more complex. "Low level" and "high level" are administrative terms, not scientific ones. Low-level waste does indeed include things like gloves and boots, as well as other materials that have become contaminated through exposure to radioactive material. It is generally far less radioactive than, say, spent nuclear reactor fuel. But low-level waste can actually contain spent fuel in minute amounts, irradiated tools, pieces of decommissioned reactor buildings, and so forth. The U.S. Department of Energy projected that Ward Valley's proposed nuclear waste dump would quite likely have received shipments of waste contaminated with some of the longest-lived radionuclides generally handled as waste, including radioactive isotopes of cesium as well as strontium and even plutonium.

Over the years, in fact, Ward Valley's proposed nuclear waste dump might have hosted as much as 100 pounds of plutonium.

The plan was part of California's attempt to comply with a 1980 federal directive, Public Law 96-573, which delegated responsibility for handling low-level waste to individual states, or groups of states. In 1982, the California legislature passed AB 1513, which among other things directed the state's Department of Health Services (DHS) to start looking for a place to put California's low-level waste, and to find a dump operator to manage the stuff.

One company after another was selected by DHS to run a potential California low-level waste dump, and then one after another backed away when they figured out the potential liabilities. Finally, DHS landed on U.S. Ecology, a company with a somewhat Orwellian name that ran a number of low-level waste dumps across the country, including one near Beatty, Nevada.

U.S. Ecology took some time to decide where to propose the dump. The company considered alternate sites in Silurian Valley, north of Baker, and in the Panamint Valley near Ridgecrest and Lone Pine. In March 1988, the company announced it had found its preferred site: on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management in the north end of Ward Valley.

By then California had joined a waste disposal "compact" of states including Arizona and the Dakotas, meaning that radioactive waste from those states would likely be coming to Ward Valley. What's more, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- which had power to order waste to any appropriate low-level waste dump -- could send shipments from anywhere in the country to the proposed Ward Valley dump.

When it got there, the waste would be put in unlined trenches in the valley's gravelly soil covering about five football fields' area. There it would be vulnerable to windstorms, flash floods, and other disturbances, and free to leak radioactive materials into the surrounding desert.

In the late 1980s, California's antinuclear movement had dwindled somewhat from its peak during the Diablo Canyon years, but a few organizations took up the fight. There was the Committee to Bridge the Gap, based in Los Angeles. There were Northern California's Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition and Greenaction. Activists from the Sierra Club and CalPIRG and the Abalone Alliance other such groups delivered testimony at public hearings, distributed petitions, and alerted their memberships. I played a peripheral role myself, putting out a special Ward Valley issue of Terrain, the Bay Area environmental monthly I edited at the time.

But the core of the movement to oppose Ward Valley didn't come from the coast. It came from people whose ancestors have lived in the desert for millennia. Though California's native desert people had been historically slow to involve themselves in "white people's politics," the notion that Ward Valley might be graced with nuclear waste dangerous for thousands of years roused members of the nearby Chemehuevi and Mojave people to action, as well as other Colorado River tribes including the Quechan and Cocopah.

The late Llewellyn Barrackman, an elder of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, put the tribes' opposition as succinctly as possible in a short piece in that issue of Terrain:

They intend to transport nuclear waste through our reservation and through the town of Needles. They have never asked our permission or held a hearing on this issue. There is no provision to train our people should there be an accident, no plans to deal with the terrible dangers of a nuclear waste transport accident.

We will be needing water to grow. There is much water beneath Ward Valley and it will eventually become contaminated. This is a terrible crime. Our poor desert tortoise never even had a chance. Both the tortoise and the land are sacred to us. We have used this land for thousands of years. We use the plants there to heal ourselves and renew ourselves. Now it will all be destroyed. It's wrong all the way around.

Over the decade of the 1990s, tribal resistance to the project grew. Elders held vigils both on the land and elsewhere; by the late 1990s, the vigils on the project site had become a full-scale occupation. Where the project's opponents had originally been a few coastal urban environmentalists, within a few years Native opposition was the face of the campaign to keep Ward Valley nuclear-free.

As I describe in Part 1 of this article, an unprecedented coalition of Native Californian desert tribes and other environmental activists fought the State of California to a standstill 15 years ago on a proposal to dump low-level nuclear waste in Ward Valley, about 20 miles east of Needles. The activists who fought the project had public sympathy on their side and expert political sensibilities. But they had something else on their side as well: science.

Though the plans for the Ward Valley dump had been in the works since Reagan was in the White House, and the project's Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) had already been released two years before he took office, most of the political maneuvering over Ward Valley took place during the Clinton administration. From the outset of his administration, Clinton and his Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt clashed with California Governor Pete Wilson over the dump site, though it seemed more out of a White House desire that the issue go away than anything else.

Two weeks before Clinton took office, Bush's Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan handed over 1,000 acres of Ward Valley to the California DHS, a necessary step in licensing the dump. The land transfer was halted almost immediately by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel, after the Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition filed suit to stop the transfer.

That transfer would never go through, but we wouldn't find that out for another seven years.

