Joshua trees meet very different fates in California, Arizona

The sun goes down on Joshua trees at Castle Mountains National Monument in eastern California on Feb. 1, 2016. Private land across not far from here was recently transfered to Mojave National Preserve in part to protect these iconic desert plants. (David Becker/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

It’s been an up-and-down month for Joshua trees in the region.

At Mojave National Preserve in California, thousands of the iconic desert plants recently won permanent federal protection, thanks to a land transfer that added 3,100 acres to the park 90 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, in Mohave County, Arizona, a Las Vegas businessman is defending himself from allegations of a “Joshua tree massacre” on about 100 acres of private property he’s clearing for agricultural development.

Al Barbarich, who owns the land about 95 miles southeast of Las Vegas and hopes to establish a nut and fruit orchard there, said his permit to clear the land did not require him to save any of the Joshua trees. But he said he arranged to have about 100 of them dug up and replanted at homes, a school and other locations in the area — all at no cost to those who received the plants.

“We tried to do something nice for the neighbors and the community,” he said.

Some area residents didn’t see it that way. In online posts and a Feb. 12 story in the Kingman Daily Miner newspaper, the developer was accused of wholesale Joshua tree murder.

Barbarich acknowledged that some plants were destroyed as the land was cleared, though he couldn’t say how many. He said a lot of the Joshua trees shown piled up in the photos posted by his critics were older plants with little hope of being successfully transplanted.

The negative publicity is “unfortunate,” Barbarich said, because he felt like he was trying, at his own expense, to do the responsible thing. “We wanted to preserve the trees to the extent that people wanted them,” he said.

FROM PRIVATE TO PROTECTED

The additional Joshua trees now under the protection of Mojave National Preserve in California were also once subject to the whims of private development.

The plants are growing on what used to be scattered pockets of private land within the boundaries of the 1.6 million acre desert preserve. Over the past decade, the nonprofit Mojave Desert Land Trust has been buying up such “private in-holdings” and selling or donating them to the National Park Service.

The latest land transfer, completed earlier this month, involved 110 scattered parcels ranging in size from 5 to 320 acres.

Frazier Haney, conservation director for the trust, said most of the land is located in Lanfair Valley near the eastern edge of the preserve, an area “really rich in Joshua trees and Mojave yucca.”


Haney said the trust purchased the property from “a variety of willing sellers” over the past nine years. The group paid a total of $1.5 million for the land and received $1.4 million from the park service in return.

That money will be used to buy other private property within the preserve and other desert parks in California, Haney said.

“Scenic views, sensitive habitat and historic resources that might otherwise be lost are now protected in perpetuity for all to appreciate and enjoy,” Greg Gress, regional realty chief for the park service, said in a written statement.

Haney said private in-holdings are not governed by the same rules and protections as the surrounding park land. Gradually eliminating the patchwork of in-holdings simplifies management of the entire preserve, he said.

‘STRICTLY WILLING SELLERS’

But Haney stressed that the trust isn’t trying to force private landowners off their property, some of which dates to the days of homesteading in the area roughly 100 years ago. “It’s strictly willing sellers,” he said.

Since it was founded in Joshua Tree, California, in 2007, the conservation group has donated more parcels of land to the park service than any other trust in the country, Haney said.

Mojave National Preserve has gained more than 30,000 acres — and countless Joshua trees — through the trust’s efforts.

Haney said more than 1,300 private parcels remain within the boundaries of the preserve, though, “so we’ve still got a ways to go.”

Nonprofit land trust turns over 3,000 acres to Mojave National Preserve

An entrance to Mojave National Preserve on Zzyzx Road near Baker, Calif. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Associated Press
Los Angeles Times

A nonprofit group has donated more than 3,000 acres of desert land to the Mojave National Preserve.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust announced Wednesday that it had handed over ecologically and historically significant land to the park. The 110 parcels already are surrounded by the national preserve. They include juniper and yucca stands and a century-old homestead site.

The trust has an ongoing program to buy up private land that survived within the boundaries of the Mojave National Preserve, Joshua Tree National Park and Death Valley National Park.

“Development of this private land can degrade neighboring park resources, impact public access and cause management problems for park staff,” a trust statement said.

Over the past decade, the trust has conveyed about 23,000 acres of land to the National Park Service.

“Our great desert parks are immeasurably enhanced” by the work, Greg Gress, regional realty chief for the National Park Service, said in a statement. “Scenic views, sensitive habit and historic resources that might otherwise be lost are now protected in perpetuity for all to appreciate and enjoy.”

Shrinking Colorado River is a growing concern for Yuma farmers — and millions of water users

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Los Angeles Times

The Colorado River begins as snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains and ends 1,450 miles south in Mexico after making a final sacrifice to the United States: water for the farm fields in this powerhouse of American produce.

Throughout the winter, perfect heads of romaine, red-and-green lettuce, spinach and broccoli are whisked from the warm desert soil here onto refrigerated trucks that deliver them to grocery stores across the continent. If you eat a green salad between Thanksgiving and April, whether in Minnesota, Montreal or Modesto, odds are good that some of it was grown in or around Yuma.

The summer freshness on all of those winter plates reflects the marvel of engineering the Colorado has become — and why managing the river in the Southwest's changing landscape seems so daunting.

The Colorado is suffering from a historic drought that has exposed the region's dependence on a single, vulnerable resource. Nearly 40 million people in seven states depend on the river, a population some forecasts say could nearly double in the next 50 years.

The drought, now in its 16th year, has made one fact brutally clear: The Colorado cannot continue to meet the current urban, agricultural, hydroelectric and recreational demands on it — and the point at which the river will fall short could come sooner than anyone thought.

That is true even after an unusually wet spring in the Rocky Mountains, where runoff feeds the Colorado and its tributaries.

In the decades to come, federal officials say, significant shortages are likely to force water-supply cutbacks in parts of the basin, the first in the more than 90 years that the river has been managed under the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

They would not apply evenly. In Arizona, which would take the steepest cuts, officials are warning that the elaborate conservation measures and infrastructure put in place in the 1980s to guard against shortages will probably not be sufficient. As the drought continues, serious shortages and more severe cutbacks have become more likely.

Farmers who grow cattle feed and cotton in central Arizona could be forced to let fields lie fallow, maybe for good, and cities like Phoenix might have to begin reusing wastewater and even capping urban growth, the region's economic engine.

Here in Yuma, though, there may be no cuts at all. Thanks to the seemingly endless idiosyncrasies of the rules governing the Colorado, much of metropolitan Phoenix could theoretically become a ghost town while Yuma keeps planting lettuce in the desert.

The looming shortages have opened a contentious new conversation here in Arizona, with increasing calls for rethinking the way the state divides the water it also shares with six other states, including California. Some experts say that a recalibration is in order — that while it may not make sense for millions of people to live in the arid West, people should take precedence over growing leafy greens on an industrial scale.

In a 2013 study, the Bureau of Reclamation suggested transferring about a million acre-feet of water from farms. Academics say it is only a matter of time before agriculture is forced to yield some of its supply — and that farmers could benefit financially from such transfers.

That kind of talk is rattling farmers in Yuma. They know they have water priority but not necessarily political priority.

"They believe there's a target on their backs," said Tom Buschatzke, who leads the Arizona Department of Water Resources. "I believe they're right."

