The Mojave National Preserve: 1.4 million acres of contradictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lovely, bitter pill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beauty and the Beast

The president’s new monument forces southern Utah to face its tourism future


Enraged, county commissioners sent bulldozers into the new monument.
Richard Menzies

by Paul Larmer
High Country News

KANAB, Utah - Outside the Kane County administration building, a warm autumn sun sets the red cliffs ablaze. Inside, seated in front of an American flag, Kane County’s own firebrand, Joe Judd, 67, tells how he came to this small town in southernmost Utah.

"I retired 17 years ago as parks manager for the city of L.A.," he says. "I was responsible for 200 parks, 14 golf courses, and a staff of 2,200 that was 80 percent black."

Judd says the job was rewarding, but ate him alive. "You don’t get to be a nice guy when you have your life threatened," he says, shaking his head. "So when I was 50, I said, "I don’t need this." " He moved to Kanab.

Instead of hobby ranching, Judd became active in the Mormon Church, serving as a bishop and helping overhaul a soup kitchen for the needy. He also served on the board of the local power company. Then, two years ago he won a seat on the Kane County Commission.

"Now I’m working on zoning ordinances and septic regulations," he says. "I’m trying to pull people here into the 20th century."

This Joe Judd seems far different from the one I talked to two months ago, the day after President Bill Clinton created the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The monument, more than half of which lies in Kane County, killed a proposed coal mine on the Kaiparowits Plateau that supporters say would have brought millions of dollars into Kanab and other towns in the area (HCN, 9/30/96).

On the phone, Judd cursed the Clinton administration for running roughshod over local people and for destroying the last hope for good wages in his county, which is 95 percent public land and home to just 10,000 people. Soon after, Judd and his fellow commissioners sent county bulldozers into the new monument, some to areas environmentalists want protected as roadless wilderness.

Judd still curses the president and is unapologetic about the "freshened up" roads. But he quickly accepted $100,000 from the Clinton administration to do planning in conjunction with the new monument, and then asked for and received $100,000 that neighboring Garfield County had rejected as "blood money." His county then signed an "assistance agreement" with the Bureau of Land Management that spells out how the two will cooperate during the planning process for the monument.

"It was arrogant as hell for the president to use the law to his advantage as he did," the commissioner says. "But we’re not going to sit around with our heads in our hands."

Before visiting southern Utah, I couldn’t have guessed that Kane County might embrace the new monument. But Judd and others like him recognize that the monument solidifies two facts of life: Southern Utah’s mining, logging and ranching are in decline; and the region is already a public-lands playground for the world.

Even the angry leaders in Garfield County, which is home to the monument’s northern half, recognize that the game has evolved from fighting off outsiders to adapting to a tourism boom that could turn their quiet towns into a theme park.

As I drove for hours around the edges of this immense monument and visited its widely scattered communities, I wondered how the land and the people would change over the coming years. Would the anger and resentment fade? Would the Bureau of Land Management be able to run a monument that will attract millions of visitors each year? And would the towns end up looking and feeling like every other strip-developed community near a national treasure?

Kane County: Prosperity’s thin veneer

Kanab, pop. 4,500, boasts a golf course on the edge of town that bustles on a weekday in mid-November, and newish hotels, gift stores and restaurants line the clean, wide streets. It seems downright prosperous for a town that has just seen its hopes for a major industrial project - the Andalex coal mine - dashed.

A mild climate and proximity to some of the southwest’s finest scenery have made tourism the town’s main economic force for years. Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Canyon and Capitol Reef national parks are all closer than a day’s drive, as is Lake Powell. The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is just the latest and nearest attraction.

But not long ago, tourism was balanced by a substantial natural-resource-based economy. The scales tipped during the early 1990s, when Kanab lost more than 500 timber and uranium mining jobs. Families that had a primary breadwinner earning $20 to $30 an hour suddenly had to move or change occupations. Those who wanted to stay had to send Dad to work as a trucker or laborer in a distant city and add Mom, grandma and the kids to the work force, most often cleaning hotel rooms and flipping hamburgers for tourists at $5 an hour.

In 1990, 1.5 people per Kane County household were in the work force and the average income was $25,000, according to a recent economic report prepared for the county. Today, 2.6 people work per household and the average income has eroded to $18,000.

"When the high-paying jobs dried up, more people had to work just to meet the bills," says Gil Miller, a Logan, Utah-based economist who drafted Kane County’s latest economic development plan. "The only jobs available were in the tourism industry."

Kanab councilman Roger Holland says seven families in his Mormon Church ward lost their jobs with the closure of the Kaibab mill. "Some have gone on unemployment, then welfare," Holland says. "None of these families have come back to the point economically that they were before."

