Got $5 million? You could own this sustainable "ghost town" in the Mojave Desert

In the Mojave Desert town of Nipton, the spirit of Western frontier has transformed a forgotten outpost into a self-sustaining ecotopia where the dream lives on.

Historic Hotel Nipton bed and breakfast.

By Dashka Slater
Sunset Magazine

One rule of Nipton living is that you never try to outshout the train. The noise might not seem so deafening closer to civilization, but in this Mojave Desert town, 60 miles south of Las Vegas, silence holds dominion. On my first visit there last year, I sat for a long while and heard nothing at all—no car, no airplane, no leaf blower, no barking dog, not a single human voice. The vast wordless desert surrounded me in all directions.

I’d arrived on a weekday, my rental car pinged by a shower of pebbles and grit as I motored down Nipton Road, which runs between Interstate 15 and the town of Searchlight, Nevada. Nipton was the only stop for miles, its existence marked by a wagon-mounted sandwich board that read:

WELCOME TO NIPTON, CA
B&B HOTEL & ECO-CABIN
STORE RV PARK & CAMPING
RESTAURANT

There were no people roaming the sidewalks because there were no sidewalks—or people, for that matter. A faded settlement of about 20 permanent residents, the town consisted of an assortment of structures, some solid and occupied, some as vacant and splintered as an Old West movie set. Gamers might know Nipton for its cameo in Xbox 360’s Fallout: New Vegas, where it played a post-apocalyptic wasteland infested by giant mantises. But otherwise it was your typical drive-through desert community, fixed at the crossroads of Nowhere Special and Wherever You Were Going. There was one notable exception: Nipton, and everything in it, was for sale.

Two weeks earlier I’d telephoned the town’s owner, an 83-year-old former gold miner named Gerald Freeman, known to everyone as Jerry. He purchased Nipton’s 80 acres in 1984, then spent the next 30 years slowly turning it into a desert ecotopia, where he did everything from plant trees to convert to biofuel to erect an 80-kilowatt solar plant that pumps the town with nearly half its power.

A future buyer with enough cash and the right sense of mission would get the deed to the whole thing—a town, yes, but also Jerry’s vision. “Nipton was where I realized my dream,” he told me. But time was running out. When we spoke, he’d just spent four months in the hospital with congestive heart and renal failures, and he was still getting his nutrition from a feeding tube. He was looking for someone to continue his work. Before we hung up, he invited me to Nipton, to come see his sustainable community up close.

And so there I was, standing outside the whitewashed adobe Hotel Nipton, gazing out at the knuckly brown mountains of the Ivanpah Range and imagining what it would be like to have your own little kingdom. Just as I was turning the thought over in my mind the first freight train came rumbling through, followed by a violent blast of horns and chiming bells. For 20 minutes the cacophony lasted. I wanted to remark on it, but it was too loud, and besides, there was no one around to hear me.

Jerry might own Nipton, but the day-to-day running of the place usually falls to Jim Eslinger. A former long-haul trucker with a drooping mustache and a bowie knife strapped to his hip, Eslinger serves as caretaker and hotelier of Hotel Nipton.

At the height of the season, the hotel receives a steady influx of desert ramblers and foreign tourists anxious for a whiff of the authentic Old West. But the day I was there, the only other visitors were a couple from Las Vegas on an overnight with their teenage niece. Eslinger made a bonfire behind the hotel. The blaze was huge, fed by an enormous tree stump and several sheets of plywood. Sparks flew up in great blizzards, hissing and crackling. The niece, already in her pajamas, watched it for a few minutes, then turned back inside in search of a Wi-Fi signal.

Eslinger had wandered through town eight years ago and never left. “I can’t even imagine living in a city now,” he said. “I’d rather put a bullet in my head and call it a day.” His needs were meager, but when our conversation turned to the latest Powerball mania sweeping the nation, he confessed a longing for the winning ticket.

“I’d buy Nipton,” he said flatly, throwing more combustibles on the fire. “And I wouldn’t change a thing.”

I was at the hotel lobby early the next morning, waiting for Jerry to arrive. These days, he and his wife, Roxanne Lang, spend most of their time in their home in Henderson, Nevada, about an hour away, because of his health. I thumbed through the scrapbooks stacked in the sitting area, each one stuffed with yellowed newspaper clippings: “Owner of historic Nipton thinking big.” “Nipton developer has big plans.” “Nipton is his personal fiefdom.”

When Jerry arrived, he was pushing a wheeled walker, and despite obvious signs of declining health, he retained a quality of robust vitality. He wore a leather vest and sunglasses, and he had the same rough-hewn features of the man in the photographs from 30 years ago. He settled into a bentwood chair on the hotel’s wraparound porch and attached an oxygen tube to his nose, so that his breath didn't run out before his thoughts did.

Jerry was born in Hollywood in 1933 to a Russian Jewish family. He graduated from Caltech with a degree in geology and eventually founded a mineral exploration company. After some success, he invested in several gold mines in the Ivanpah Valley, but already he was looking for his next project.

And there was Nipton, just down the road from his mines—and it was for sale. The way Jerry saw it, the tiny outpost had everything you needed to build a self-sustaining community, including access to the sweet waters of the Pleistocene- era lake below its surface. He bought it for $200,000.

At first, Jerry wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the town. He originally envisioned Nipton as an artists’ colony, while his wife pitched the town as a movie location (a few films, including Breakdown, with Kurt Russell, were shot there). Neither idea bore much fruit. But soon the newly remodeled hotel filled up with desert pilgrims, and the trading post—stocked today with guidebooks, dry goods, and local crafts—brought in a steady income. Jerry tried to open a gas station but found it too expensive. He conceived a barbecue business, but that took too much time. So he constructed a greenhouse from which to sell potted poplars and Christmas trees, but there was little demand. Then, certain that a new gold rush was about to strike the Ivanpah Valley, he spent $50,000 building an assay house and convinced a mining company to locate its office there.