Farmers here do not intend to go quietly. Some come from families that were here when the big cities of the modern Southwest were little more than crossroads.

"We have a legal right to this," said Mark Smith, who farms about 500 acres in Yuma and leads one of six irrigation districts in the area. "The guys who say this is an easy fix — it's not an easy fix. We're growing vital crops."

"This is a national debate," Smith added, "because we're supplying the entire nation."

::

Few rivers are asked to work as hard at the Colorado. Ranchers in western Colorado use the river to water pastures for beef cattle, while Denver and its suburbs channel it east across the mountains to enable city living. Las Vegas and other southern Nevada communities draw up to 90% of their water from the Colorado. Hoover Dam and others convert its flow into power. After Arizona and California take their share, the river exits — evaporates, really — through the dry remnants of a delta leading to the Gulf of California.

If a shortage is declared, California is one state that would not face any immediate cutbacks, thanks to an agreement reached with Arizona in 1968. That pact allowed Arizona to build one of the nation's most ambitious water-supply systems, the Central Arizona Project, but it also ensured that much of Arizona would take steep cuts if a shortage is declared.

Yuma is an exception.

Wedged into a wrinkle of borderland between California and Mexico, farms here have been drawing water from the Colorado since the late 19th century. Their early presence here earned the area the most-senior water rights in Arizona and some of the most-senior in the basin. Of the approximately 15 million acre-feet of water allocated for use each year across the entire basin, about 1 million acre-feet — nearly 7% of all of the water — goes to just 150,000 acres of farmland here.

By comparison, the 5 million water users in Phoenix and Tucson share about 1.5 million acre-feet. California has rights to the largest share, 4.4 million acre-feet, and even under the most dire scenarios it is virtually certain to always receive it. The law of the river says so.

Yet even as parties in the basin are often wary of one another — and not equal partners — most emphasize the need to work together under the current rules. The alternative, some fear, is that the federal government will intervene.

"There are many who have advocated for years that you have to change it significantly," said Wade Noble, a lawyer for the Yuma County Agricultural Water Coalition. "We, of course, resist that because with our priority we benefit from the [current] law the most."

In February, Noble helped draft a report by the coalition intended as a preemptive strike against anyone eyeing Yuma water. In it, Yuma leaders argue that the region has become more productive and profitable while also reducing its water use as it has shifted its focus to winter vegetables over the last four decades.

Yet the region still uses an extraordinary amount of water. High soil salinity has led farmers to flood fields in an attempt to wash salt away from fragile roots, then provide more water for irrigation. And in an era seeing the rise of seasonal, locally grown foods, Yuma strikes some as emblematic of old ways of thinking about what people should eat and when.

Then again, farmers in Yuma say cities have been allowed to grow with little concern for the water required to sustain them. They note, too, that most of their crops align with a growing emphasis on healthful eating.

"They are doing a lot of things right," said Robert Glennon, a law professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in water issues.

But Glennon has also warned that Yuma farmers and others in the arid West may have only so much control over their fate — a lesson farmers in parts of California, dependent on other rivers, are learning during the historic drought there. He has encouraged farmers to reduce production so they can sell or lease a portion of their water rights to cities. Research shows that a cut of just 4% in certain agricultural areas could increase the water supply by 50% for some cities, he said.

Farmers here say the entire region was settled on an ethic of national service. The Bureau of Reclamation began building canals feeding off the Colorado in the first years of the 20th century.

Edward C. Cuming arrived in the summer of 1902, an Irishman who had first migrated to Alberta, Canada, before moving south. Cuming homesteaded 160 acres just south of Yuma, irrigating them with the new canals. The Depression forced him to sell 40 acres but also led to a new era of government support for the area.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, expanded and improved irrigation canals across the Yuma area. One of those channels, stamped "CCC 1940," is known as the Cuming Canal. It runs directly in front of fields now owned by Edward Cuming's grandson, Jim Cuming.

"When we had an abundant supply of water, the farmer was doing a great job," said Cuming, 77, sitting on a concrete culvert above the Cuming Canal while cloudy Colorado River water surged beneath him.

"Now all of a sudden he's a villain because he uses too much to produce your fruit and fiber."

This story was prepared under a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists' Fund for Environmental Journalism.

Learning to bend: Settling Utah's road wars

BOOK REVIEW

By Ed Marston
High Country News

Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon Country
Jedediah S. Rogers
242 pages, hardcover: $39.95.
University of Utah Press, 2013.

Some fear that we will saddle our children with trillions of dollars in federal debt. That would be too bad, but it would be a minor inconvenience compared to what our forefathers cursed us with: the 1866 federal law known as R.S. 2477. Like other such gifts -- including the 1872 Mining Law -- R.S. 2477 lays a heavy, destructive, expensive hand on the present.

The statute's 19 words said that anyone who wished to could build a public "highway" across the West's public land. That highway could not be extinguished by the later creation of a homestead, a national park or even a wilderness.

R.S. 2477 was repealed in 1976, but its highways -- sometimes nothing more than rough trails made by cowboys herding cattle -- are still being fought over in the West. That is especially true in Utah, where the state has launched 30 federal lawsuits to establish 36,000 miles of mechanized rights of way through existing wilderness, national parks and monuments, and wilderness study areas.

Into this expensive, litigious mess bravely comes the young historian Jedediah S. Rogers. With Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon Country, Rogers attempts to connect two warring ways of life. He asks us to look at roads not only as physical structures but as symbols of culture and history. In Rogers' telling, the Mormons of southern Utah regard the primitive roads their ancestors pioneered as comparable to the naves of medieval cathedrals. To interfere with the public's ability to travel them amounts to sacrilege. But to those who favor wilderness, the sacrilege is motorized travel through red-rock canyons and riparian areas.

Rogers humanizes the conflict over wilderness by portraying some of the people most involved. He is sympathetic both toward Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, and toward Abbey's nemesis, uranium miner and Lake Powell resort developer Calvin Black, immortalized by Abbey as the character "Bishop Love."

Abbey hated roads -- the better the road, the more he hated it -- and the reservoir he called Lake Foul. Black appreciated Lake Powell because it also served as a highway, and so loved roads, writes Rogers, that he assumed the 1960s slogan "Black is Beautiful" referred to pavement.

Given the area's bitter history -- which includes the Grand County commissioners repeatedly, and feloniously, sending bulldozers into Moab's Negro Bill Canyon to "refresh" the disappearing road -- what could bring the two sides to the table now?

Partly it is the passing of generations; both Black and Abbey are gone, for example. And partly it is exhaustion from decades of expensive struggle.

But it may also be fear of the future: Utah could win its R.S. 2477 cases, or President Barack Obama might unleash the 1906 Antiquities Act, as President Clinton did at Grand Staircase-Escalante, and create de facto wilderness. Or both events might happen, further complicating what is already a mess.

Rogers' book is both perfectly timed and a sign of the times, appearing as Utah Congressman Rob Bishop seems to be progressing toward a two-state solution in Utah, with some public land being protected and some now-protected land being opened to development.

Although the book is well-timed, it isn't always well-written, and it lacks clear maps to illustrate chapters about the road wars in places like Arch Canyon and the Book Cliffs.

While Rogers lacks the partisan passion of an Abbey or Black, he has passions appropriate to this time: for compromise and the merging of interests. He believes that if the two sides were to bend a little, each would win more than they could by defeating the other in Congress or the White House or the courts.