In the interim, U.S. Ecology's proposal started taking serious hits. During the Bush administration, the Executive Branch and Wilson's office had worked hand in hand to make the dump happen, with BLM handling the environmental review process -- dogged by accusations of insufficient public comment periods -- and Wilson vetoing bills that would restrict operation of the dump. While the Clinton administration was by no means radically environmentalist, after 1993 the White House was less willing to bend rules to get the dump established.

In mid-1993 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed critical habitat for the desert tortoise, which had been listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1989. That proposed critical habitat included all of Ward Valley, adding significant complexity to the process of launching a nuke dump on federal land. By 1995, biologists studying Ward Valley tortoises noted a significant drop in numbers, and found that the newly discovered Upper Respiratory Distress disease was prevalent in torts in neighboring territories to which U.S. Ecology proposed relocating tortoises from the project site.

Likely the biggest blow to U.S. Ecology's plans came in the form of one of the smallest atoms in the universe: Tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. Though U.S. Ecology claimed that its unlined ditches wouldn't leak radioactive material into the water table, a study in April 1994 found the radioactive element deep beneath the company's Beatty facility, in geological conditions not too dissimilar to those at Ward Valley.

Though the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a report in mid-1995 declaring the proposed dump safe, two of the report's authors dissented -- previously unheard of for NAS studies of this kind. The two dissenting authors cited unknowns involved in leaching of radioactive substances through desert soils such as those in Ward Valley. Five months later, when the 1994 study of tritium migration at Beatty was released to the public, it turned out that the NAS report's authors had not had access to that crucial study when they wrote their report.

In other words, it turned out that U.S. Ecology's dump would almost certainly leak, and the company withheld that fact from federal investigators. The Clinton-Babbitt Interior Department was incensed, and President Clinton announced the land transfer would be put on hold until more studies of tritium migration were complete.

One of opponents' biggest concerns was that leaking radioactive material might make its way to the Colorado River, the water source for millions of people in Los Angeles and elsewhere. U.S. Ecology maintained that Ward Valley was a hydrologically closed basin, meaning that groundwater in the valley didn't have an outlet by which it could leave. The U.S. Geological Survey formally backed U.S. Ecology up in this assessment, but some of its staff geologists weren't so sure.

In February 1993, a year before U.S. Ecology quietly learned that tritium had leaked more than 360 feet deep into the soil beneath its Beatty facility, USGS scientists Howard Wilshire, Keith Howard, and David Miller -- Mojave Desert geology experts all -- wrote a letter to newly appointed Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stating that they'd not been consulted during the Ward Valley environmental assessment process leading up to the publication of the final EIS in 1991. When Babbitt's office asked the three for more details, they responded with a detailed memo describing geological problems with the EIS -- most chillingly, saying that the EIS contained no information on possible hydrological links between Ward Valley and other basins. In other words, if there was any way that nuclear material could leak out of Ward Valley and find its way into the rest of the desert, or even the Colorado River, you wouldn't find that out by reading the project's Environmental Impact Statement.

In a longer report released at the end of 1993, Wilshire, Howard, and Miller provided a list of five possible routes by which Ward Valley groundwater might leak into the Colorado River, a map of which (included at right) was included in the later National Academies of Science report. Of the five possible routes by which groundwater from the Ward Valley dump site might conceivably reach the Colorado, three did so upstream from Parker Dam, where the intake of the Metropolitan Water District's Colorado River Aqueduct might have shunted the potentially contaminated water to the taps of (nowadays) about 17 million people.

What's more, as Wilshire and his USGS colleague Jane Nielsen pointed out two years later in an article in the Ward Valley issue of Terrain I edited in December 1995, the EIS severely underestimated the potential amount of water that might be filtering through the Ward Valley site:

Another important factor at the site is the flow of surface water to Ward Valley from drainages in nearby Lanfair Valley to the northwest. A low divide separates the south-flowing Ward Valley drainage from Sacramento Wash, which discharges surface water from Lanfair Valley eastward into the Colorado River valley. Examination of aerial photographs shows sediment from Lanfair Valley extending in plumes south of the present divide. To change the course of some Lanfair Valley drainages from Sacramento Wash to Ward Valley would take nothing more than a shovel and a few hours of diligent digging. Lanfair Valley drainages now going into Sacramento Wash could flow toward Ward Valley in a period of high rainfall. This would increase the catchment area used to calculate flood risk by a factor of about 25; a wider area catches more water.

More ominously, subsurface connections may exist between Ward Valley ground water and the Colorado River. Fractured and tilted upper plate rocks and detachment faults may lie at shallow depth beneath Ward Valley. Such rocks are exposed between Ward Valley and the Colorado River, a strong indication that they lie close to the surface in the Valley itself. If they do, contaminants in Ward Valley's ground water could flow into the Colorado River. Whether a groundwater connection to the Colorado River constitutes a significant risk depends on the actual (and highly disputed) composition of the waste intended for Ward Valley.

So the dumpsite would almost assuredly leak, and there was a non-zero chance that any leaked radioactive materials would, over time, find their way to whatever Los Angeles had in the 23nd century instead of lawn sprinklers. When it comes to environmental threats, that would seem to be a slam dunk.