But the dream was larger than any one venture. It was as old as the West and as human as the first Homo sapiens who trekked across the Bab el Mandeb strait in search of a new home. It was the dream of starting over and of forging a new and simpler path. “We’ve got all the resources we need to do that,” Jerry told me. “We’ve got the water, we’ve got the sunshine that gives us the power. We have the ability to grow things and to build structures from the natural materials around us.”

“After considering Freeman’s enthusiastic boosterism for a couple of hours, a listener comes away with one of two impressions,” a reporter for the San Bernadino County Sun observed in 1986. “Either this guy has really done his homework and Nipton’s development is a venture of genius. Or, he’s gotten too much sun.”

In 1991, Jerry struck gold once again. The Nipton Trading Post was granted approval to sell tickets for the California State Lottery, making it one of the closest retailers to Las Vegas. (Nevada has no state lottery.) For a while it was the highest-volume lottery-ticket retailer in California, and even today it remains one of Nipton’s most important sources of income.

The previous afternoon I’d strolled into the trading post, where two Buddhist monks in saffron robes were filling out their tickets. One was tall and thick, the other as tiny as a 10-year-old. They didn’t speak much English, so our conversation consisted mostly of the word “lucky,” passed back and forth with various inflections. The big monk had recently won $1,700, which he used to purchase a new iPhone. He held the gadget out for me to admire: “Lucky!”

Once the lotto took off, so too did Jerry’s vision for a sustainable community. First he added a cluster of tented eco-cabins, outfitted with platform beds and wood-burning stoves. Popular with today’s 30-something crowd, the cabins were based on a design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Then, in 2010, he assembled a solar plant, which produces 40 percent of the town’s power. It sits on the outskirts behind a barbed wire fence, its rows of reflecting harvesters mirroring the sun as it moves across the sky.

Jerry’s next step, he said, was to build a hydrogen system in order to store clean energy. He described a visit he recently had from Phil Hawes, the architect for the Biosphere 2 project, who spoke to him about using Nipton as a kind of hands-on sustainable-design classroom for San Francisco Institute of Architecture students. (When I spoke to Hawes, he sounded downright Jerryesque, conjuring visions of Nipton as a self-supporting Eco Village of 2,000 souls.)

But all of these notions depended on the right kind of buyer stepping forward. Someone who saw Nipton as Jerry did. Someone to keep the dream alive. “I’d like to move forward in the direction I’m going,” Jerry said. “That heritage, that legacy, that thrust that began with the first settlers.”

The setting sun had painted the desert pink. The mountains solidified into silhouettes, hoarding the evening shadows. It was time for Jerry to head back to Henderson. Eslinger walked him to his car.

“Thanks for taking care of Nipton,” Jerry said, his eyes misty. Then he and Roxanne drove off toward the train tracks and disappeared over the horizon.

A few months later, I called him at his home in Henderson. He’d come down with a bout of pneumonia not long after my visit, and his voice was faint, with long pauses as he gathered air into his lungs. While his dream buyer had yet to materialize, he had found new operators for the cafe and was hiring a property management company to help run Nipton. A few new residents had moved to town, and he was in talks with someone who wanted to install a solar observatory. He was heartened by these signs of interest, he said, his voice growing stronger. They told him he was on the right path, and he planned to stick around long enough to see where that path would lead. “We’ll see what happens,” he said. “Life has so many crazy twists and turns, you hardly know what’s going to happen from one day to the next.”

Then last October, I got an email from Roxanne. It was brief without being terse: Jerry had died in her arms a few days earlier. He was buried at a cemetery in the Mojave Desert. The town of Nipton is still for sale.

California desert town being sold for $5 million

The historic Hotel Nipton is included in the Nipton town site now for sale.

David Schuman
KTNV Las Vegas

A For Sale sign is up in front of the entire town of Nipton, California.

The sale includes the 80 acres of land, all the buildings, and the fields of solar panels.

Buyers are looking at the small desert community just across the state line for its environmental sustainability and its potential for development.

Six people live in Nipton full-time. They like the isolation.

"It's quiet except for the trains, and I don't even hear the trains anymore," said Jim Eslinger, who lives in Nipton with his girlfriend. "I sleep right through them."

Tony Castrignano with Sky Mesa Realty and Capital is the man tasked with selling the town.

For $5 million, the buyer gets the country store, the RV campgrounds, the Nipton hotel and the solar panels that allow Nipton to operate at 50 percent off the grid.

"You can take it to the resource and tourism industry or you can take it into a more commercial industry or a combination of both," Castrignano said.

He said potential buyers have talked about building housing, selling solar power, growing organic food and turning the community into a tourist hot spot.

"If you own the town you can call yourself the mayor if you want to because you have all the votes," Castrignano said.

He says there are about six serious buyers looking at Nipton right now, which include both individuals and companies.

A Ghost Town, Going Green

Mr. Freeman and his wife, Roxanne Lang, reopened the town’s store and cafe, and restored the hotel, room by room, creating a destination for bikers, hikers, miners and tourists. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

By DIANE CARDWELL
New York Times

NIPTON, Calif. — Gerald Freeman leaned on a walking stick on a dusty hill near the four rows of his solar arrays, talking about it like an apostle on a mission. Down the road are the eucalyptus trees he planted as a potential source of biomass. And not far away, he said, he hopes to install a hydrogen system, another source of renewable fuel.

It’s all part of Mr. Freeman’s unlikely dream here in the Mojave Desert — to turn this tiny town into a community running on clean power entirely of its own making.

The dream began in earnest about 30 years ago, when Mr. Freeman, a gold miner living in Malibu, bought this ghost town — hotel and general store included. He still has a ways to go, but Nipton now produces roughly half the electricity for its fluctuating population of 30 to 70 residents from the array Mr. Freeman installed in 2010.

“The more independent we can become of outside resources, the better,” Mr. Freeman said, citing the rising cost of utility power, frequent outages and preserving the environment as motivation. “I’ve been conscious of the global warming issue since my early days in school. It’s only now beginning to be so much part of the present day. People are slow to adapt to an oncoming reality.”