He urges environmentalists to see desert homesteads, mine shafts, abandoned orchards and even roads as part of a landscape shaped by humans but still dominated by nature. He quotes environmental historian Bill Cronon, who has written that the exclusion of man's works from nature is dehumanizing.

And he asks southern Utah's Mormon residents to acknowledge that the heroic pioneer days, when wagon trains were lowered to the Colorado River by rope down the Hole in the Rock notch, are over. We have blasted an interstate highway through the San Rafael Swell and turned parts of the Colorado, San Juan and Escalante rivers into ponds. Progress now, Rogers argues, is not demonstrated by how much more nature we can bulldoze, but by how much we can refrain from conquering:

"In a country -- a world -- that is increasingly developed one acre at a time, we need these places to keep us rooted. The (Colorado Plateau) region is one of the few places where large tracts of wildlands exist."

Jackrabbit Homestead: Artists, Off-Roaders, and the American Dream Writ Miniature

By Kim Stringfellow
KCET.org

Jackrabbit homesteads are only for folks who have a bit of pioneering blood in their veins. The land generally is rough, no water is immediately available, more or less road building has to be done. But fortunately there are many Americans who find infinite pleasure in doing the hard work necessary to provide living accommodations on one of these sites--and cabins are springing up all over the desert country.

--Desert Magazine, 1950

Beyond the proliferation of big box chains, car dealerships, fast food joints, and the nameless sprawl located along California State Highway 62 the desert opens up. Out there, where signs of familiar habitation seem to fade from view, a variance appears in the landscape in the form of small, dusty cabins --mostly abandoned--scattered across the landscape. The majority of the existing shacks, historically found throughout the larger region known as the Morongo Basin, lie east of Twentynine Palms in outlying Wonder Valley. The curious presence of these structures indicated that you are entering one of the remaining communities of "jackrabbit" homesteads left in the American West. The mostly derelict structures located among the occasional inhabited ones are the remaining physical evidence of former occupants who were some of the last to receive land from Uncle Sam for a nominal fee through the Small Tract Act of 1938.

One of the many land acts designed to dispose of "useless" federal lands from the public domain, the Small Tract Act authorized the lease of up to five acres of public land for recreational purpose or use as a home, cabin, camp, health convalescent, or business site to able-bodied U.S. citizens. If the applicant made the necessary improvements to his or her claim by constructing a small dwelling within three years of the lease, the applicant could file for a patent--the federal government's form of a deed--after purchasing the parcel for the appraised price (on average $10 to $20 an acre) at the regional land office. This highly popular mid-century homestead movement reflects the quintessential American desire to claim territory and own a piece of the land even if the property in question is virtually "worthless" from an economic perspective.

Although some cabins have been passed down from the original jackrabbit homesteaders to family members for recreation and other purposes, today the majority of the area's jackrabbit homesteads have fallen beyond repair, lending a ghostly and feral presence to the landscape. Others have found new function as primary, full-time residences with modifications, often referred to as "biltmores" by area residents. A small, but growing community of artists and musicians fleeing rising housing prices and general urban ills of the Los Angeles metropolitan area are reclaiming and re-envisioning the structures as artist studios or as creative retreats. Inventive enclaves forming within this geographically defined area are inspired by the Morongo Basin's spacious desert backdrop, its perceived tranquility, and a desire to form a sense of community within a rural environment. Many have migrated to the region with aspirations uncannily akin to the original homesteaders and share similar outlooks or values with them.

In their quest for renewal and reinvention, musicians and other artists have converged on this part of the desert during the past half-century for the creative stimulation that the openness of the place provides. Cosmic, country-rock music icon Gram Parsons, who frequented Joshua Tree often, died there; and other musicians, such as Tim Easton, Gram Rabbit, Ann Magnuson, and Victoria Williams have homes there.

Artists see the desert as a place of refuge and as a source of inspiration. Joshua Tree and its vicinity are home to a well-documented community of creative types. Bob Arnett, Diane Best, Helena Bongartz, Chris Carraher, Shari Elf, Perry Hoffmanm, Mary-Austin Klein, Jack Pierson, Randy Polumbo, and Andrea Zittel are some of the diverse group of artists living throughout the Morongo Basin and who also own cabins originally built by jackrabbit homesteaders. There have been numerous in-depth articles in both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times concerning the artists' presence in the area. Zittel, an internationally-known artist living in Joshua Tree, co-hosts the High Desert Sites, a biannual series of experimental, site-specific art projects, providing an alternative space for both local and out-of-town artists. Helena Bongartz employs the architectural structure of the cabins directly in her art, using the fascade of an abandoned shack near Amboy to project her video work at night.

Historically, the region has also served as a place to build alternative communities, including those of gays and lesbians. It is not known how many gays and lesbians settled in jackrabbit homesteaders, but there is speculation that some are believed to have done so. A long-time lesbian resident refers affectionately to her neighborhood as the "gay ghetto," a tightly knit community home to many practicing artists who have restored cabins into artist studios and very distinctive creative retreats.

As structures for the imagination, the abandoned cabins have become a catalyst for various human projections, where physical and symbolic constructions of space play out over time. If you look closely, you may also find that the cabins reveal a personal text that describes their former occupants in a much more intimate way. Chris Carraher, an artist and cabin dweller in Wonder Valley, asserts: "The homestead cabin is the other icon that figures this place for me. A pervasive relic of a small-time working-class fantasy land-rush, it is the American Dream writ miniature. Abandoned, ghostly, habited, or reclaimed, the cabin is a lone prop that sets the stage of this tremendous theater at the edge of civilization and wildness, a porous vessel through which the desert and human pass, and pass again."

About the Jackrabbit Homestead Project:

Jackrabbit Homestead is a project produced by Kim Stringfellow exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California's Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park through a physical installation of photographs, maps, documents, and other related materials. Another component of this project is the Web-based multimedia presentation featuring a free, downloadable car audio tour component available at www.jackrabbithomestead.com. The accompanying book, Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938-2008 was published in 2009 by the Center for American Places. The Web site and audio tour were funded by the California Council for the Humanites California Story Fund initiative and were released in March 2009.

African-Americans Shaping the California Desert: Homesteading in the Mojave

by Chris Clarke
KCET.org

Journalist Delilah L. Beasley documented African-Americans' contribution to California in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In this era when "urban" has become a coded phrase meaning "African-American," it can be easy to forget that California's desert backcountry has a rich African-American history of its own. Black California history isn't limited to the 213 and the 510: the 760 is pretty well-represented in its own right.

For generations the California deserts represented both opportunity and the possibility of being left alone to live your own life. Both of these siren songs were alluring to many African-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The deserts of California, namely the Mohave and at Victorville, are government lands, and quite a few colored people have taken up homesteads on this land and are improving them. Some sections have been found to contain oil. Many of the colored people have bought this land and afterwards sold it for a good margin.

So wrote Delilah L. Beasley, the first African-American woman to land a regular writing gig with a major metropolitan daily newspaper, in her 1919 book The Negro Trail Blazers of California. Beasley, quite an interesting figure herself, traveled the length and breadth of the state doing research for the book. The work almost killed her. A poignant note in the preface reads:

During the past year the author has been in very serious ill health and all during the long months of illness there were a few good, staunch friends who voluntarily sent money whenever they wrote and never allowed her for one moment to entertain a thought that she would not get well nor complete the book.