And yet there were any number of environmental issues during the Clinton administration's tenure in which cold hard science went up business interests and lost. Look at Clinton's scientifically indefensible Option Nine forest management plan, which sacrificed actual science in the form of wildlife biology to the demands of a few timber companies. In fact, a few times after the Wilshire data became publicly available the Clinton administration appeared ready to sign off on the dump. In May 1995, for instance, Secretary Babbitt agreed to finally release the land for transfer to the state, so long as Governor Wilson made the Department of Health Services (DHS) abide by a few restrictions in the type of waste the site took in and how that waste was handled. Wilson said no. Within a few months, John Garamendi --- who was workng as Deputy Interior Secretary at the time -- tentatively offered to transfer the land without conditions.

But Ward Valley had something that other Clinton-era wildland issues often lacked: a committed base of people of color who'd declared their steadfast opposition to the project.

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this story, Ward Valley is of supreme cultural significance to people in the Colorado River Indian Tribes, as well as the Chemehuevi and other local Native people. After a period of gathering strength and determination, desert Native people made that importance known rather emphatically. After a public gathering on the site in October 1995, the local tribes -- with the support of antinuclear activists from throughout California -- made plans to maintain a continuous onsite vigil, to be supported by an emergency influx of supporters from around California if it looked like development was imminent. This onsite presence was managed by Native people, who assumed a leadership role in the occupation of the site, with logistical aid provided by the Morongo Basin-based Desert Environmental Response Team. Onsite presence varied from a few people holding the "fort" to gatherings of 700 or more people during scheduled protests, many of whom went home to organize support in their far-away towns. The Native protest at Ward Valley became a cause celebre.

The Native role in opposition to the Ward Valley dump site didn't just win wide support among other environmental activists. It also helped prevent the Clinton administration from assenting to the dump just to make the pesky issue go away. It was the same President Clinton, after all, who had signed Executive Order 12898 in February, 1994, which ordered federal agencies to note and correct environmental policies that disproportionately affect communities of color. Native people have long been disproportionately burdened by the effects of nuclear and hazardous waste dumping, a reality that was not lost on the feds dealing with Ward Valley. In December 1995, Tom Jensen, Associate Director for Natural Resources of the President's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), said in an internal CEQ memo:

"Interior Department officials, relying on the NAS analysis and recommendations, believe that the site can be operated and used with complete safety. Interior would like very much to move ahead with the transfer and put the Ward Valley conflict behind the Administration. That said, they believe that, as a political matter, the Administration simply cannot of its own volition agree to hand the site over in exchange for a check and an unpopular governor's promise to do the right thing."

In other words, the Native occupation -- which would continue for a few years after the memo -- had made the project politically unpalatable even for those in Interior who hadn't been swayed by the science. The political considerations also included opposition from non-Native people. The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors and U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer had both gone on record opposing the dump, for instance. But it's doubtful whether even they would have had the power to stop a project that both the Governor and the nuclear industry wanted, had not the Clinton administration feared news stories featuring Native people evicted -- once again -- from land they held sacred.

A decade and a half later, the Ward Valley dump is dead. But most of the people who opposed it are not. And the Ward Valley experience emboldened those who took part. It's hard to say how much the Save Ward Valley movement influenced the successful Quechan Tribe lawsuit against the Imperial Solar Two project in 2011, for instance, and Native opposition to other destructive projects is explicitly carried on in the spirit of the Ward Valley encampment.

And perhaps most importantly: Ward Valley still lives. What's left of its tortoise population still walks the washes unimpeded, and the rain that filters through its shallow gravles is no more radioactive than usual.

In an age of seemingly consecutive losses of desert landscapes, that's something to hold on to.

Museum plans events for Arizona Centennial

COLORADO RIVER MUSEUM: The Colorado River Historical Society and Museum, between the Laughlin Bridge and Davis Camp, is planning two days of events for local celebration of the Arizona Centennial.

By JAMES CHILTON
The Daily News

BULLHEAD CITY — With the Arizona Centennial less than two weeks away, the Colorado River Historical Society and Museum is preparing two days’ worth of events for the public to enjoy.

Museum president Dave McDaniel said the society has been hard at work on creating an interactive pathway around the museum grounds that will provide snippets of history from Arizona’s century of statehood. The path will include items that hearken back to the area’s history, with numbered markers that correspond to a brochure visitors can reference to read about Bullhead City’s past, from the first Native American settlers, to the Colorado riverboat days of the mid-19th century, to the founding of Hardyville, the area’s original white settlement.

“The new pathway that runs around the museum is going to be designated the Arizona Centennial Pathway, and along the pathway we’re going to have little snapshots of history,” McDaniel said. “Along each stop there are numbers, and in the brochure, they give information about Hardyville, steamboats in the area, the Beale Wagon Road, and we have a mural that was painted by Paul Jackson, who is the tribal artist for the Mojaves.”

Inside the museum, McDaniel said, visitors will find both current and historical maps of the state dating back to 1912, as well as some other artifacts that are indicative of local life during the early part of the last century.

“On Feb. 11, we’re going to have an open house from 11 in the morning until 2, and the city council’s and some of the Fort Mojave tribal members are invited,” McDaniel added. “And we’re going to have some souvenirs we’re going to give out. We’re going to have coin envelopes with wheat pennies in them that mention the Colorado River Museum and the ‘cent’ennial.”