For decades, people have experimented with self-reliant living, whether hippies flocking to communes in the hills or survivalists hunkering down across the plains. But not since Henry David Thoreau took off into the woods near Walden Pond has the idea of going off the grid seemed so within reach — albeit this time without sacrificing the modern conveniences.

With cheaper and more widely available ways to make power at home or in town, individuals and communities have been moving ever closer to declaring their energy independence, using technologies like solar, batteries and even small-scale wind. In recent years, towns dedicated to environmental sustainability while reducing the reliance on fossil fuels — known as transition towns — have sprung up in Europe, Australia and the Americas.

Still, it is not yet easy to unplug from the power system, as Mr. Freeman’s journey — which he may not get to complete because of flagging health — illustrates.

Mr. Freeman, 81, first got to know the place — not much more than a few buildings plopped behind the railroad tracks like a movie set — back in the 1950s. With a degree in geology from the California Institute of Technology, he would come from Los Angeles to prospect for gold, spending days climbing and sampling the rocks on his own. He eventually established a successful mine and moved to Malibu with his second wife, Roxanne Lang, now 63, whom he had met on a dive boat off Catalina and wooed with the opening line, “Can I help you with your wet-suit?” she recalled.

But Malibu became expensive and was far from the mining operations he oversaw. So when Nipton came up for sale, he bought it, moving there with Ms. Lang in 1984.

The town offered tremendous natural resources in the form of a Pleistocene-era underground lake whose waters flow there first and strong, year-round sunshine barely trespassed by clouds. It also had a rich history, bustling from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries along with the mining industry, and even boasting a hotel that played host to the silent-movie star Clara Bow, who owned a ranch nearby.

But by the time the couple moved there, it was all but empty and in disrepair. They stayed for six years, until their son outgrew the one-room schoolhouse that serves the area, and then moved to Henderson, Nev., a Las Vegas suburb.

In that time, they reopened the store and cafe and restored the hotel room by room, creating a destination for bikers, hikers, miners and tourists, especially Europeans, looking for the flavor of the Old West.

Michael Truman, for instance, usually escapes the cold of Medicine Hat, in Alberta, Canada, to come to the area from November to March. He had never been to Nipton before, but took a different road looking for places to travel with the dog he was planning to look after for friends and stumbled upon it.

“It looked cool, so I said, ‘I’m going there,’ ” he said, adding that he would probably bring the dog back for a day in the preserve bordering the town. “I like plants and animals more than people — they’re easier to get along with.”

It has also attracted a cluster of about 10 full-time residents who work in Nipton, some who say they were attracted by its peace and solitude.

The couple running the cafe, Susan and Fernando Gamez, have begun growing some of the vegetables they use for offerings like the If Looks Could Kale burger, using an intensive vertical system intended to save on space, energy and water.

“The whole area is more and more into how do we use our environment,” said a woman behind the cash register who gave her name as Brenda M. “Let’s not trash it; what can we do with it?”

For Mr. Freeman, those questions were there all along. He had begun experimenting even before he bought the town, using a grant from the state to plant eucalyptus as a potential energy source and farming euphorbia, which produces a latex that can be refined into fuel.

But he had always been interested in solar, he said. Over the years, he talked to several companies about installing an array, but it was too expensive. Then he came across a Palo Alto-based company that used mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on light-sensitive material to increase the efficiency and lower the cost, and decided to go ahead, especially given the generous state and federal incentives.

That company, Skyline, has since gone out of business, but the array shines on.

“It seems to come up when the normal path of the 20th century toward eternal growth is stymied or when groups of people feel like that path is not going to work for them,” said Dona Brown, a University of Vermont professor and author of “Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America.”

Mr. Freeman said he was now looking to a system to make hydrogen, both to store energy and to sell. The couple have put in five tent cabins using a modified Frank Lloyd Wright design and are talking about building an R.V. park to accommodate workers from the giant Ivanpah solar power plant nearby and a rare-earth mine just around the bend.

Mr. Freeman may not be the one to see all those plans to fruition, however. With diagnoses of congestive heart and renal failures, he is considering selling the town or finding a partner who can realize the vision.

Standing near the spot where, on those long-ago prospecting trips, he would call the train depot to tell the motorman to pick him up on the way back, he referred to the need for self-sufficiency in the face of global warming and economic instability.

“Things are evolving and the future is clear,” he said. “It’s just a question of how soon we can get there.”

Summer Evenings In the Desert

Commentary | The Hidden Desert

The hour of sunset in the Mojave Desert | Chris Clarke photo

by Chris Clarke
KCET.com

It's hot in the desert right now. Triple digits last week in the Mojave a little earlier than usual, August weather arriving in June, and I spend most of my days indoors at the writing desk. That writing desk has a built-in alarm, though: it's next to a west-facing window with an overhang. When the sun shines in my eyes, sunset's an hour off, and it's time to walk out into the desert.

Even when the day is hot, at 3,500 feet sundown brings pretty rapid cooling. The day's stored heat radiates up into the sky. The breeze raises the hairs on my neck. 95° seems sweet after a triple-digit day, and the mid-80s sweeter still, and the slanting, coloring light draws me deeper into the desert.

Outside my house is a mature palo verde. It's flowering this month, sweet-scented yellow bean flowers that tempt passersby to lean in, breathe deeply, and come away with a face full of scratches from palo verde thorns. That's the voice of experience speaking.

In that long hour before the sun drops down behind San Gorgonio Mountain a million little flies and wasps come out to drink palo verde blossom nectar, all but invisible against the darkening sky. Invisible but not unseen: not long after the bugs come out, so do the bats. In my yard, three or four pallid bats tend to come out each night to keep the pollinators' population down a bit. They get bolder as the sky grows darker, and those in my yard have grown accustomed enough to me that they inspect me at remarkably close range, hovering three feet from my face for fifteen or twenty seconds.