Beasley did live another 15 years after writing that preface, long enough to land a column at the Oakland Tribune, lobby for California's passage of an anti-lynching law, and organize for the establishment of the then-controversial International House at UC Berkeley.

The legacy of the desert homesteaders she mentioned was not always as monumental. The East Mojave's Lanfair Valley, now mostly part of the Mojave National Preserve, offers an example.

In 1910, the first year of homesteading in the Lanfair Valley, six land claims were filed by black people, a respectable proportion of the total number of claims. All in all 17 African-American families homesteaded the valley, most of them in the vicinity of Dunbar - a settlement intended to serve as a center for African-American folks. Dunbar's Post Office opened in 1912, within a month of the opening of another Post Office a tenth of a mile away, in Lanfair. The two offices operated in a kind of de facto racial segregation until 1914, when, according to local historian Dennis Casebier, the U.S. Post Office noticed the redundancy and closed Dunbar's P.O.

Ambitious projects nearby included an orphanage for black youth and the planned community of Harts, billed by its founders G.W. Harts and Howard Folke as "bringing freedom and independence to a limited number of colored people." Neither really got off the ground, though a few young boys did move there from orphanages in the Los Angeles area for a time.

African-American homesteaders proved more resilient. The first half of the decade after 1910 was unusually rainy, and the Lanfair Valley saw a flurry of attempts at wheat farming, some more successful than others. Black families lived with their white neighbors in what must have seemed a liberatingly democratic fashion, the adults helping on each other's farms and the kids sitting together in school. This early integration had its limits, though. As Casebier writes,

In talking with people from that period (black and white) there is an almost categorical denial of any prejudice or discrimination between whites and blacks... In spite of this kind of testimony - which I consider to be honest but somewhat naive - there is evidence of some discrimination.

In speaking of her black neighbors one resident] said "I don't think they ever came to any of our dances." There's a reason for this. I have a copy of the bylaws for the social organization in Lanfair Valley called the Yucca Club and under the heading of who is eligible for membership the bylaws stated clearly that a member could be "any white person in the valley." This is the club that organized the dances.

Also in interviewing black homesteaders (remembering they were children in the teens) they seemed to know little about the community picnics and pioneer celebrations held at Lanfair on the 4th of July and they did not attend them. That tells me that likely their parents did not feel welcome at those gatherings - as they were specifically not welcome at the community dances each month.

Black and white homesteaders had a common enemy in those days: the Rock Springs Cattle Company, which held grazing rights to much of the Lanfair Valley, resented the homesteaders and did its best to chase them out. According to the National Park Service,

The homesteaders experienced constant conflict with the Rock Springs Land & Cattle Company. The company considered Lanfair Valley to be some of the best part of its range, and resented the "intrusion" of settlement. The company denied water to the settlers, forcing them to use the few public springs or dig expensive wells. Cattle trampled carefully nurtured crops, sometimes allegedly after the cowboys cut the nesters' fences. In return, the farmers would occasionally help themselves to beef. The cattle company brought in hired thugs, and rumors swirled claiming some homesteaders' cabins burned to ashes under mysterious circumstances.

In the end it was rain as much as racism that undid the African-American community in the Lanfair Valley: by the second half of the decade the climate reverted to its extremely arid type, wheat crops failed, and one by one homesteaders moved away to better opportunities elsewhere. By 1927 the population had dwindled to the point where the Postal Service was compelled to close the Lanfair Post Office. What remains now is cleared land, foundation stones, and the occasional fence line -- some of it still owned by the descendants of the homesteaders.

But in the few short boom years residents of the Lanfair Valley may well have enjoyed more relative freedom, and less hatred, than any other African-Americans in the U.S. In Casebier's words:

The fertile soil yielded crops with which homesteaders (black and white) could sustain themselves. The children made their own games and toys and played among the wonderland of Joshua trees. From where they lived east of Lanfair a half mile or more -- they could see the smoke of the train rising above the Joshuas and hear the whistle as the train came through twice a day - once early in the morning from Goffs to Searchlight and later in the day back from Searchlight to Goffs. They had a fine school in Lanfair with efficient teachers and friendly students and parents. There were outings to magical places like Fort Piute and Piute Creek and occasional visits to Goffs and sometimes even into Needles.

Chris Clarke is an environmental writer of two decades standing. Author of Walking With Zeke, he writes regularly at his acclaimed blog Coyote Crossing and comments on desert issues here every week. He lives in Palm Springs.

Harry Reid, the New Public Lands Enemy No. 1

Remember Tom Daschle, Democrat Senate Majority Leader of the recent past, voted out in of office in his home state of South Dakota? Perhaps voters should do it again, this time in Nevada, and defeat the second Democrat Senate Majority Leader in a row. If we do, we might have some chance of saving our public lands from the mining industry.

By Bill Schneider
New West

Senator Harry Reid

I used this headline once before when writing about Mark Rey, former Bush Administration Undersecretary of Agriculture and boss of the Forest Service. Prior to Rey’s Reign of Terror, California Republican Congressmen Richard Pombo held the honor of being the biggest enemy of public lands. Voters booted him in 2006, but he’s back, running for Congress again this year.

Now, we have a new Public Lands Enemy No. 1, none other than current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

As I write this, the second most powerful Democrat in the country is locked in a bitter battle to keep his power and his membership in America’s most exclusive club. It’s a long time to November 2, but early polls show Senator Reid losing to any of the four Republican challengers.

Normally, those of us who value our public lands would be rooting for the Dems, but in this case, we’d be better off with a freshman Republican who might regularly vote on the wrong side of environmental issues, but wouldn’t have the unbridled power to the Senate Majority Leader wields.

Although Senator Reid has taken some flack from his conservative constituency for voting to protect roadless lands and desert tortoise habitat, he is, to put it mildly, the darling of the state’s vast mining industry. And to say mining is big in Reid’s home state of Nevada would be quite the understatement. The Silver State is 87 percent federal land, and in one year, 2007, miners in Nevada extracted nearly 190 tons of gold--three times the total yield in all other states combined--not counting all those tons of silver, copper, urainium and other minerals.

Reid is hopelessly intertwined in his state’s mining culture. He is the son of a miner and owns 14 abandoned mines himself. His two brothers are lawyers representing mining companies, and his son-in-law lobbies for the mining industry. And miners shovel money into his campaign war chest, almost $300,000 so far, and that figure is sure to grow in this critical election year.

And year after year, Reid comes through for his mining buddies and sponsors by single-handedly stopping mining reform legislation.

If there is anything more logical and reasonable Congress should do than modernize the General Mining Law of 1872, I’d like to know what it is. For 138 years, the law has made mining “the highest and best use” of federal lands, trumping all other uses. Miners can still stake a claim to our property and take ownership of it for pennies per acre, regardless of how many billions in gold and other minerals they extract from it.

Nationally, miners have gouged more than $400 billion in gold out of our public land, but they haven’t paid one single penny of royalties back to the U.S. Treasury--even though every other industry taking natural resources from public lands does. In Nevada, for example, one company, Toronto-based Barrick Gold, paid just $9,765 for 1,950 acres of federal land and extracted $10 billion in gold from it.

And the government or we, the public landowners, can’t say no to miners. We must sell our land for pennies. The 1872 law requires it. Remember back in the mid-1990s when President Clinton tried to stop the New World Mine near Yellowstone National Park. The only way he could do it was pay the mining claim holders $65 million, all taxpayer dollars, for federal land they paid almost nothing for and didn’t develop.

