Once-abandoned Searchlight subdivision may soon be buzzing with drones

Aerial view of Searchlight airport on Tuesday, April 11, 2017. Jonathan Daniels, founder of Praxis Aerospace Concepts International, plans to open a drone testing site at the airpark. (Michael Quine/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By Eli Segall
Las Vegas Review-Journal

SEARCHLIGHT — The once-abandoned subdivision off the side of U.S. Highway 95 is tucked out of view, but there isn’t much to see anyway — just some house-less streets next to a mile-long airstrip.

But in time, if Jonathan Daniels has his way, the property will be buzzing with drones.

Daniels, founder of Henderson-based Praxis Aerospace Concepts International, recently leased about an acre of land at the Searchlight Airpark for his drone-testing business.

He plans to start working from temporary trailers — the site has water and power hook-ups — by mid-May and eventually build a permanent facility. As part of his agreement with the property owner, Daniels also will manage the tower-less airport.

At first glance, Searchlight seems an unlikely place for aviation technology. It’s a pint-sized town some 60 miles south of Las Vegas with abandoned mines and mobile homes and rarely gets new bursts of commerce.

But the area has open airspace for drone testing, Daniels said, unlike the more-restricted Las Vegas Valley, as well as a paved airstrip next to paved streets with utility service. His goal is to make the airpark a launch point to fly back and forth from a Boulder City droneport — test flights that could open drones to a range of commercial uses, he said.

Government officials and industry executives are trying to make Nevada a major hub of drone development and testing. It’s too early to say whether Daniels’ arrival in Searchlight will spark a big inflow of other unmanned-aircraft businesses, but he would at least bring some life to a boom-era real estate project that crashed with the economy and looks like a ghost town.

“If I could have designed a turn-key, instant airport for unmanned aircraft, it would look just like that,” he said.

‘The golden ticket’

Daniels, a 45-year-old former Army helicopter pilot and infantryman, founded Praxis in 2011. The company mostly provides testing, training and other services for owners and operators of drones and other robotics.

He also is part of the group that plans to develop and operate the Eldorado Droneport in Boulder City, a 50-acre property designed to include a 15,000-square-foot terminal building and 860,000 square feet of warehouse, hangar, training, office and research and development space.

His goal is to have people flying drones from Searchlight to Eldorado and back, a roughly 35-mile trip each way.

Drone operators typically can fly only within their line of sight, but Daniels said he wants authorization to let people fly back and forth without needing to drive alongside the aircraft.

He said he stumbled across the Searchlight Airpark when his group was looking for places to expand beyond Boulder City. As Daniels sees it, being able to link the two is “a sheer serendipitous event.”

If drone operators can show the Federal Aviation Administration that they can fly longer distances without visual line of sight, he figures it could help them secure approvals for such commercial uses as parcel delivery or inspections of pipelines, railroads, power plants, farms and forest fires.

“The golden ticket to get there is being able to prove the technology to the FAA,” he said.

Boom, bust, then drones

Daniels contacted airpark owner Bill Turnbull of Seattle and pitched him on the proposed use. Turnbull, whose company RC Aerodyne sells remote-controlled helicopters and airplanes, said he hasn’t determined what to do with the rest of his roughly 40-acre spread.

Located at the south edge of Searchlight, the airpark was designed to have dozens of houses and aircraft hangars, a community where people could fly in and out as they pleased, similar to the tiny town of Cal-Nev-Ari about 10 miles south.

The developers, who teamed up in 2004 during the housing bubble, built roads and installed street signs, power boxes and fire hydrants. But by 2010, after the economy crashed, one partner had sued the other, and by 2011 the airstrip was “in disrepair and deteriorating” because the developers had defaulted on their loan, county documents say.

Lenders foreclosed on the project site in 2011. Turnbull and his wife, Joan, bought it in 2015 for $400,000. Their holdings include a portion of the airstrip, the rest of which is owned by the federal government.

Asked if he could design the airpark to his liking, Daniels said he would want traditional airport facilities such as hangars, flight training and fuel service, with a cluster of companies that work in small-aircraft aviation.

“That’s important for an airport,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s just a chunk of dirt.”

Old West lives on at Pioneertown

What started as an Old West movie set built in the 1940s, Pioneertown still lives on as a getaway that recalls those days. (Photo by Trevor Summons)

By Trevor Summons
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

One of the few places that never seems to change is the small Western town of Pioneertown, or Pi’ Town as many of the locals call it.

A walk down Mane Street — only hoof and foot traffic allowed — is always interesting. If the original builders of the town were to come back they would feel right at home.