Tourism has continued to grow, but workers not only earn low wages, they frequently get laid off during the cold winter months. Roger Carter, manager of the Red Hills Best Western in Kanab, says he pares his summer staff of 35 to a baker’s dozen during November, December and January.

"We love our tourists, especially now that they’re all we have," says Carter, who moved his family to Kanab seven years ago from Flagstaff, Ariz. "But it’s a boom-and-bust economy, too."

To this hard-hit community, the Andalex coal mine project looked like a savior. No wonder everyone was hopping mad when the President took that hope away.

Practical to the CORE

Later that evening, I meet with three men who have moved past anger to focus on Kane County’s future. They lead a community organization called CORE - Coalition of Resources and Economies.

On my left is hotel manager, Roger Carter, who serves as CORE’s president; on my right, Richard Negus, a 67-year-old London-born transplant who has been an animal-rights activist, journalist, and cat-show announcer at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Dead ahead of me is the imposing figure of Jim Matson, the former manager of Kaibab Industries’ logging mill in Fredonia, Ariz., 9 miles south of Kanab.

The mill closed two years ago, a victim of changing economic conditions and, according to Matson, appeals of federal timber sales on the Kaibab National Forest north of the Grand Canyon brought by environmentalists.

"Do you have any environmentalists in your group?" I ask.

"All 12 of us," quips Matson.

A forester by training, Matson, 52, has been reborn as a super-consultant on natural-resource conflicts and economic development. Kane County recently hired his firm to spend $200,000 in monument planning monies.

"We’re a poor county, behind the times in land-use planning and economic development," he says. "The coal mine and the $1.5 million a year it would have provided - now that’s gone and we have to quickly shift our priorities."

Matson says the monument catalyzed a countywide economic plan that he had been working on for months. The plan focuses on bringing small and medium-sized firms to the county - companies like Stamp "Em Up, a business started in Las Vegas by two Kanab women who recently moved the operation back to their hometown. The company manufactures rubber impressions for a variety of crafts, and at 200 employees, it’s Kane County’s biggest employer.

But Matson knows Kanab is a rookie in the recruitment game. Last year, he says, the owners of a tent and outdoor-gear manufacturing company scouted Kanab as a possible location for their business. They left quickly when town officials couldn’t promise that the company’s sewer, water, power and telecommunications needs would be met.

"We didn’t even speak the same language," Matson recalls.

The new plan, which calls for zoning and upgrades in Kanab’s infrastructure, should give the county the credibility it needs to start recruiting businesses from places like Southern California. It might be a tough sell.

Kanab’s work force lacks the skills and expertise to attract the high-tech industries that are flocking to Utah’s Wasatch Front, says economist Gil Miller. The nearest four-year college is several hours away, in Cedar City. And Kanab sits almost a hundred miles from an interstate and lacks commercial air service.

Kanab can’t even attract the BLM. The agency recently decided to locate its temporary monument planning office in Cedar City, which is several hours away from the new monument and outside both Kane and Garfield counties. BLM monument supervisor Jerry Meredith says the agency didn’t want to locate in any community near the monument for fear it would give the town an edge in the competition for permanent monument facilities. But there were logistical concerns as well, he admits.

Cedar City has an interstate, an airport, conference facilities and Southern Utah University, Meredith says. And, it has real estate.

"We needed 6,000 square feet of space and 18 houses for employees right away," says Meredith. Even Kanab would have been marginal, he says.

To Matson, the BLM’s decision was "a slap in the face. It said that they didn’t want to live with us."

It also said Kane County would, for the next three years, lose out on 18 high-paying government jobs.

If you designate it, will they come?

Driving the 60 miles east from Kanab to Big Water, pop. 350, which lies within a few miles of Lake Powell, I am struck by the immensity of the new monument. Its southern edge along the highway is a series of rugged, sparsely vegetated cliffs that extend as far as the eye can see.

The last protrusion is the Kaiparowits Plateau, which looms like the prow of a giant ship behind the town of Big Water. It is also the place where Andalex had planned to mine coal.

Big Water, with its dirt roads and boat-storage yards facing the highway, missed out on the mining boom, but its mayor, Gerry Rankin, says she is eager to capitalize on the new monument.
It isn’t a Grand Canyon or a Lake Powell, she says, "but it’s got a rough, difficult beauty, you might call it."

For Big Water to attract tourists, though, Rankin says it needs the BLM to develop some roads into the monument so that people can sightsee. The town also needs a sewer system, she says. Without one, it has been unable to attract hotels or other large commercial enterprises. The carloads of tourists now passing Big Water on their way to Lake Powell have little reason to stop.