With gold selling north of $1,100/ounce and other metal prices also in the stratosphere, the public land giveaway to hard rock miners has doubled since 2003. We now have around 400,000 active mining claims on our public lands.

When the gold is gone, mining companies leave taxpayers with tab for reclaiming broken communities, poisoned waterways, and almost unimaginable wastelands. Instead, miners should be paying reasonable royalties to not only cover the cost of mined land reclamation, but also fund other federal programs--such as a good slice of the budget for the Agriculture and Interior Departments.

But this one-sided economics isn’t the biggest problem with the archaic 1872 mining law. No other industry does more permanent damage to our public lands than miners, large and small.

Some people fret over logged or overgrazed landscapes, but Mother Nature can take care of those problems in few years. But mining is forever. Even Mother Nature with all her power can’t reclaim the spoils and purify the acid water. And most mines involve permanent roads and residential developments that endure long after the miners have moved onto to the next mountain.

Even mines that never open leave a permanent impact. The vast majority of the many thousands of “wilderness cabins” dotting on the choicest tracts of formerly public land are patented mining claims given to mining companies and now private residences.

And we can plan on Senator Harry Reid making sure none of above, regardless how embarrassing this antiquated law is to a civilized society, ever changes.

In 2007, the House passed a bill with reasonable mining law reforms. It stopped the 19th Century public land giveaways and required new and existing mines to pay a small royalty to be used mostly for mined land reclamation. Even though it had plenty of support in the Senate, Reid was able to keep it from coming up for a vote.

Now, essentially the same bill, the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act (S.796, H.R. 699), has been introduced into both the House and Senate, and if Congress doesn’t take some action on it by April, it will be dead until next year. Sadly, conservationists working hard on it suspect it faces the same fate as the 2007 bill because Harry Reid is still there making sure it won’t happen--even though, incidentally, several of the Senate Majority Leader’s distinguished colleagues in the West, such as both senators from Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon, all Democrats, have co-sponsored the bill.

With significant democratic majorities in both houses, the time is finally right to re-write the 1872 mining law, something traditionally opposed by Republicans. But Houston, we have a little problem--the big DINO (Democrat in Name Only) standing in the way or any common sense mining law reform.

Trouble is, of course, assuming Nevada voters dump Reid this November, the floundering and increasingly unpopular Democratic party might also lose control of the House or Senate or both, which puts us right back where we’ve been for a long time, allowing miners to run roughshod over our public land with no limits or consequences, economically or environmentally.

When Congress passed our current mining law, Ulysses S. Grant lived in the White House and George Armstrong Custer was out fighting Indians. Almost unbelievable, eh? We did repeal the Homestead Act, right? Why not do the same with the biggest boondoggle of all time, the General Mining Law of 1872?

I suppose it might not seem so unbelievable if you understand how the U.S. Senate doesn’t work, where one man, owned by the mining industry, can consistently stop something as overdue as mining law reform regardless of how many members of Congress or owners of public land support it. I say, throw the bum out. I’m tired of miners getting the gold and public landowners getting the shaft.

Suspicious fire guts Charles Manson's remote Death Valley hide-out

The Barker Ranch cabin's rock walls and tin roof are still intact, but its wooden interior beams and window and door frames are reduced to ash. An outbuilding is destroyed.

Fire gutted a remote Death Valley ranch once used by Charles Manson.
(National Park Service)

By Julie Cart
Los Angeles Times

Barker Ranch, the old Death Valley mining camp notorious as Charles Manson's hide-out, has been gutted in a suspicious fire, according to the National Park Service.

"The building is gutted, burned out," said Terry Baldino, a spokesman for Death Valley National Park.

The homestead's rock walls and tin roof were still intact, but its hand-hewn wooden interior beams and window and door frames were all reduced to ash, he said.

An outbuilding, originally built as a garage or workroom, was destroyed, Baldino said.

Park officials said the fire might have started last weekend; it was reported Wednesday. No cause has been identified and the fire is under investigation, Baldino said.

The cabin is in a remote area of the park and is used by backcountry campers. It had a stove and a fireplace, but there is no water source in the area. If the fire was inadvertently set, there was no water available to put it out.

"The thing that is really sad," Baldino said, "is that a month ago we had a restoration crew out to stabilize the place. We were afraid the wood lattice and tin roof would come off. We replaced wood timbers in the sagging roof and cleaned up the interior and the grounds. It was actually in fairly good shape when we finished."

Barker Ranch about ten days earlier on April 26, 2009. (KN6KS / Thomas Hart)

The simple cabin was built in the 1930s by a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer, who, with his wife, had staked a gold claim. The Barker family then bought the house and worked the claim.

In the late 1960s, the Manson gang roamed the barren Death Valley landscape in dune buggies and prepared for "Helter Skelter," a race war that Manson was trying to spark. The phrase was taken from a Beatles song, which Manson believed was encoded with predictions that the conflict would destroy modern civilization. Manson and his followers planned to survive by living in a tunnel, then emerge as leaders of a new world order.

Manson eventually was arrested in the cabin, hiding in one of the cupboards, after a 1969 murder rampage in Southern California that involved the killing of actress Sharon Tate, three friends and a teenager at the pregnant actress' Benedict Canyon home, as well as the slaying of a couple in Los Feliz.

The ranch was the subject of renewed attention recently when a local police detective searched the site for possible clandestine graves. The excavation revealed little more than a few bullet casings.

Mojave land trust achieves acquisition milestone

Joshua Tree charity donates 10,000th acre to Park Service

Hi-Desert Star

JOSHUA TREE — The Mojave Desert Land Trust, a Joshua Tree public charity, announced the acquisition of its 10,000th acre of land to be donated to the National Park Service this week.

The land trust has given land to Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park through 183 transactions at a cost of $5 million dollars.

Mindy Kaufman, the land trust’s president, said she was extremely proud of the achievement: “We are only 3 years old as a land trust and these acquisitions speak to the grit and determination of the board, our funders, small staff, great volunteers and the community in its desire to preserve land in the Mojave Desert.”

Founded in 2005, the Mojave Desert Land Trust uses a fund in the Preserving Wild California Program to acquire privately held parcels inside the boundaries of desert national parks.

Most national parks contain private lands that are holdovers from the homesteading, ranching and mining days.

The Mojave Land Trust believes these lands can become the staging grounds for incompatible development, such as commercial real estate or homes, putting wildlife, natural and cultural treasures and the experiences of park visitors at risk.

According to the land trust, the National Park Service lists 1.8 million acres of private land it hopes will be acquired and donated to the government at an estimated price tag of $1.9 billion.

Inholdings that require restoration from dumping, illegal roads or other uses are restored by the Mojave Desert Land Trust before they are donated to the National Park Service.

To date, using professional contractors and the volunteer time of trained land stewards, over 70 acres have been restored — recycling more than 15 tons of debris, 36 vehicles and four travel trailers.

This year, Nolina Peak, which the land trust acquired in 2007, was incorporated into Joshua Tree National Park.

The 640-acre Nolina Peak parcel protects the Quail Mountain watershed originating in Joshua Tree National Park.

“In only three years, the MDLT has acquired over 3,500 acres in Joshua Tree, a rate of acquisition that far exceeds what the park was able to accomplish,” said Curt Sauer, superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park.