Then at 1 p.m. on the Feb. 11, McDaniel said the museum will host a going-away celebration in honor of Bullhead City’s first elected mayor, J. Michael “Mike” Love, who will be departing to Sacramento, Calif., with his wife Gloria after spending the last 32 years here. On Wednesday, Love dropped by the Bullhead City Hall, where he bid his formal good-byes to current mayor Jack Hakim and City Manager Toby Cotter, receiving a certificate of appreciation and the key to the city for his service.

Following the open house, on the day of the actual centennial, Feb. 14, McDaniel said the museum is planning a host of programs for the day, running from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The programs will include presentations on a number of subjects including Hardyville and Original Bullhead, as well as a video presentation on the steamboats of the Colorado River and a hike to “Museum Rock,” a nearby Indian petroglyph.

The museum’s regular hours of operation are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, or a full schedule of centennial events, call 928-758-7643 or 928-754-3399.

The Old Spanish Trail, Explained

New Mexico to Southern California

Old Spanish Trail (in red). (National Park Service)

by Nathan Masters
KCET

Although Southern California today is a region teeming with millions, for much of its history it was a remote outpost of the vast Spanish Empire. Nearly 227 years passed between Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo's first exploration of the California coast in 1542 and Gaspar de Portolá's establishment of the Presidio of San Diego in 1769. Then, for another sixty years, Southern California grew in relative isolation from the rest of Hispanic civilization. Finally, in 1829, an intrepid merchant opened a trade route—today known as the Old Spanish Trail—between Los Angeles and Santa Fe, creating Southern California's first overland link with the older Spanish settlements of New Mexico.

From June 2-5, historians, archivists, and representatives from government agencies and the Hispanic and Native American communities will gather in Pomona at the 2011 Old Spanish Trail Association annual conference to explore the history of the trail in California.

In the late nineteenth century, hundreds of miles of unforgiving terrain and harsh climate divided Southern California from New Mexico, but both stood to profit from a direct trade route. Alta California then formed, along with the province of New Mexico, the northern boundary of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The recently-colonized Spanish territory boasted fine natural harbors in San Francisco and San Diego. But with its location at the northern extreme of the Spanish Empire, and surrounded by inhospitable desert to the east and southeast, Southern California was effectively isolated from the political and cultural center of Mexico City to the south.

To the east, the older Spanish province of New Mexico, first settled in 1598, offered California integration with the burgeoning United States and the Mexican heartland via established overland trade routes. For Southern California's rancheros, New Mexico also represented an untapped market for the region's abundant supply of horses and mules. From the point of view of landlocked New Mexico, a trade route to Southern California represented not only a potential market for Santa Fe's serapes and other handmade goods, but also a connection to foreign markets via California's ports.

Almost as soon as the first Spanish settlements arose in California, efforts were made to bridge the chasm and link the two provinces. A team of Franciscan missionaries left Santa Fe for California in 1776, but made it only as far as Utah Lake, near the present-day city of Provo.

In 1826, American fur trapper and explorer Jedediah Smith blazed a trail from present-day Utah to the Mojave Desert. After a clash with hostile Mohave Indians, Smith met two Tongva guides who offered to take his expedition to Mission San Gabriel, near Los Angeles. The guides led Smith along the intermittent Mohave River and over the San Bernardino Mountains near the Cajon Pass. Smith's party arrived at the mission on November 27, where they were warmly received by the missionaries, as depicted in the scene below.

Three years later, Santa Fe merchant Antonio Armijo led the first successful caravan from Santa Fe to Southern California, combining Smith's route with portions of the Franciscans' 1776 path to Utah to open what would later be called the Old Spanish Trail. In doing so, Armijo had established an important link between California and New Mexico, now the northern flanks of the newly-independent Mexican Republic.

Elizabeth von Till Warren, a historian of the Old Spanish Trail, writes of the new route's effect:

News of the opening of trade with California resulted in immediate commerce between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. With a few exceptions, pack trains made annual treks between New Mexico and California, bringing woven Mexican products to California, which lacked sheep, and bartering them for horses and mules, scarce in New Mexico.

The trail carried mule-trains over the Cajon Pass, then west through Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, and El Monte, to the region's major settlements at Mission San Gabriel and Los Angeles. There the traders unloaded their goods, many of which were sold at the Los Angeles Plaza.

The increased commerce hid a dark and ugly side to the trail's establishment, according to von Till Warren:

Raids for Indian slaves became common, with victims sold at either end of the trail despite official condemnation of the practice. The traffic in human beings reverberated among the peoples who lived along the trail for many years longer than the caravans plied their trade.

The trail remained an important trade route for several years until, shortly after the American conquest of California, several competing routes comprised of wagon roads were opened. The Old Spanish Trail, which allowed only for pack animals, soon fell into disuse.

Today, monuments mark the trail's path through the Southland. In Upland, the Madonna of the Trail statue overlooks the route once taken by Santa Fe-bound traders. The monument, dedicated by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1929, was one of twelve placed along the National Old Trails Road, which stretched from New York City to Los Angeles. In the Cajon Pass, an obelisk-shaped monument, dedicated in 1917, commemorates the early pioneers who traveled between Southern California and points east.