When I lived in Nipton five years ago, my back yard faced out onto almost 200,000 acres of open Mojave, and I would go there in the evenings and watch the shadow of Clark Mountain sweep across twenty miles of desert. From a distance it looked as sharp as a knife's edge. As it drew closer, as the sun's disk began to hide in increments behind the mountain's summit ridge, that edge dulled. It became a long, shallow gradient from light to dark. The bats came out at the edge's mid-point, when the sky had turned from blue-white to salmon. The lesser nighthawks came out then as well, swooping more aggressively than the bats at their insect prey.

Nighthawks haven't discovered my yard in Joshua Tree, at least not that I know of. The bats don't have that company in the airspace around the palo verde.

In the square mile of desert behind my house, the cactus wrens start slowing their pace. They're one of the few birds here that's most active in mid-day, even in the hottest afternoons. They flit between the Joshua trees' limbs, their breasts' whitish speckles glowing pinker as they reflect the lowering sun's light. Crissal thrashers and Gambel's quail try to catch a few last beaksful of food, running around in the desert underbrush.

With the sun low in the sky, a remarkable thing happens for those animals that live close to the ground: the desert is suddenly both well-lit and full of shade. The shadows of the low shrubs start to fill all the open ground between them, offering a chance for animals to forage without getting broiled.

Lizards have a complicated relationship with shade in summer. In the mornings the larger lizards seek direct sun to boost their body temperature. In mid-day they've had enough and stay beneath the shrubs. Side-blotched lizards and Great Basin whiptails, common around here, take advantage of late afternoon's spreading shade to forage for ambling insects. On my last walk I watched as a whiptail launched itself at an Eleodes beetle. The beetle stood on its head at the lizard, which reconsidered its decision. Eleodes squirts a noxious chemical weapon out of its hind end at potential predators. The headstand is a warning. Most animals that have eaten a previous Eleodes don't have to think twice about backing off.

One can walk off into the sunset only so far. Eventually the sun sets all the way and you have to turn around and walk back. The shadow of San Gorgonio fills the Morongo Basin the way Clark Mountain's filled the Ivanpah Valley, and the far slopes of the Sheepholes stay brightly lit enough to silhouette the Joshua trees for the next half hour.

Of course, the whole notion of the "end of the day" is a subjective one. One person's dusk is another person's alarm clock. Across the desert, as the bands of red fade along the western horizon, a family business opens its doors for the new workday. Their yipping song carries on the wind, announcing the beginning of the evening's hunt. I'll hear them again at 4:00 am, if I'm lucky enough to be awake.

The tortoise tax

Steve Williams, Opinion Page Editor

Opinion

Steve Williams, Opinion Page Editor
Victorville Daily Press

If you know anything at all about Nipton, you know that for years it had the most lottery ticket sales in the state. That’s because it was the town nearest Primm and Las Vegas, and thus the most accessible place for many Nevadans to purchase tickets.

But from Nipton, on the northern edge of the Mojave National Preserve, those who visited to purchase tickets could look across 15 miles of dry lake bed and desert emptiness and see Brightsource’s huge new solar thermal plant, southwest of Primm. It doesn’t look very big from Nipton, though. It looks tiny against the mountains beyond, and tinier still when compared with the thousands of square miles contained in the Preserve.

But the plant sits on land that is prime habitat for the desert tortoise. So Brightsource, Google and NRG, the investors, have been fighting attempts by environmentalists to first bar the plant from being built, and then keep it from operating.

In a May 15 piece noting the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, two writers for PERC (Property and Environment and Research Center), Laurie Higgins and David Currie detail just how much it’s cost the companies and taxpayers to fight the enviros. To date, investors have allocated $56 million — and have already spent more than $130,000 per animal — to care for and relocate the species.

When the permit for the plant was finally issued after years of negotiations, it was estimated that 150 desert tortoises lived within the plant’s footprint. But environmentalists, citing more recent “studies,” now estimate that 750 are there. If 750 tortoises are on that land, there must be, oh, 20,000 of the creatures between the plant and Nipton. At $130,000 per, the desert tortoise population in the area is worth about $2.6 billion.

Higgins and Currie write that among creatures protected by the ESA, “the tortoise is one of the top recipients of tax dollars ... with little success in advancing conservation goals. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that the tortoise received nearly $190 million in tax-dollar support from 1996 to 2009, yet species population increased negligibly.” Or zero.

They also note that the plant received $1.6 billion in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to help create green jobs and energy. So, they write, “At the end of the day, we may have no tortoise, no green power, and no money.”

We in the Victor Valley know about the desert tortoise. On the “endangered” list, its presence has created endless delays in building everything from roads to freeway overpasses to the VVI power plant at Southern California International Airport. To what end? To make environmentalists feel good about themselves, apparently. Certainly their efforts have done nothing to increase the tortoise population.

Our only hope is that one of these years, environmentalists will begin using common sense to reach their goals. In the meantime, they’re just creating unnecessary economic woes, even to the extent of stubbornly keeping a “green” plant from generating electricity. Typically, that makes no sense at all.

Remote California town blazes trail with solar plant that saves water

New technology uses less water, which suits Nevada’s climate

A view of the Skyline Solar facility in Nipton, Calif. Friday, June 11, 2010. The 80 kilowatt , High Gain Solar (HGS) 1000 system power plant will provide 85% of Nipton’s electricity needs. (Steve Marcus)

By Stephanie Tavares
Las Vegas Sun

On the southern horizon is a new breed of solar plant, one that could be a game changer for the industry.

Just across the California border, Nipton has unveiled a sun-powered generator that is expected to provide about 85 percent of the town’s electricity over the course of a year.

The solar plant uses a new technology, concentrating solar photovoltaic, known as CPV, which could be a boon in places like Nevada where the sun is strong, but water for power plants is scarce.

Concentrating solar power plants are expected to use far less water than their solar thermal cousins because they lack the cooling requirements and don’t need water to heat for steam. And because they have fewer photovoltaic panels to be cleaned than a traditional photovoltaic plant, they could use less water than traditional photovoltaic arrays.