“While these lands are all critical to the management of resources within the park, the acquisition of Nolina Peak is a giant step forward in our ability to preserve the northwest end of Quail Mountain, with its resident populations of bighorn sheep, bobcat, mountain lion and desert tortoise.”

Sauer said he considers the land trust an important partner for conservation in the Mojave Desert.

Another recent acquisition of 320 acres is located in the Mojave National Preserve. A wildlife corridor, this land links the pinyon juniper highlands of the New York Mountains with the Watson Wash drainage.

The site also includes habitat for plants and animals and is the location of a historic homestead.

Preserve superintendent Dennis Schramm said the land trust’s help has been especially critical in the past several years, when federal money to buy land was mostly unavailable.

“Wilderness, desert tortoise critical habitat, springs and other biologically diverse properties are now permanently protected due to the efforts of MDLT,” said Schramm.

Mojave Desert historian keeps California's heritage alive

Dennis G. Casebier stands in front of the library in Goffs, Calif., that bears his name. The railroad depot replica holds the world's largest archive of Mojave Desert history. Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Over the course of decades, Dennis G. Casebier has assembled the lost voices and hidden histories of a place largely washed clean of its past.

By David Kelly
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Goffs, Calif. — Out on the great swells of the eastern Mojave Desert, that vast sand sea lying between Barstow and the Colorado River, there is no crumb of history, no tall tale, no arcane bit of knowledge too small to escape Dennis Casebier's notice.

"I'm fascinated by who ate rabbits," he said, sitting inside a library that will soon hold his life's work. "Did they eat jack rabbits or cottontails? Did they fry them or roast them? Did they grind them up or make stew out of them?"

"You see, that's the level of history we get into here," he said.

The soft-spoken retired physicist is a legend in this harsh land, a sort of Willy Wonka of the desert who transformed 70 acres of rock and scrub into the Goffs Cultural Center, his personal Xanadu of history and imagination.

In this tiny hamlet of 23 on the barren edge of the Mojave National Preserve, he and a group of volunteers carved roads and towed in ore carts, a defunct wooden post office, a caboose, windmills and boxcars. He bought a collapsing 1914 schoolhouse and turned it into a museum. His own Tales of the Mojave Road Publishing Co. has produced 26 books, 16 of which he wrote.

Yet none of it compares to his masterwork, the recently opened $1-million Dennis G. Casebier Memorial Library. Housed in a replica of the old Goffs Railroad Depot, the two-story, climate-controlled collection of thousands of books, maps, photos and tapes is the exclamation point on his arid passions.

Steve Mongrain, president of the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association, a nonprofit group that has helped raise money for the project, calls it "the most extraordinary historical collection of Mojave Desert history and culture in existence."

"There is nothing like it in the world," Mongrain said. "Anything that pertains to the Mojave can be researched there. It is unprecedented."

The association's 800 members donated $250,000 for the library, and the California Cultural and Historical Endowment provided the rest in grants.

Casebier, 74, has assembled the lost voices and hidden histories of a place largely washed clean of its past. The homesteads are gone, the mines closed, the tiny towns swallowed by sand.

Freight trains, some 6,000 feet long, still lumber through to Needles and beyond, but they rarely stop anymore because there are so few towns to stop in.

A 1920s picture of Rock Springs Land and Cattle Co. cowboys is one of about 108,000 photographs Casebier has collected. The library also has thousands of maps, oral histories and biographical files. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Gone too are characters such as gunfighter Bill Hollimon, who, when he wasn't shooting rivals, liked to pour gasoline down anthills and set them alight.

"The history is just everywhere, yet nobody is here. It's empty," said Casebier, an especially polite man who speaks with great precision.

"The people have gone, their life ways ended somehow. We are gathering the history of this forgotten land, and we have done so with a vengeance."

On a recent morning, Casebier rattled around the library, dipping in and out of the new filing cabinets. Each one contained dozens of subject files filled with personal histories.

Harrison Doyle?

"He's the oldest guy I ever interviewed, 103 or 104," Casebier said. "He was walking the streets of Needles in the early 1900s."

Llewellyn Barrackman?

"Former headman of the Fort Mojave Indians."

Betty Ordway?

"She was like the Rosetta Stone," he said. "She came here in 1914 and knew everyone and remembered everything. She knew the gunfighters and the homesteaders and where the stills were. She was the belle of the valley."

Tucked away in library cabinets are 3,000 biographies, 1,000 taped oral histories, 108,000 photographs, 6,000 books and 6,000 maps, ready for perusal by those Casebier believes demonstrate "an advanced interest in the desert."

Jo Ann Casebier, right, and volunteer Carol Brown sort historical documents. Thousands of soldiers were stationed in the Mojave during World War II, and many of their personal accounts are on file in the library. (Irfan Kahn / Los Angeles Times)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., consulted Casebier and used information from his collection when writing "Searchlight: The Camp That Didn't Fail," a book about his hometown.

"This book is better because of Dennis," he wrote in the preface.

Students working on master's degrees have come to study the homestead period and the military history of the region. Thousands of soldiers were stationed in the Mojave during World War II. Many of their personal accounts are on file in the library.

Casebier's own history in the desert began in 1954, after he left his home state of Kansas and enlisted in the Marines. He was stationed in Twentynine Palms and spent his free time poking around what is now Joshua Tree National Park.

"It was love at first sight when I saw the desert," he said. "It's different for everybody, but for me it was the wide open spaces and maybe the simplicity."

He returned to Kansas in 1956, got a degree in physics from Washburn University in Topeka, and returned to California in 1960. He worked on guided missile systems for the Navy and lived in Corona.

Meanwhile, his passion for the desert led him into the eastern Mojave, where he was smitten by what he dubbed "the forgotten country" encircled by the Colorado River and the I-40 and I-15 freeways.

There, he found an awe-inspiring emptiness.

"All the people had moved away. The schools went away. Everything went away," he said. "You would think that people would be swarming all over this area looking for its past, but they weren't."

Casebier's Navy job often took him to Washington, D.C., where he spent evenings at the National Archives and the Library of Congress photocopying records and maps about the eastern Mojave.

At one point he found a defunct wagon trail stretching 131 miles from the Colorado River to Camp Cady, east of Barstow.

Casebier formed a volunteer group that turned the dirt track into the four-wheel-drive Mojave Road. Soon he was leading caravans down it.

Chris Ervin first toured the road in 1988.

"It was a really fun, educational and a socially uplifting experience," said the Orange County resident, who works on the archives as a volunteer. "Dennis single-handedly rediscovered the Mojave Road and got thousands of others involved. He is an inspiration and a visionary."

In 1990, after he retired, Casebier and his wife, Jo Ann, moved to Goffs and bought 113 acres that included the old Goffs Schoolhouse. Working with the Mojave heritage association, he set to work saving the school and building the cultural center, which he donated to the nonprofit.

At the same time, he traveled the country interviewing former desert residents for his oral histories, persuading many to part with photographs and personal papers.

His disarming approach put people at ease.

"I'd say, 'So, how did a nice girl like you end up in the desert?' "

Some subjects were duds, but others, he said, were "bell ringers." He interviewed Curtis Springer 54 times. In 1944, Springer founded a spa and resort in an area he named Zzyzx, just south of Baker. A road bearing the name still exists.