The trail's historical significance was further recognized in 2002, when an act of Congress, passed unanimously by both houses and signed by President George W. Bush, designated the corridor as the Old Spanish National Historic Trail and placed the historic route under the supervision of the National Park Service.

Team of lone rangers scours the new Wild West

Park service workers in the Mojave never know what vestige of the Wild West they'll find, right down to train robbers.

By Mike Anton
Los Angeles Times

KELSO, CALIF. — High noon and the desert is hot as a wok, yet Tim Duncan is wearing body armor under his uniform. A handgun and a Taser hang from his belt. Next to him in the truck are a shotgun and an M-16 assault rifle with extra magazines.

"Out here, you have to be prepared," he said.

Duncan is a National Park Service ranger at the Mojave National Preserve, a Mordor-like sweep of serrated mountains, feral deserts, Joshua tree forests, dry lakes and lava beds -- a park five times the size of Los Angeles that's patrolled by eight law officers.

Here the wilds of nature meet the wilds of man, an incongruous environment that has hidden meth labs and illegal waste dumps, plant and wildlife poachers, archaeological thieves, the occasional dumped body and train robbers.

Yes, train robbers.

Union Pacific trains laden with goods from the coast rumble into the Mojave National Preserve at the aptly named Devils Playground, 40 miles of hellish sand dunes and salt flats at the base of the Kelso Mountains. Mile-long caravans of double-stacked cars wheeze to a crawl as they labor up the steep Cima Grade through the heart of the preserve. Sometimes they stop on side tracks to let other trains pass.

Thieves typically strike at night -- busting into boxcars and tossing down the booty to waiting accomplices with trucks.

Sometimes, looters find what they want, such as consumer electronics. "Other times the container is loaded with teddy bears or promotional magnets for a restaurant," Duncan said.

Congress created the preserve in 1994. When Duncan arrived three years later, the railroad was losing more than $1 million a month there to robbers.

"It was just like an open-air flea market out here," he said. "Stuff was strewn everywhere."

Stepped-up enforcement by park rangers and railroad police has dampened the wholesale looting. Yet rangers still come across piles of empty flat-screen television boxes and Styrofoam packing material. Four men were caught last month liberating TVs from a boxcar in broad daylight. A fifth suspect, a 17-year-old boy, was found dead, a victim of the scorching midday heat.

Such arrests are rare. Those who do get caught tend to stand out.

Three summers ago, Ranger Kirk Gebicke and a partner stopped to chat with two men sitting in an empty Budget rental truck near the railroad tracks. The pair had been drinking and couldn't explain why they were parked in a moving van miles from anything that needed to be moved. They expressed ignorance about a sack of cocaine the rangers found in the grass four feet away.

The men were arrested. An aerial search of the area found 75 flat-screen TVs worth more than $225,000 that had been thrown from a train.

"I'm at the edge of the world here," Gebicke said. "There are things here that you won't find at Yosemite or Yellowstone."

Mojave National Preserve lies an hour east of Barstow, sandwiched between Interstate 15, Interstate 40 and the Nevada state line. Known as the Lonesome Triangle, it has been trafficked for eons by people seeking riches, a path to someplace else -- or simply a place to hide.

Prehistoric hunters tracked large animals across a verdant landscape of rivers and lakes sculpted by volcanic activity. Ancestors of today's Mojave, Paiute and Chemehuevi Indians eked out an existence after the lakes disappeared.

Spanish soldiers and Mormon pioneers blazed routes to the coast that others followed in droves -- the Southland's first freeways. Miners in the 1800s discovered gold, silver, copper and minerals used in industry. Ranchers found endless grazing land. During World War II, Army Gen. George Patton chose the Mojave as a stand-in for North Africa to train soldiers. After the war, returning troops turned the Mojave into an off-road motorcycling mecca for a booming Los Angeles.

An anything-goes Wild West ethic permeates the area's history, and vestiges of it persist.

The freeways are conveyor belts for trouble from Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Some 1,800 miles of dirt roads lead to countless out-of-sight arroyos and hidey holes. It's impossible to know what's going on out there.

At any given time, two or three lone rangers drift across a potentially hostile universe where the road signs have been blasted by bullets and any hope of backup is a mirage.

Rangers study the landscape for signs of recent human activity. Gebicke carries what he calls a "track trap" -- a garden rake to smooth over entrances to dirt roads leading to known trouble spots.

"I'm seeing what's in place and what's out of place," Duncan said. "If I'm on a road where there never was a gate and suddenly there is one now, why, that raises a red flag."

Duncan, 52, is a gregarious bear of a man with a graying beard and a Georgia accent thick as country gravy. He grew up in the sticks and dreamed of a life outdoors just like Fess Parker's Daniel Boone in the '60s television series. After a stint in the Air Force and time working for an aerospace firm, Duncan went back to college, earned a forestry degree and joined the Park Service, serving first in Alaska and later at the Manassas Civil War battle site in Virginia. His first two years in the Mojave he patrolled alone.

More than 500,000 vehicles a year traverse the preserve's few paved roads. Because there are no formal entrances or fees, it's unknown how many are just passing through on what is a popular and at times white-knuckle shortcut between Palm Springs and Las Vegas. (A driver recently was clocked going 121 mph and ticketed; fatal wrecks are common.)