Although massive solar arrays on thousands of acres of mostly federal land get the lion’s share of the attention, some think everyday Nevadans will benefit more from growth in small-scale renewable energy systems called distributed generation. These smaller projects, like rooftop solar or small terrestrial projects like the one in Nipton, provide electricity directly to a building without expensive transmission lines. No bulldozing the desert, either.

The state energy office this month announced it will seek third-party agreements with small-scale solar developers to build dozens of new arrays on state land. Some of the projects are expected to be relatively portable solar arrays on vacant lots — just like the one 64 miles southwest of Las Vegas in Nipton.

The 80-kilowatt project is part of the one-time mining camp’s plan to become an eco-tourism mecca. Nipton is on the northern edge of the Mojave National Preserve, home of the popular Kelso Dunes. Many park visitors are “granola and Prius” types, and they usually stay at campgrounds and hotels in Nipton. The town is betting that stepping up its environmental reputation will drive tourism growth.

“We’re in the hospitality business in Nipton,” said Gerald Freeman, its principal administrator. “This is all part of our plan to be an environmentally friendly destination. We’re going to project our environmentalism strongly. That’s the underlying theme of Nipton for the future: to move progressively toward a sustainable, environmentally friendly community.”

And in the Mojave Desert, that means solar panels.



Freeman has been looking into powering the town with renewable energy since the 1980s. But it was only recently, with the new technology, federal tax incentives and the advent of third-party ownership, that the plan became economically viable.

It took just a few months for Freeman to find a company that would finance the purchase and installation of the system in exchange for a set price per kilowatt hour sold to Nipton residents.

Prices charged by the local utility, Southern California Edison, have gone up an average of 6 percent a year, Freeman said. Under the power purchase agreement, the rate could increase only 3 percent a year. And after the tax incentives run out in about six years, the town has the option of buying the installation at a reduced price.

“We’re pleased to be able to lower our cost and also do our bit in terms of getting off fossil fuels,” Freeman said. “It’s going to save us money right from the start and will get better later on as electric (bills) rise. It was an easy decision to put in a system that would cover most of our power needs in Nipton.”

The system is designed by Skyline Solar, a Silicon Valley-based solar photovoltaic manufacturer that has combined the portability of solar photovoltaics with the concentrating power of mirrors used in solar thermal power plants.

With the help of an Energy Department grant and U.S. Patent Office fast tracking, Skyline is among the first American companies to bring concentrating photovoltaic designs to market.

Its system resembles the Nevada Solar One thermal array in Boulder City, except where the center-mounted pipes full of molten salt would be is a row of photovoltaic cells. Using photovoltaics on a concentrating solar power frame allows the plant to take up less land, and eliminates the need for extensive land leveling, pipe laying and liquid storage silos. And with the addition of mirrors, it can produce far more electricity than a traditional solar photovoltaic array.

No pipes, no buildings and no water or chemicals are needed, Skyline spokesman Tim Keeting said.

Products such as Skyline’s can be planned and assembled quickly — the Nipton project took just five weeks to come online — and they can be built with tiny footings drilled into the land or no drilling at all, making it easier to convert back to bare dirt should the land be needed for another use later, said Robert Mumford, spokesman for the solar division of Panelized Structures, which installed the system.

The Skyline system is one of the first concentrating solar photovoltaic systems to come to market. That’s mostly because the federal government has historically channeled research and development grants to rooftop photovoltaic technologies, according to National Renewable Energy Lab reliability group manager and photovoltaic pioneer Sarah Kurtz, who was involved with the Energy Department grant and attended a ribbon-cutting celebrating the new power plant in Nipton on Friday. A few of the town’s residents were there along with local and county dignitaries and the team of engineers, government workers, contractors and financiers who made the project happen.

“There has been a real change in just the last few years,” Kurtz said.

The Skyline system, which she called “elegant and versatile in its design” was able to move from paper to prototype much more quickly than some other CPV systems because the design was simple and took components that had been tested elsewhere and combined them for increased efficiency and expedited assembly.

“Skyline has broken some records on bringing this to market with speed,” Kurtz said.

These smaller solar installations also save land because they usually sit on developed sites or sites that were bulldozed in anticipation of development. And they rarely need new transmission lines and corridors to carry the power to market because they usually serve nearby buildings.

Skyline has about 20 megawatts worth of projects in various stages around the globe, including Nevada. Keeting said it is too soon to reveal exactly where and when its first CPV project will begin construction in the state, but he says if all the contracts and permits work out it could be within the next couple of years.

Small-scale solar is a growing business in Nevada. Panelized Structures’ Las Vegas team built its first large distributed generation solar project in the parking lot of the ProCaps laboratory in Henderson two years ago. The business has grown by as much as 100 percent each year since, while the rest of its building divisions foundered, Mumford said.

“The business has just exploded,” Mumford said. “In the month between May and June, we’ll install 3.4 megawatts of solar panels across the Southwest — about 2.5 megawatts in Nevada alone.”

NV Energy to buy power from Searchlight solar plant

By Steve Green
Las Vegas Sun

The small town of Searchlight in Southern Nevada moved another step toward becoming a big energy center Thursday with the announcement of a deal by NV Energy to buy power from a big solar plant planned for the community.

Searchlight, on U.S. 95 between Boulder City and the California town of Needles, is already proposed to be the site of a big wind energy farm to be operated by Duke Energy. With 161 turbines producing 370 megawatts of power on public land totaling 26,000 acres, that project could serve 100,000 homes.

NV Energy and American Capital Energy announced Thursday they have entered into a long-term power purchase agreement for the sale of energy produced from ACE's 20-megawatt solar photovoltaic power plant to be constructed in the desert near Searchlight, 55 miles south of Las Vegas.

The project, expected to be completed by mid-2010, will be larger than the 14-MW photovoltaic plant completed in 2007 at Nellis Air Force Base. The Nellis plant, toured by President Obama on a recent visit to Las Vegas, is the largest photovoltaic facility currently operating in the United States, NV Energy said.