Some of these builders were the stars of the old Western movies, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. They decided to convert the sets of their films into overnight dwellings and then they put in a small 18-room motel where they could stay after a day’s shooting out in the hot sun.

The six-lane bowling barn is still there, but it’s not functioning at the moment. It’s been up for sale a few times but it’s hard to find many takers; it’s difficult to make money from occasional bowlers.

It’s a shame as the bowling alley is an original — Roy Rogers bowled the first ball back in 1947 and it was a strike (of course!) A decade later school boys and girls were replaced with automatic pin setters, but then gradually business fell off.

At the end of Mane Street, sits Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, which is a thriving bar and restaurant business with regular concerts on the weekends. Its outside walls were some of the original sets used in those early films.

Today, during the daytime, you will find lots of horse trailers unloaded as today’s modern cowboys trail their mounts over the impressive terrain. It was this scenery that attracted Rogers and Autry to film so many movies and early TV series here.

Often at night they would gather in the motel, at the rear of Pappy and Harriet’s, play cards and carouse around. Room No. 9 became known as Club Nine for the fun they had there.

Last time I was there, I met up with John Jeffries who with his partner, Gary Suppes, makes saddles and other leather goods. As I walked along in the center of town he was there again. It was good to see him.

He is one of about 400 who make up the permanent population of the town. Of course that is not just Mane Street, but several blocks on either side.

“We’ve had a very good summer,” he said. “Lots of buses with foreign tourists from all over the world.”

It was a Thursday in late October when I was there, and it was pretty quiet at that time.

“At the weekend, things begin to build up,” Jeffries continued.

They do a lot of weddings, he told me.

“We offer a particular service,” he said. “For a $50 fee, we’ll try and talk ’em out of it!” he laughed into his grizzled beard. “We haven’t had any takers yet. But it might save them a lot of money later on.”

I can never quite work out exactly how many people live on the main street there, as there are a number of places with obvious signs of habitation. Perhaps there is a resident of the shop that sells Soap and Goats, but I never saw anyone about, not even a goat.

Pioneertown is a fun place to visit, and if you want to stay over like the old movie stars, then go online to the motel and see if they’ve got room. Prices vary from $110 to $210 per night. And if you’re thinking of getting hitched, then maybe a visit to the saddle maker might be an idea first.

Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada's Lake Mead Disappear

Many of the buildings used to lie 60 feet below the lake surface

A sign showing the trail to the ghost town of St. Thomas in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada in August 2015.

Nick Visser
The Huffington Post

Lest anyone forget, the drought in California and across the Southwest is still raging on. And one of the places where its effects can be observed most clearly is Nevada's Lake Mead.

The nation's largest reservoir has hit a series of troubling milestones over the past year, sinking to a record low in late June. Now, in the latest benchmark for the new Lake Mead, a town that flooded shortly after the completion of the Hoover Dam in 1938 has literally risen from the depths.

The ghost town -- once called St. Thomas, Nevada -- was founded as a Mormon settlement in 1865 and had six bustling businesses by 1918, according to Weather.com. But for nearly a century, it's been uninhabited and uninhabitable, existing mostly as an underwater curiosity.

Captured by two Getty photographers, the photos [at the link] below show the shell of the former settlement. St. Thomas has appeared under similarly dire drought conditions several times in the past decades.

The National Park Service has opened up a pathway from a parking area down to the ruins, which you'll be able to visit for the foreseeable future. Take a look here.

The ruins of a school in Mormon pioneer town Saint Thomas, flooded 70 years ago by the rising waters of the Colorado River when it was dammed to create Lake Mead.

The Desert Oracle Is Your New Favorite Guidebook

by Rick Paulas
KCET.org

The Desert Oracle is a new print quarterly, and it's amazing. I could try to come up with the perfect 100 words to sum up its contents, but I'll let its website speak for itself: "A pocket-sized field guide to the fascinating American deserts: strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros!"

Despite having a website, the quarterly's contents are only available in an honest-to-goodness printed-out pamphlet form. It can be picked up in a handful of shops strewn throughout the desert, or you can purchase a one-year subscription for a measly $15. It's worth it.

I spoke to Ken Layne, the quarterly's creator, about the project.

Where did the idea come from?

Ken Layne: I've been roaming the deserts for 30 years, and living in one godforsaken lizard-filled wasteland or another for probably a dozen years total. And desert people do get a little peculiar, after a while. You get used to the space and the quiet and the light and the silence. Get outside and away from the TV and life is full of small, strange moments, like finding a young rattlesnake bouncing over your dirt driveway while you're taking the beer bottles out to the recycling bin on a summer night, or the sudden realization that a lone coyote is tracking you down a desert canyon, or instantly knowing that's the International Space Station moving over your part of the sky at dusk.