Park officials stress that the overwhelming majority of visitors come to admire the preserve's austere beauty. Three of North America's four desert ecosystems meet in its 1.6 million acres to form more than 30 distinctive plant and animal habitats. Hiking the Kelso Dunes, which rise to 700 feet, conjures a feeling of being Lawrence in Arabia. Spring wildflowers are a popular draw as is the lovingly restored Kelso Depot, once a thriving passenger train stop and now the preserve's visitor center.

But off the beaten path are scenes that will never appear in a glossy coffee-table book: The man hanging from a rope on a Joshua tree in February, an apparent suicide. The attempted hijacking of a recreational vehicle by a luckless man abandoned in the desert by a friend; he was beaten and subdued by the four vacationers when his gun proved empty.

"Some people look at all this desert and say, 'That's just wasteland. It doesn't matter what I do with it -- or do in it,' " Duncan says as he drives past an old water-pumping station with graffiti and three wild burros. "I've had people tell me to my face: 'We know what the rules are, but when no one's around, we do what we please.' "

Thieves will steal anything that's not anchored to the ground -- as well as stuff that is. Scrap metal from historic ranch structures and mining sites. Copper wiring from modern communication relay stations. Rare butterflies and reptiles coveted by collectors, including the colorful rosy boa and the endangered desert tortoise. Tortoises have also been found shot to death.

Two men who stole a front-end loader from an abandoned mine carved a road across miles of black lava cinder cones before they were caught.

Mojave National Preserve has 1,600 documented archaeological sites, some dating to 10,000 B.C. Many of them have been stripped of their pottery, baskets, stone tools and metates, arrowheads and other artifacts.

"What surprises me is how much material used to be there," said David Nichols, the preserve's full-time archaeologist, who compared his findings with old field surveys. "At most of these sites, I'd say 70% of the visible cultural material is gone."

Rampant looting predates the Park Service. An area first documented in 1977 was so rich in artifacts it was dubbed the Freightwagon Site because you could fill one with the stuff. A researcher's report offered this prescient observation: "As soon as this site location becomes public knowledge, it will be vandalized by off-the-road 'enthusiasts.' "

When an associate of Nichols' revisited the area last year, nearly everything was gone. Off-road quad tracks led straight to the site from I-15.

"It's awful," Nichols said. "And because the place is so vast we never, ever catch anyone in the act of doing anything."

Native American petroglyphs have been cut from rock walls and carted off. Boulders adorned with ancient art have vanished. Vandalism is pervasive, especially of petroglyphs depicting "mask figures" which resemble a human face with eyes and a mouth.

People shoot at them for target practice.

"I dream of the day that I come around a corner and find a guy with a hammer and chisel," Nichols said.

Maybe he shouldn't, given that Nichols patrols the backcountry unarmed.

The preserve's remoteness makes it an ideal place to take care of certain types of business.

In 2001, a Dallas man was traveling to Los Angeles with three men he met in a coffee shop. They pulled off I-15 and drove into the preserve to find a quiet place to empty their bladders. That's when one of the man's new friends shot him to death under the soft light of a million stars.

Two years later, a woman's torso was found just outside the preserve. Tattoos of a hummingbird over the left breast and an "M" with a star on the lower back led authorities to identify the remains as those of a 19-year-old Las Vegas prostitute last seen getting into a car with California plates.

Duncan figures it's a sure bet there are more out there who will never be found. "There's an old story: If all the dead here in the desert stood up, we'd have a forest."

As he approaches places such as the New Trail mine, a lurching 20-minute drive up a rock-strewn road, Duncan is aware of the risk of being in this country alone.

It was here in 2001 that Duncan and Gebicke went to saw off locks that had been placed on the camp's old cabins. They encountered four men in a pickup coming the other way. They just happened to have the key.

At the mine, the rangers discovered a drug lab and 10 gallons of pure methamphetamine oil ready to be crystallized.

The men were arrested and the mine site cleaned up.

A 2003 National Park Service narrative of the preserve's history noted that "crystal meth has posed a considerable problem to the park." Rangers periodically run across red phosphorus stains, containers of lye and empty boxes of pseudoephedrine -- signs of a cook at work.

"If I don't get up here for six months, you have no clue as to what's gone on in that six months," Duncan said.

On this day, the New Trail mine is quiet. On a table in an outbuilding are empty bottles of whiskey, sour apple schnapps and a half-filled jar of clear liquid labeled "corn whiskey."

Outside, a lizard scurries across ground strewn with beer bottles and spent shells.

Whoever was here left several camp chairs behind, suggesting they will be back. What they'll be up to is anyone's guess.

The desert is good at keeping secrets.

On patrol, Ranger Tim Duncan carries a handgun and a Taser. Next to him in his truck are a shotgun and an M-16 assault rifle with extra magazines. “Out here, you have to be prepared,” he says.

Piute Canyon still draws dedicated explorers

TRIP OF THE WEEK

by MARGO BARTLETT PESEK
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal


The stone ruins of old Fort Piute overlook a spring and vegetation-filled canyon at the eastern edge of the Mojave National Preserve. One of the few sources of reliable water in the Mojave Desert, Piute Spring and its half-mile long stream drew overland travelers for many centuries. Today, the remote site draws only dedicated hikers and back road explorers seeking glimpses of the past.