At 20 megawatts, the Searchlight plant will serve about 4,000 homes, said Tom Anderson, ACE's director of Southwest Business Development. In comparison, Acciona's Boulder City solar plant generates 64 megawatts. It uses a different technology in which concentrated sunlight heats a liquid.

"This is another major step in our commitment to bringing power from renewable resources to the citizens of Nevada," Michael Yackira, NV Energy president and chief executive, said in a statement on Thursday's deal. "Our state is blessed with abundant solar, geothermal and wind resources, and expanding the use of these resources through power purchases of this kind or direct investment in renewable projects is one of our top priorities."

Terms of the power purchase agreement, which is subject to approval by the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada, were not disclosed.

The agreement will assist NV Energy in meeting Nevada’s renewable energy standard, which was recently increased by the Legislature. The standard now requires that 25 percent of energy be generated by renewable resources and energy efficiency and conservation programs by 2025.

The companies said all of the electricity output from the plant will go to customers of NV Energy’s southern service territory.

Construction of the project is expected to create more than 120 jobs and will further develop Nevada’s burgeoning renewable energy workforce, the companies said.

"American Capital Energy is excited about the Searchlight Solar I solar PV project. We are honored to have been selected to work with NV Energy to deliver clean, renewable solar energy to Southern Nevada," Tom Hunton, CEO of Massachusetts-based ACE, said in a statement.

In a presentation earlier this year to the Searchlight Town Advisory Board, ACE officials said the plant is planned for 215 acres of private land 1 mile northwest of U.S. 95 and state Highway 164 headed toward Nipton, Calif.

Anderson said the cost of the project isn't being disclosed and that the deal with NV Energy will help the company obtain financing for the project.

The company plans to work on construction permitting this year and start building the plant in early 2010, assuming the power-purchase deal is approved by the Public Utilities Commission.

ACE, he said, has built about 20 energy projects while its executives combined have built hundreds of such projects.

He said ACE has been working with the Searchlight community and feels it has support there for the project.

"NV Energy is becoming one of the more progressive renewable energy utilities," he added.

Ivanpah Valley project causing concerns

By BENJAMIN SPILLMAN
REVIEW-JOURNAL [Las Vegas, NV]

A proposal to build a Southern Nevada airport that could handle as many as 35 million passengers a year could be facing delays before it even gets off the ground.

The National Parks Conservation Association, an environmental group dedicated to protecting national parks, wants to extend a Monday deadline for public comments on the proposed Ivanpah Valley airport another 45 days to give people in California a chance to weigh in on the project.

Environmentalists and operators of the Mojave National Preserve fear noise, light and pollution from a major airport near Primm would threaten the sanctity of the 1.6 million acre preserve.

"Natural quiet is a delicate and important feature," said Dick Hingson of Flagstaff, Ariz., who has researched the impact of aircraft noise on national parks for the Sierra Club. "People go out there ... to get away from airports, traffic noise, interruptions."

But there's pressure to get the new airport built fast. McCarran International Airport, already the fifth-busiest in the nation, serving more than 44 million passengers annually, could be at capacity of 53 million by 2011.

Officials in Clark County, which operates McCarran and supports the Ivanpah Valley site, say the soonest a new airport could be built is 2017.

Even without delays, the visitor-dependent Las Vegas economy could face six years with a discrepancy between the amount of new hotel rooms it could add and the number of people who could be shuttled in to fill the beds.

"At that point, we have to be very, very creative about how we are going to get people in here," said Chris Jones, spokesman for McCarran. "If we want to continue to bring people in to fill the resorts, there has to be a new airport."

The federal government seems inclined to stay the course and deny the conservationists' request for a deadline extension.

"We are going to elect to keep the comment period closed on Nov. 6. That was the close of the comment period, and we are sticking to that at this time," said Andy Richards, manager of the Federal Aviation Administration's San Francisco district office.

Officials will use the comments in part to determine what issues to study when they draft an environmental impact statement. The goal is to have a draft environmental impact statement by January 2009, Richards said.

"If we would like to stay with January of 2009, we must remain on schedule," he said, adding there will be more opportunities for public comment.

"This is just the start," he said.

Richards defended the process and said there was no need to hold public forums, called scoping sessions, outside Nevada.

"The project is in Nevada. It was our feeling we well publicized it among the California agencies of concern," he said.

During a series of scoping meetings in October in Las Vegas and Jean just 10 people spoke out on the proposal.

Their concerns centered on whether the airport would disrupt off-road vehicle recreation in the Ivanpah Valley, possible impacts on the desert tortoise and worries about the region's water supply.

The highest number of concerns came from the off-road riders who hold races in the open desert area.

The distribution list for information on the scoping process included more than 100 agencies, American Indian tribal governments and elected officials at all levels of government, including federal agencies and some Indian tribes in California.

No local governments or elected officials from California were on the list.

Also, no scoping meetings were held in California, even though aircraft from the airport would fly over both states.

"The fact that a scoping meeting was not scheduled in California suggests that (consultants coordinating the process) have avoided developing awareness of this project in Southern California, even though portions of the desert region may be significantly affected by it," wrote Ron Sundergill, director of the Pacific region of the National Parks Conservation Association in an Oct. 31 letter to the FAA and the Bureau of Land Management.

Sundergill cited several Mojave ranches and the town of Nipton, Calif., as well as remote desert roads as examples of places that could be affected by the proposed airport.

Linda Slater, a ranger at the Mojave National Preserve, said aircraft could disrupt the serenity of the preserve. Serenity is a major draw for park visitors, she said.

"They would be banking right along the boundary of the park," Slater said. "It would really change the experience for some of the people camping in that corner of the park."

Quirky desert town takes pride in what it has to offer

NIPTON - They came here for the gold.

By MARK MUCKENFUSS
The Press-Enterprise

Not that they found much, at least not enough to get rich.

But that didn't keep them from staying in this speck of a town in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Nipton is California's last outpost off of Interstate 15, just 2 ½ miles from the Nevada state line.