Joe Judd says he doubts the monument will give Big Water much of a boost. The southern portion of the monument, he says, is "like your big toe; there’s nothing sexy about it. You won’t see anything that you can’t find in two-thirds of the rest of the state."

There are few roads into the monument from the south, Judd notes, and most are nearly impassable for all but skilled four-wheel drivers. The people who come and want to see the new monument will have to stay around the outskirts or risk getting stuck or lost. Either way, they are a liability, in his view.

Judd recently jetted to Washington, D.C., with Garfield County Commissioner Louise Liston to ask Congress for $575,000 to help his county cope with everything from a stretched police force to growing numbers of lost and injured hikers, and overflowing garbage bins. Liston asked for $900,000 and an extra $2 million for road maintenance and improvement in the monument.

By asking for so much money, Judd seems to contradict his prediction that the monument will generate little interest. But early readings indicate that tourists are chomping at the bit. The BLM offices in Kanab, Escalante and Salt Lake City say they are swamped with thousands of requests for monument information and maps. A Web site put on the internet by the town of Escalante’s Chamber of Commerce received 2,000 hits during February alone.

"We want all the tourism we can get," admits Matson, "but we don’t want a Moab (Utah)-type situation," where hordes of visitors have failed to lift family income and strained public services to the breaking point.

Kane County’s eager-but-cautious attitude toward tourism is based on experience. Even without the monument, towns like Kanab have begun to see the negative side of a minimum-wage economy and the outsiders it attracts. The newcomers may also have a tough time fitting in with the locals. The communities in Kane and Garfield counties share two characteristics: The citizens are predominately white and Mormon.

"The people that come down to fill these jobs have different values," says Tom Hatch, a sixth generation rancher who represents both Kane and Garfield counties in the state Legislature. "They work a season and then they go on welfare or unemployment. It’s changed our schools and our kids. We have drugs and violence and some kids want to become gang members."

Steering the ship

Matson says the county will keep tourism’s downside uppermost in its mind during the BLM’s planning process. "We want to steer the ship rather than have someone steer it for us," he says.

Steering the ship means local control. The county wants monument visitor centers and staff offices located within communities such as Kanab and Escalante, not inside the monument. Environmentalists say they like that idea.

"There’s no reason to put a Marriott in the middle of the Kaiparowits Plateau," says Scott Groene, an attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "This is actually a place where we all agree."

Jerry Meredith says his agency will consider placing several visitor centers in the communities around the monument. "This monument is so spread out that it doesn’t lend itself to having one central headquarters," says Meredith, who previously oversaw the monument area, as the BLM’s Cedar City district manager.

Kane County also wants to hire county employees to man new monument campgrounds and facilities. The idea of having local people filling these slots - instead of senior citizen volunteers or federal employees from afar - is novel.

"If we could get 150 jobs paying $8, $9 or $10 an hour with benefits, that would be a whole lot more than we have now," says Richard Negus, CORE’s public affairs director.

Meredith says the BLM will consider contracting out services to the counties, though it is too early to commit.

Garfield County: Holding to the past

Garfield County is Kane County’s colder, rougher brother. It has some of the most scenic - and already well-visited - portions of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. (BLM officials say that more than 500,000 visited the monument area last year and this year the number is likely to boom.) But the county’s cool and wet winter climate, compared to Kane County, also means a shorter tourism season. Its towns are smaller and scattered across a landscape that is more than 98 percent federally owned. All 4,000 county residents could fit into the town of Kanab.

It’s snowing and raw as I drive through Panguitch, the county seat. And quiet. Only a handful of cars and trucks cluster around the open businesses - a grocery store and a gas station. Panguitch is the county’s biggest town with a population of 1,400, but it looks like a carnival that has closed for the season. The museums, gift stores and hotels are here, but no customers. The town lost a timber mill and nearly 100 jobs two years ago.

Twenty-five miles and maybe six cars later, a lone coyote scampers across the road as I turn in to Bryce Canyon National Park. Ruby’s Inn stands guard just outside the park entrance; compared with Panguitch, it bustles. A busload of foreign tourists load up in front of the lodge, which is run by a local family; inside, several dozen tourists dine at the cafe and browse in a souvenir shop the size of a department store.

At 80 years old, Ruby’s Inn is the economic heavy of Garfield County, employing nearly 500 people during the summer months. But the minimum-wage-plus-tips pay can’t compare to wages provided by a coal mine or a timber mill.

The next lonely hour down the road runs right through portions of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. This northwestern side of the monument, with its hayfields surrounded by towering cliffs dotted with juniper and pine, seems a world away from the harsh desert I encountered near Big Water. And it is; it has taken me a whole day to travel around just the western half of the monument.