Visitors approach the canyon and fort on foot, either from the west on roads within the Mojave National Preserve or from U.S. 95 to the east on obscure side roads. Use high-clearance vehicles or those with four-wheel drive.

To reach Piute Canyon from U.S. 95, drive a little more than six miles south of the junction with Highway 163, the road to Laughlin. Watch for a graded road heading west. Follow it about seven miles to a power line road, where you turn north for about a mile and a half. Watch for two rock cairns marking the turnoff onto the canyon road, a very rough track. You may have to park and walk the two miles to the ruins of the 1800s fort near the mouth of the canyon.

Visitors within the preserve follow a graded utility road from the junction of Cedar Canyon Road and Lanfair Road east nine and a half miles to a smaller road leading to a corral. North of the cattle guard, look for rock cairns marking two different foot paths to Piute Canyon, a trip totaling about six and a half miles round-trip. Young people from the California Conservation Corps spent time improving the rough canyon trail last year.

Natives of prehistory visited frequently. Hunters stalked the wildlife attracted to the water and vegetation. Farmers diverted the stream into irrigation channels for their tiny patches of corn, beans, squash and cotton. Seasonally, they gleaned a variety of natural foods and plant products. They left scattered petroglyphs on boulders to mark the importance of the oasis.

The site witnessed a parade led by native groups who established foot trails for long distance trading routes long before the arrival of white settlers. When a Spanish exploration party including Father Francisco Garces ventured into the area seeking a route to the coast in the 1700s, local Mojave and neighboring Chemehueve tribes assisted and accompanied them. The natives met the first exploring fur trappers cordially in the 1820s. Later relations with encroaching whites turned much less hospitable.

The ancient route past Piute Creek carried no stranger travelers than the experimental camel caravan led across the desert in 1857-58 by soldier-surveyor-explorer Edward F. Beale. Camels subsequently served as beasts of burden in arid parts of the West for several decades in the late 1800s, including Nevada.

Although Beale and his camels encountered no hostile natives, an emigrant train across the Colorado River in Arizona was massacred in the fall of 1858. The incident led to the 1859 construction of Camp Colorado, later Fort Mojave, on the river 22 miles east of Piute Canyon. That year, hostiles also attacked a military expedition passing through the canyon. In 1859-60, the army established a chain of redoubts across the Mojave Desert. The first one west of Fort Mojave at Painter [sic] Creek was first called Fort Beale, but later renamed Fort Piute. Outposts to the west about 20 miles apart included forts at Rock Spring and Soda Spring.

Fort Piute housed 18 soldiers and their officers. Ruins of rock-walled buildings, passageways and corrals remain. The thick stone walls contained defensive rifle ports and metal deflecting shields. The larger of two buildings contained three rooms and a fireplace within walls measuring 25 by 60 feet.

The army manned the fort until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. California Volunteers re-manned it in 1863. Returning in 1866, the army used it through 1868. Later, the post became a relay station for the overland mail where stagecoaches changed horse teams. The steep, rough section of government road through Piute Canyon often put passengers afoot, even the sick or wounded. When steamboats began to ply the Colorado River and railroads finally crossed the Mojave, the centuries-old trail became a nearly forgotten path.

150 years ago, camels appeared on Southwestern desert trails

Winter Visitor Guide 2008
Colorado River Communities & Imperial Valley

Doug Baum of the Texas Camel Corps in a typical summer uniform worn by Lt. Edward F. Beale’s soldiers, if they wore a uniform at all.

If the first sailing ships, the first horses and the appearance of the first Caucasians – Spanish, French, English and Portuguese – flummoxed the natives in the Caribbean and in the Americas – imagine what the sight of a camel 150 years ago must have been like.

Writing in a report to Congress in 1858 of the expedition of camels that he led from Texas to California, across New Mexico and Arizona, Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale observed on Oct. 17, 1857 as his group of men and 25 camels neared the Colorado River:

“Here the Indians began to pour in upon us from the Mohave villages. First, two or three, and then by dozens. They were a fine looking, comfortable, fat and merry set; naked excepting a very small piece of cotton cloth around the waist, and, though barefooted, ran over the sharp rock and pebbles as easily as if shod with iron.

“We were soon surrounded on all sides by them. Some had learned a few words of English from trafficking with the military posts two hundred and fifty miles off, and one of them saluted me with: “God damn my soul eyes. How de do! How de do!”

The concept of using camels as pack animals was promoted by Sen. Jefferson Davis when he became Secretary of War in 1853, the idea implanted in his imagination five years earlier by a Major Henry C. Wayne.

Davis, who later assumed the presidency of the Confederate states, was forward-looking on behalf of the South – he was interested for economic and political reasons in seeing the South connected to the newly-acquired State of California. He favored the Gasdsen Purchase, for example, to expand lands of the Arizona territory for a southern railroad route to California.

That led to a $30,000 congressional appropriation in 1855 to conduct the experiment. Writes Lewis Burt Leslie in “Uncle Sam’s Camels,” about Beale’s introduction to using camels as transport animals:

“While with Kit Carson in an exploration of Death Valley, California, Beale had conceived the ideas thatthe camel, would solve the problem of conquest of waterless wastes in the desert.