I had to leave the desert for a while, and was having another existential crisis that no amount of salary or page views or retweets would ever fix. So I spent most of a year wandering around, back and forth across the Sierra, up and down the 395, and all over the Mojave and Great Basin. Since the early 1980s when I started writing for little Southern California papers and magazines, I knew I'd end up being the editor and publisher of some eccentric thing. It was just a matter of seeing the publication clearly before I ever started work on it. One day last summer, it appeared more or less fully formed, and then it was just a matter of figuring out how to make it exist.

What was behind the decision to go with a print version as opposed to a website?

Layne: I've been doing online writing and websites for 20 years now and it was a lot of fun for a long time. But it's a mature medium now, big companies and big numbers. And websites all look the same now, especially because most people view them through a Facebook or Twitter viewer on their phones.

The desert is a physical thing. People who love the desert physically miss it when they're away. The air is different, the space is generous, and I thought I might be able to capture some of that in a physical artifact -- something that comes by mail just four times a year, that you can read and enjoy in a personal and solitary way, no "sharing" required.

In the first issue, you have a piece about Art Bell's Coast to Coast show. To me, that voice and content encapsulate the tone of the desert for me. Why do you think that the show fit so well with the desert landscape?

Layne: Art Bell lives in the High Desert around Pahrump, not far from Area 51. That geography is in his voice and was always felt in his late-night radio show. It makes an ideal soundtrack for a late-night drive on a lonesome road. When his show was at its peak in the 1990s, it was really "community radio" for weirdos and desert rats.

Where are these going to be available besides getting a subscription?

Layne: I'm distributing the Oracle myself, so it's for sale at places I like in the kind of desert outposts I like: Joshua Tree, Amboy, Old Town Yucca Valley, beloved southwestern bookstores such as Back of Beyond Books in Moab and Antigone Books in Tucson. I'll find a few more places to put it with each issue, but for now here's a list of shops in four southwestern states where you can get a single copy.

What are you favorite SoCal hikes/campsites?

Layne: My most beloved hike was my daily walk when, for many years, I lived across from Black Rock Canyon Campground in Joshua Tree National Park. Out the door and west along the park boundary, connecting with the West Loop and the trails up to Warren Peak and Eureka Peak -- many spots where you can sit and stare out at the snowy peaks of San Jacinto and San Gorgonio. You can go all the way back to Black Rock Canyon spring and there's a huge flock of pinyon jays living there in the forest. This is prime Joshua tree woodland, with junipers and Mormon tea and all kinds of critters you will see on a regular basis: bobcats, black-tailed deer, my coyote-pack neighbors, gopher snakes and rattlers and rosy boas, tortoises, roadrunners, jackrabbits, antelope ground squirrels, families of ravens including a mysterious old albino raven that was seen around for many years, etc. I never saw the bighorn sheep, because they're shy and rise earlier than I do, but the evidence was everywhere. (One day I found the sawed-off, bloody horns of a mature ram dumped on the side of a dirt road just outside the park. The Fish & Game ranger came out and took a report.)

There's a place called "Section 6" and another called "Coyote Hole" not far from what we call "downtown Joshua Tree." Wonderful places, the latter with a real desert spring, and both are easy enough to find if you're interested. Boulders and chuckwallas, spring flowers and cactus blooms. You can camp in the rocks at the first place. (Please do clean up your mess, give a hoot, and don't act surprised when the locals pass by your remote campsite on their morning dog walks or bicycle rides.)

The wildest and most remote walks in urban Southern California are along the shore. A few years back, I walked the California Coastal Trail from Tijuana to San Francisco, and discovered some stunning wild shoreline here and there. There's a stretch between the very southernmost point of San Onofre State Beach, where there's a mile or more of parking-spot "campsites" on old Pacific Highway, and you walk down whatever canyon (always follow the surfers hiking down with a board under their arm), and you immediately forget Interstate 5 is about a thousand feet away, running parallel down the coastline. The canyon walls are full of chaparral, but also ferns and other fog-fed greenery. The spookiest part of this walk, headed north toward San Clemente, used to be walking over the nuclear plant's seawall -- which is part of the structure, so it hummed and vibrated as you walked across. And then you go through these 1940s-style Marine Corps beaches and cabins that are part of Camp Pendleton, palapa shade structures, woody wagons, it's a kind of time travel.