Heading south on Nipton Road from the interstate, the town is a small puff of green in the road on the far side of the valley that bleeds into Ivanpah Dry Lake.

Its 30-some residents live in a brutal yet scenic landscape, where the wind whips west from the Mojave National Preserve's barren New York Mountains and trains thunder by on their way to and from Los Angeles.

Coming into town, visitors cross the rails to find a dirt parking lot on one side of the road where the Nipton Trading Post is flanked by a café and the Hotel Nipton. A dusty RV park sits on the other side of the road.

Nipton was once touched by celebrity -- silent-film star Clara Bow occasionally stayed in its tiny hotel. Now it is a curiosity for tourists, a road stop for bikers and a place for people with little love for the city to hide away.

Jerry Freeman, who bought the town in 1984, is working to make it an inviting place for artists. He has begun an artist-in-residence program with the help of the national preserve and hopes to expand it.

While any large mining operations around Nipton have pretty much dried up, Freeman still finds the gold connection interesting.

The first man to settle here, at the turn of the 20th century, was Samuel Duncan Karns, a man who made millions in Pennsylvania oil and then lost it by investing in railroads. He came west to look for gold and established the Nippeno Consolidated Mine, reportedly borrowing a Pennsylvania area Native American name.

Karns died in 1909, four years after the railroad came through and dubbed the spot Nipton.

In 1913, another prospector showed up. Harry Trehearne was a miner from Cornwall, England. He never had much luck finding precious ore, but he opened a store in Nipton, selling supplies to other miners.

That building, not much more than a shack, still stands on the property, behind the Hotel Nipton and across from a dirt road that Freeman says was once a stage route linking Searchlight, Nev., -- 20 miles east -- with the rail line.

A trained geologist, Freeman first came to Nipton in the late 1950s when he was a college student. For a time after he graduated, he would show up most weekends, looking for gold.

"I'd take the train and arrive here in the early a.m.," he says. "I had a Jeep parked here and I would spend the weekend prospecting. At that time, the hotel was in service."

But things were on the decline. Trehearne, who took over construction of the hotel from the railroad and later added the trading post, had died in 1949. Subsequent owners let things fall apart.

By the early 1980s, when Freeman noticed a sales ad for the property and drove out to look at it, Nipton was more desolate than he remembered.

"The hotel was a wreck," he says. In fact, the county had condemned it.

"We bought a ghost town and decided to transform it," he says, "to take this clay and reshape it into something I consider more useful and interesting and enduring."

He stops talking as one of the many daily trains rumbles down the track.

"Out here the protocol is don't try to talk when a train goes by," he says. "Nothing you have to say can't wait until after the train goes by."

After investing lots of time and money in the hotel, Freeman and his wife reopened it in 1986 as a bed and breakfast. It has only five rooms. Four eco-cabins have been added out back.

A cactus garden with a geometric design fronts the small hotel, which was built sometime between 1905 and 1910. On its front porch are old round-back wooden rockers. Inside, historic photos dot the walls. An old wood stove is the centerpiece of the long narrow lobby.

Freeman points out Room No. 3.

"Clara Bow, she was the most famous celebrity to visit here and this was her favorite room," he says.

She and her husband lived on the Walking Box Ranch near Searchlight. "Her husband drove their cattle here to load them on the train and they would stay here."

When the hotel first reopened, Freeman says, business was understandably slow. But with the establishment of the Mojave National Preserve in 1994, things picked up. The hotel is usually booked for most of the spring.

Warm Welcome

People began moving in and making Nipton their home, as well.

Initially miners populated the RV park when the area enjoyed a brief boom in the late 1980s. Most moved out, but others came. Those who live here say it has a charm that may not be immediately evident.

Cindy Adams, 57, remembers her first visit. She and her husband moved here six months ago from Colorado when he took a job at the mining operation in nearby Mountain Pass.

They pulled up one evening, hauling a trailer with their belongings.
"I leaned down and looked out the window and then at my husband and I said, 'Is this it?' " she says.

The friendly greeting they received improved her outlook.

"I went into the store and they were like, 'Oh yeah, we knew you were coming,' " she says.
She's now adjusted to the isolation of the desert, even though sometimes it's a little too slow for her. She works in the Trading Post two days a week and helps out at the café.

"Every two weeks we have big excitement," she says, laughing. "The bookmobile shows up on Wednesday and everybody comes down and gets coffee at the store and their books. And on Friday, the Schwan's man comes.

"But there're days when it's very quiet and we're all, 'Hmmm ... ' "

Rosie Davidson and her husband Donald are Washington, D.C., residents who are in their third extended stay in Nipton. Donald is part of the Artists in the Parks program and is working for the Mojave National Preserve as Nipton's current artist- in-residence.

"I fell in love with it the first time I saw it," Rosie says of the town. "I think this place is idyllic in many ways."

Donald says he finds beauty in the stark desert surroundings. He spends most days in the field, cataloging and doing pen and ink drawings and watercolors of native flowers. He may drive as much as two hours into the desert to find the particular species he's looking for.

"There's so much to preserve here," he says. "It's one of the most unsullied desert environments that the public has access to. The programs that I am part of and that I promote are more needed out here."

In addition to providing artwork and information to the park service, Davidson conducts educational workshops, teaching adults and children how to recognize and draw native plants.

"Visitors no longer just want to walk through a park," he says. "They want to engage in an experience such as a hands-on workshop where their work can make a contribution."

Some of Davidson's work hangs in the Trading Post, which is filled with curious items such as old lanterns hanging from the ceiling, American Indian dolls, papier-mache camels from India and plush scorpions and tortoises. If you want to buy a Nipton postcard you have one choice, showing the hotel, of course.

Desert Dwellers

Next door, the Whistlestop Oasis boasts a rooftop sign that says, "Best Burgers Around."