Betty Ordway was another bell ringer. Casebier, who found her in Auburn, Calif., was so impressed that he put her entire 155,000-word interview into two bound volumes.

"She had 500 photos and she cast light on the big things and the little things," he said. "We had gunfights out here between ranchers and homesteaders, who would help themselves to a cow once in a while. A 1925 shootout killed two gunfighters, and Betty knew both men."

And she liked her rabbit fried like chicken.

"You could see her salivate when she remembered," he said. "I just loved that. Maybe because I'm such a nut or maybe because I wish I lived back then."

With his research constantly expanding and scattered everywhere, Casebier came up with the idea of a central library.

The grants arrived in 2006 and the building was completed in July.

Archival material is still being moved in, and the rules on how people can use the library are still being worked out.

Casebier, who still does oral histories, said anyone interested in visiting must make arrangements first.

"We are targeting researchers of desert history, those who are writing books or papers or scholarly works," said Ervin, the library's project manager. "Our focus is how do we make sure this thing lasts longer than all of us? We are trying to get an endowment -- maybe $10 million -- to pay for and support all these wonderful materials in perpetuity."

Back in Goffs, Casebier hopped into a golf cart and motored down his complex's Boulevard of Dreams. He passed a Justice of the Peace office that once served the towns of Amboy and Ludlow, and pulled up in front of an old library built in 1927.

There are hundreds of books inside that have not been moved to the new library just up the road.

For desert aficionados it's a small, if dimly lit, slice of heaven. Books with titles such as "The Great California Deserts," "Our Desert Neighbors," "On Desert Trails" and "Desert Treasures" stand in dark wooden cabinets behind glass doors.

Casebier likes to sit in the back room and read. If he should ever get bored, which is highly unlikely, he could open the window and drink in unlimited blue sky.

He has spent the better part of his life studying the desert. For years people have asked him why.

"I want people to know the tremendous respect I have for the human beings who lived here and the tremendous respect I have for their self-reliance," he said.

"They were a special breed. I don't want that story to disappear."

Goffs Depot reincarnated as library

By A.D. HOPKINS
Las Vegas Review-Journal


Built as a replica of the historic Goffs Depot, this building is really a research library containing the unique Mojave Desert Archives.
Photo by Dennis G. Casebier/CERCA Contributor

A vanished railroad depot will be reborn as a research library and the home of a unique archive Oct. 11 during the 2008 Mojave Road Rendezvous at Goffs, Calif.

Goffs is a former railroad junction and ranching community that has become a repository of historical buildings, artifacts, and lore relating to the Eastern Mojave. The latest addition to its resources, the library, was built in the image of the Goffs Depot that formerly stood at the junction of the shortline Nevada Southern Railroad with the Santa Fe, the main east-west line through the Southern California desert. For about 30 years beginning in 1893, this junction connected Searchlight to the outside world; its depot stood from 1902 to 1956.

Goffs has become regionally famous as the site where historian and author Dennis Casebier, his wife, Jo Ann, and scores of other volunteers restored a charming one-room schoolhouse, originally built in 1914, to serve once again as the social center and soul of the sparsely populated community, as well as a small museum.

Here also Casebier and company assembled an unrivaled collection of over 100,000 photos, 4,500 maps, 700 oral histories, 6,000 books and other documents and ephemera now known as the Mojave Desert Archives, which will be the heart of the new library's collection. They chronicle the Mojave Road, an Indian trade route that became a 19th-century military highway; the region's mining boom of the 19th and 20th centuries; decades of friction between homesteaders and cattle barons; and much more.

Now in its 28th year, the annual Mojave Road Rendezvous is primarily a gathering of the volunteers who have restored and rebuilt the desert crossing and gathered the region's artifacts and knowledge. The event is also open to the public; however, no public accommodations or recreational vehicle hookups are available at Goffs; the closest are the motels of Needles, Calif., 30 miles to the east, or the campgrounds of the nearby Mojave National Preserve. Goffs is 104 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

The Rendezvous kicks off at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 10 with a covered-dish supper, where visitors bring one to share, continues with the dedication at 2 p.m. Saturday, and a no-host dinner at 4 p.m. in the no-frills "Flywheel Cafe." For further information, contact the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association Web site, www.mdhca.org, or call (760) 733-4848.

CALICO BASIN: Tranquillity lost

Couple selling property near Red Rock to BLM

By KEITH ROGERS
Las Vegas Review-Journal


Twenty-six years ago Gene and Becky Hutchinson bought a small ranch house on more than 2 acres of sandy soil off a gravel road in Calico Basin, away from the hustle and bustle of Las Vegas.
Except for their dogs barking when strangers approach, it has been a peaceful spot at the edge of Red Rock Canyon's scenic sandstone cliffs west of the city and far from its bright lights.

Purchased for a bit more than $100,000, the property has been perfect for the Hutchinsons, who came from Florida to work at jobs supporting Las Vegas' booming convention business.

But as years went by and the city's expansion crept westward, the rural community of Calico Basin lost some of its tranquillity. "This place isn't what it used to be," Gene Hutchinson, a retired union truck driver and Vietnam-era veteran, said Wednesday.

Tourists and rock climbers often camp on the side of the road, leaving behind their bottles and trash.

"I don't mind the climbing and the people coming out here to enjoy the area, but I don't like them leaving their beer bottles," he said.

"When I go someplace and take something, I take it back out with me," he said.

Once in a while, climbers attracted to the picturesque cliffs suffer injuries from falls and seek help at his house, which has the nearest land-line telephone. Even today, cell phone coverage is nonexistent there.

So when the Bureau of Land Management started buying property a few years ago to enhance the environment and aesthetics of nearby Red Spring Picnic Area, the Hutchinsons, too, considered selling their part of paradise.

Last month, the BLM announced it is proposing to pay $1.7 million for the 2.27-acre Hutchinson property in its latest round of planned purchases under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act.

Two years ago, the BLM used funding from the act to purchase the 5-acre Garland property near Red Spring for $3.5 million.

The act allows money from the sale of public land around Las Vegas to be used to buy environmentally sensitive lands elsewhere in the state. In all, more than 40 projects are proposed under this round, totaling more than $80.25 million.

The proposed Hutchinson purchase is part of the bureau's plan to buy some of Calico Basin's 60 parcels from willing sellers to enhance habitat for wildlife and benefit the public's use of Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

"Eventually they want the whole thing," Gene Hutchinson said Wednesday. "They want mine because we're right next to the park."

The Calico Basin community, which numbers between 75 and 100 people, evolved from land the government made available under the Small Tract Act of 1938 to attract residents to the West near the end of the Great Depression.

Of the 60 parcels, 23 have on them buildings, such as houses and horse barns. At 2.27 acres, the Hutchinson property is the smallest. The largest is 40 acres. That was sold by the BLM to the Girl Scouts in the late 1960s.

All of the other parcels became private holdings as a result of the Small Tract Act, said Bob Taylor, assistant field manager for the National Landscape Conservation System at Red Rock Canyon.

"The intent was to populate the West," he said.

One of Calico Basin's longtime inhabitants, Jake Stone, a cowboy and prospector, died about two years ago. His house and most of the antique equipment and wagon wheels that he kept along the road have been removed. The property's new owner hasn't approached the BLM yet regarding its potential sale, Taylor said.

In the meantime, some newer "dream houses" have been built in the basin and atop a ridge overlooking it, he said. It's unlikely that these properties will be sold. Reliance on well water from a small aquifer has precluded larger developments in the past, he said.