“Particularly was Beale influenced by the reading of Abbe Huc’s ‘Travels in China and Tartary,’ which dwelt at some length upon the values of the camel for commerce and travel. Soon we find Lieutenant Beale in Washington, where he met Davis, and together these two enthusiasts looked forward to the arrival in the United States of the first camels.”

In fact 79 camels were purchased from the Middle East and shipped to Indianola, Texas, halfway between Galveston and Corpus Christi, then on to Camp Verde, Texas, near San Antonio.

A word or two about Lt. Beale, who by the time he was 28 years old, had traveled across the country 10 times. Born in 1822 in Washington, D.C., Beale was the their way though hostile lines to San Diego for reinforcements, in time to save Kearney’s troops.

Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale 1822-1893
Beale made six more trips across the country in the next two years, including a trip in 1848 where he carried proof of the discovery of gold in California and was instrumental in starting the Gold Rush of 1849 to the Golden State.

In 1853, Beale was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California and Nevada, and that year, he made another of his cross country journeys, evaluating a railroad route through southern Colorado and southern Utah. He made his home at Fort Tejon in California, near Bakersfield.

It was in 1857, then, that Beale was simultaneously appointed to survey a wagon route between Fort Defiance, N.M. and the Colorado River, along the 35th parallel, as well as to take command of the first – and last – U.S. Army Camel Corps.

The expedition embarked from Camp Verde at on June 25 of that year, a party of 44 men; 12 wagons; 95 mules, horses and dogs; and 25 of the 70 camels that had been imported.

At first the camels were outperformed by the mules. Wrote Beale at the end of the day:

“Left San Antonio at 1 p.m., and encamped at the beautiful spring at San Lucas, having made sixteen miles, the camels carrying, each, including pack saddles, nearly five hundred and seventy six pounds.

“This being the first day, and the animals not having performed any service for a long time, they seemed tired on their arrival at camp; but I hope, as we proceed, and they harden in the flesh, to find them carrying their burdens more easily.”

The Camel Corps proceeded through the Big Bend Country of Texas, stopping at Fort Stockton, the on to Albuquerque, then to Fort Defiance. Though his contract called for him to begin the survey at Fort Defiance, it actually was the Zuni Pueblo in Zuni, N.M. just across the northeast border of Arizona, that Beale began his assessment. Traveling west across Northern Arizona, much of which would later be Route 66, the expedition used the San Francisco Peaks north of present-day Flagstaff as a guidepost as they headed west.

And the camels began to outperform the mules (see related story), once they became accustomed to the daily grind of the trail, and carrying as much as a half a ton of supplies was a standard load for the good-natured beasts.

The expedition’s journey ended on Oct. 18, at Beale’s Fort Tejon home. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, interest in camels as a mode of transportation was put on hold until after the war. While Beale as convinced of the animals’ utility, soldiers and cavalrymen were not, for they considered the animals malodorous and difficult to handle – the latter assessment contrasting to the experiences of the 1857 expedition – compared to the behavior of mules.


President Abraham Lincoln pushed for the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, and rail became the preferred method of handling freight and the mails. The camels at Fort Tejon were taken to Los Angeles, where they hauled freight to and from the harbor’s docks. Those back at Camp Verde went to auction and ultimately carried freight or traveled with circuses.

Some camels were used in Western Arizona to carry goods across the desert. There were camels introduced from the Orient that ended up on Northern Nevada. Many camels were simply turned loose, leading to reports that remained unverified as late as 40 years ago that descendants had been spotted in remote areas.

And what of the wagon road survey that Beale conducted, between Zuni and the Colorado River?

Beale wrote to Congress that “… one may travel the road in witner an summer withough suffering the extremes of heat or cold,” providing charts of the summer and winter temperatures along the way, as well as faithful odometer readings.

Where there were canyons, washes for rivers, he suggested either bridges of diversion dams, depending on the situation, to straighten elbows that the party was forced to take from time to time. His estimate of cost: $100,000.

He stated: “As this will inevitably become the great emigrant road to California, as well as that by which all New Mexico will reach this place, it is proper that the government should put in it such a conditjion as to relieve the emigrant and stock drivers of as many hardships incident to their business as possible.

“For this purpose, I would recommend that water dams be constructed at short intervals over the entire road. With these and a few bridges and military posts I do not doubt that the whole emigration to the Pacific coast would pursue this one line, instead of being divided and scattered over half a dozen different routes…”

“I presume that there can be no further question of the practicability of the country near the thirty-fifth parallel for a wagon road,” he stated.

It wouldn’t be until much later that this became U.S. Route 66, and emigrants found many ways to get to the West Coast – by vessel around Cape Horn; the Butterfield Stage and rail through Southern Arizona and over Yuma Crossing and the Ocean to Ocean Bridge; and the Oregon Trail, to name a few.

Mojave milestones

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

By Susan Spano, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sailing the desert in an SUV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mysterious turnoffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rocking and rolling across the Mojave

GETTING THERE:

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

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

WHERE TO STAY:

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

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

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

WHERE TO EAT:

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

TO LEARN MORE:

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

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