Being as there isn't much else around for 20 miles that might not mean much. But Bill Sarbello, 60, who runs the place, says customers drive from as far as Henderson -- 50 miles -- to eat in the casual hominess of the diner. Then they leave, which is just how he likes it.

"Come in and have a couple of beers, something to eat, play a game of pool and go away," Sarbello says.

The ex-New Yorker by way of Florida came to Nipton three years ago to take over the café.

"I'm making something grow out here in the desert," he says.

He'd been to the area before and knew what to expect when he arrived, not only from the town but the residents. He'd seen the same thing when he lived on St. John, one of the Virgin Islands.

"St. John is a desert," he says, with the only source of water being rainfall. "Everything that grows there has a thorn or a barb, and so do the people. Nipton's the same way. If you're going to come here and live, you're probably going to have some kind of thorn."

Larry Jordan, who has been running the Trading Post for six months, has seen it, too.

"Desert dwellers, they're kind of not in the mainstream," he says. "Maybe they're here because they couldn't make it anywhere else in society and they kind of keep to themselves."

Jordan and his wife are temporary residents. They are part of a program that provides store managers and workers to national parks and private campgrounds. They plan to be gone when the full heat of summer hits.

Until then, he says, he tells friends, "We're conveniently located in the middle of nowhere."

Tensions high in the preserve

Gun incident highlights residents' animosity toward the National Park Service

By KELLY DONOVAN & IAN MORRISON / Staff Writers
Victorville Daily Press

Last month, a local resident was arrested on suspicion of pointing a rifle at two National Park Service rangers in the Mojave National Preserve.

The incident underscores some of the tensions in the preserve, a place where residents steeped in the traditions of the Old West are grappling with the transition to a culture more similar to that of a national park.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, Leo H. Spatziani and another man were approached by the rangers as the men allegedly operated a dredging machine on public land near an area rich in sensitive archeological and cultural resources.

Bobby Parker, the other man with Spatziani, said this week that he and Spatziani were on Parker's 160-acre homestead, working to install a water line, when the rangers came up and asked them to stop.

Parker said he isn't sure why Spatziani reacted the way he did, but he guessed that Spatziani is among the preserve residents who are fed up with the National Park Service after more than 10 years of the agency's presence there.

The Mojave National Preserve's chief ranger, Denny Ziemann, said he thinks residents like Parker — who contends that the Park Service has a vendetta against him — are the vocal minority. Most of the people in the preserve are able to co-exist with the park service peacefully, Ziemann said.

While some residents report having good relations with the park service, there are also some who have complaints.

The birth of a preserve

The Mojave National Preserve, which is east of Barstow, sandwiched between interstates 15 and 40, was born after President Bill Clinton signed the California Desert Protection Act in 1994.

Unlike most national parks, a national preserve allows uses like hunting, grazing and mining within its territory.

And within the Mojave National Preserve, private land holdings are interspersed with federal property. The preserve is sparsely populated with an estimated 200 or less residents who've gotten used to life in the wilderness — many of whom lived in the area for years before the preserve was created.

Some of those people opposed the creation of the preserve.

"It was unwelcome," said Gerald Freeman, who operates a hotel, RV park, store and restaurant in Nipton, on the northern boundary of the preserve. "For the most part the locals were hostile. But a lot of them were squatters on government land ... they were just sort of anti-establishment, like the militias in some of the other states."

Ranching and land ownership

Critics like Parker and Dennis Casebler, a historian who runs the Goffs Schoolhouse, use the harshest possible language to describe how the park service has dealt with the people who live in the 1.6-million-acre preserve. Casebler goes as far as likening the park service to the Gestapo.

Casebler started to take action and wrote a letter Feb. 24 to U.S. Rep. Jerry Lewis,R-Redlands, that contains a litany of complaints about the park service.

Among other things, Casebler and Parker accuse the Mojave National Preserve of trying to eradicate the ranching and mining industries there — a charge the agency denies.

Ziemann said he doesn't think the park service has ever rejected a mining application in the preserve. He also said the Park Service doesn't pressure ranchers to leave, although the retirement of all the grazing allotments in the preserve is part of its General Management Plan, a blueprint for its future.

"We're not going to force these ranchers out," he said. "Nobody will ever be forced to sell their land."

Three major ranching families sold their properties to the National Park Foundation in recent years and moved out of the area, retiring their grazing allotments. Because the government cannot directly acquire land, the foundation buys it and then donates it to the park service.

Rob Blair, who is a fourth-generation member of the last remaining large ranch in the preserve, said he knows the park service wants the Blair Ranch grazing allotments to be retired. However, he said the park service and the National Park Foundation haven't tried to force him, because any sales need to be with willing sellers.

However, Blair said he knows some people feel intimidated.

"People say, 'They're going to take our land if we don't sell to them,' " Blair said. "People are scared for their homes, some of them."

One longtime resident of the area, Mike Daughtery of Baker, blames the park service for driving out the ranchers with grazing regulations.

However, he also said the ranchers might not have had other opportunities to sell their holdings for cash had the National Park Service and National Park Foundation not been interested in the land.

"There's no simple answers to this stuff," Daughtery said.

The federal government can forcibly acquire land through eminent domain proceedings, arguing that it is in the public's best interest, but Ziemann said the Mojave National Preserve would not do that.

"The claim that we're harassing these people or running them out is not true," Ziemann said.

One recent land dispute that has sparked public interest and continues to infuriate Parker and Casebler is a dispute involving longtime preserve resident Connie Connelly, who Casebler calls "a genuine desert character."

Parker and Casebler said they are upset that the park service has forced Connelly to leave the simple home she's lived in for years in a remote part of the preserve.

Ziemann said that Connelly was living on park service property without a valid lease — essentially squatting. Also, he said the park service had to spend about $60,000 several years ago to clean up waste generated at the site.

To help Connelly, Ziemann said the park service offered to buy her a new home anywhere she wanted. In the end, she agreed to move to Wyoming, and is scheduled to move this month, he said.

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/.

The Mojave National Preserve: 1.4 million acres of contradictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lovely, bitter pill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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