BLM spokeswoman Hillerie Patton said the bureau is trying to purchase any Calico Basin properties that fit with the conservation area's management plan and are in the hands of willing sellers. "As funding becomes available, we will try to make the acquisitions," she said.

The process will proceed slowly, she said, noting the bureau currently is interested in three Calico Basin properties whose owners want to sell.

"We're not looking to boot people out of their homes. We're not trying to do a land grab," Patton said. "By no means are we trying to encourage people to give up their homes to us."

Taylor said purchasing the Hutchinson property makes sense. It is adjacent to the conservation area and would enhance the park's open character.

Before the sale can be completed, the Hutchinsons, he said, will have to raze the house that was built in 1963 and begin restoring the acreage to its natural state. Otherwise, the BLM would have to contract the work out under the government's process.

That would entail purchasing abandoned buildings, and funding isn't available for demolition. Nevertheless, the cost to do that is included, up front, in the sale of the land.

"We just want the raw land," Taylor said.

That means the Hutchinsons will have to remove the septic tank in addition to all the buildings. Taylor said the water well, which is downstream from Red Spring, probably will be retired too.

"We'll restore that wash to its proper, functioning conditions, and bring in native plants," he said.
As it is now, the land provides habitat for the threatened desert tortoise and a state-protected bird, the phainopepla. The black-and-gray crested bird eats berries from mistletoe, a parasite plant found on old growth mesquite trees.

A healthy acacia tree also stands on the property, which sits at an elevation of 3,500 feet.

In the spring, wildflowers turn the landscape into a kaleidoscope of colors.

There are yellow desert marigolds, orange globe mallows and delicate Mariposa lillies. Brilliant fuchsia blooms poke from the top of an occasional hedgehog cactus.

Hutchinson said his wife has mixed emotions about moving, probably to Utah.

And he suggested that other Calico Basin residents will want to stay put.

"A lot of them ain't going to move because they've been here forever," he said.

Agency claims home of woman

By CHUCK MUELLER, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

IVANPAH - A whitewashed bungalow in this old desert mining town southeast of Mountain Pass holds a lifetime of memories for Connie Connelly.

But the National Park Service says the 44-year-old woman, who came to Ivanpah with her parents in 1968, must leave the house by Friday.

The six-room cinder block dwelling, once a general store that stocked provisions for desert prospectors, is on federal land in the Mojave National Preserve, park officials said.

Connie's parents, Don and Pauline Connelly, were issued lifetime leases to live in the house by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which administered the area before the park service took over in 1994. But the documents did not include their daughter's name.

"But it has been my home since I was 8, and all my memories are there," said Connie, who shares the five-acre site with 12 dogs, a cat and a horse.

Her father, a former sheriff's deputy in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, died in 1990 at age 80. Her mother died last year at age 81 after a long illness that had required the family to move to Newberry Springs to be closer to medical care. While they were away from Ivanpah, another family occupied the house, and the Connellys had to buy it back for $8,000.

PAPERWORK PROBLEMS

"It appears that the bureau did not update the lease after it was granted to the parents in 1986," said Jennifer Foster, co-founder of Public Lands for Public Use, a 6-year-old watchdog group that investigates the use and misuse of public land.

As a consequence, Connelly does not possess a current lease or title to the land where the bungalow sits, said Chief Park Ranger Dennis Ziemann.

Without the lease, she is residing illegally on federal land, Ziemann said in a March 18 letter to Connelly that demands she leave the 71-year-old house.

"Failure to comply will result in criminal prosecution and removal of all property on the premises," Ziemann said.

That could mean the park service intends to tear down the house, which qualifies as a historic site because of its age, Foster fears.

"When a structure is over 50 years old, it could be eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places," said desert historian Dennis Casebier.

STANDING FOR HISTORY

Public Lands for Public Use plans to stand at Connelly's side on Friday and over the weekend and longer if necessary, said Foster's husband, Ken, who co-founded the group with his wife.

The Fosters filed a notice of intent Monday to appeal the issue in Connelly's behalf with the U.S. Department of Interior's Board of Land Appeals, claiming the BLM's legal description for the bungalow site is inaccurate.

"The coordinates cited in the bureau's lifetime lease of 1986 are wrong," Jennifer Foster said. "The lease says the house is in Section 32 of Township 15, but it really is in Section 31."

"Accordingly, the Bureau of Land Management may never have had the right to charge the Connelly family for a lease in the first place," Jennifer Foster said. "The federal government may owe Connie a ton of money."

"The bureau later corrected the erroneous section numbers, but the coordinates are still wrong. Her house isn't where the lease says it is. It's a mile away, across the (Union Pacific) railroad tracks on patented (private) land."

Documents in the San Bernardino County Recorder and Assessor's offices show that Connelly holds possessory rights to the house, and her tax payments are current.

Ziemann said Connelly has refused to comply with procedures that would allow the park service to provide her with relocation assistance.

Mary Martin, superintendent of the 1.6 million-acre national preserve, told Jennifer Foster in an April 5 letter that she wants to see "a positive resolution to this issue."

"(But) all the information in our records and those of (the) county and Bureau of Land Management clearly indicate that Ms. Connelly is illegally occupying federal land."

A PRICE FOR MEMORIES

Martin could not be reached for further comment this week, but park service spokeswoman Holly Bundock in Oakland said, "We've offered Connie Connelly relocation costs, including rent for 2 years and moving costs. In lieu of rent, we would buy a like house somewhere else. But she has declined that."

Connelly acknowledges she met with Martin and a park service real estate official Jan. 7.

"They wanted me to file a disclaimer and sign it over to them," she said. "They offered me $3,000 to relocate. But you can't put value on your childhood home. You can't put a price on memories."

The diminutive woman, who claims Mandan and Sioux tribal heritage, lives on occasional sales of her watercolor paintings and from jobs as a horseshoer and store clerk.

Her Spartan surroundings at the 2,400-square-foot bungalow include a wood stove and oil lamps. She hauls water from Nipton, 17 miles away, in two 55-gallon drums mounted in the bed of her 1973 Ford pickup. And every six weeks she shops for groceries in Nipton or in Searchlight, Nev.

When mid-summer temperatures climb to 110 degrees, Connelly turns on a generator to power a couple of fans in the bungalow.

"I'm not fussy about anything," she said. "It's not necessary to have a new wardrobe or newfangled gadgets."

The eviction controversy has sparked interest in Washington and Sacramento.

"We are aware of the situation," said Jim Specht, deputy chief of staff for Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, who represents the east Mojave. "He has asked his staff to look into it."

State Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, who represents some San Bernardino County desert areas, said he was told by a Lewis staff member that the congressman would work with local officials to ensure the issue is resolved consistent with the law and that due process is followed.

Bob Smith, area representative for county 1st District Supervisor Bill Postmus, said he has asked a survey team to study the coordinates to determine if the bungalow is on private or public land.

"If it's on private land, we would intervene to determine the legality of a federal agency being involved," Smith said.

Connelly's five acres lie within a 40-acre tract that was privately patented under the Homestead Act, according to an original land patent signed on March 7, 1912, by President William Howard Taft.

"Accordingly, the Bureau of Land Management may never have had the right to charge the Connelly family for a lease in the first place," Jennifer Foster said. "The federal government may owe Connie a ton of money."

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/.