I finally reach Escalante, another Mormon-settled community where locals recently hung effigies of President Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. There’s a room at the Prospector’s Inn, but only after I track down one of the owners washing her truck out back.

She asks me if I’m here to see the monument. "Well, take a look out the window," she says when I say yes. "Everything you see is the monument except for this little town."

The woman says she doubts the monument will lead to a boom in Escalante. But later, as she serves dinner at the restaurant behind the hotel, she says hers is one of three new hotels to open in town within the last three years. And someone recently bought one of the original old, brick, two-story, Mormon settlers’ houses which abound in this town, intending to run a bed and breakfast.

Even here, in a settlement that looks much as it did a century ago, change is in the air.

Las Vegas mulch

The next day, sitting in a cramped trailer office at the Utah Forest Products mill south of Escalante, manager Stephen Steed asks a question.

"How many people stayed at your hotel last night?"

Just me and one other, I say.

"Yeah, that was probably our state forester who’s down from Salt Lake for the week," Steed says. "That means a traveling newspaperman and the state forestry guy took care of the tourist industry in Escalante last night. Try feeding that to your family."

Though Steed doesn’t have much use for tourism, he’s not mired in the past. The fourth-generation logger and his father ran the mill until it shut down here in 1993, and he learned from that experience. The new mill is financed by outside money and is a different animal. It is smaller, employing just 65, and it is more efficient, producing a variety of goods, including milled lumber and chips.

"There’s no waste," says Steed. "We even ship the chips to Las Vegas. They mix them with fertilizer to make a landscaping mulch for all those subdivisions in the desert."

This value-added stuff is what Garfield County commissioners have started to look for. They recently hired a Salt Lake City-based consulting firm to help its ranchers market "riparian-free, monument beef," says consultant David Nimkin of Confluence Associates. Riparian-free, he says, means cows stay out of streams.

He also sees local logging companies producing finished products, such as furniture or floor boards. "There’s a big market for softwood floors in the Salt Lake City area, but most of the wood comes from the southeastern United States," says Nimkin. "Why couldn’t Utah fir and pine fill that need?"

The concept extends to the monument: Keep its 1.7 million acres rugged and relatively roadless, and instead of fast-food jobs you’d need guides and outfitters to lead dudes into the trackless interior, says the planning consultant. The guides could even educate visitors about the history and culture of the area.

"These towns are never going to be gateway communities like Springdale (outside Zion National Park)," says Nimkin. "But they could market the monument as one of the last great, wild places, a place where you need a local guide to show you the deep dark secrets."

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt is paying attention. He has promised to help Garfield and Kane counties plan for the changes that lie ahead. Leavitt’s planning director, Brad Barber, says the state is setting up an economic development team that will help these communities find money for new business ventures and the roads and services they need.

"Where do we put the lodges? Do we have building codes? What do we want our town to look like? Do we want any old, ugly Motel 6 in town?," asks Barber. "These are the questions these communities need to face now."

The pioneer spirit

Before leaving Escalante, I stop at the ranch of Garfield County commissioner Louise Liston. The scrappy and articulate Escalante native is known as a staunch defender of rural values. Yet she and her fifth-generation cattle-rancher husband, Robert, have adapted to a new West: They’ve given up on cattle and now raise ostriches.

The Listons trace their roots back to the Mormon pioneers who found a way across the tortuous terrain from Escalante southeast across the Colorado River. You can still travel The Hole-in-the-Rock route, which lies in the new monument, on a teeth-rattling dirt road.

"When you know of the sacrifices our pioneer ancestors made, you feel that it demands the same type of sacrifice from you," Liston says.

She says her son-in-law next door worked at the old sawmill which closed in 1993. He has yet to find a permanent job and that’s been tough on Liston’s daughter and their six children.

"My daughter started working at the Dairy Queen in Panguitch," she says. "Now she’s driving 50 miles to work at Ruby’s Inn. They sacrifice to stay in the valley. You don’t do that unless you love it."

More tourism in Escalante could mean that Liston’s daughter could work closer to home, but that doesn’t sit well, either. "It worries me that we’ll turn into Moab and have resorts," says Liston. "We’d love to keep our farming community and our cowboy flavor. I believe that’s what draws the tourists."

Louise Liston is a study in contradictions: As a county leader, she has refused to take monument planning money from a despised federal government, yet she recently asked Congress for $2.9 million to help the county cope with the monument. She would like the prosperity tourism could bring, but despises tourism because she fears it will change her quiet community forever.

The contrast between Liston and Kane County Commissioner Joe Judd appears stark. Faced with rapid change, one holds to the past while the other reaches for the future. But as I head out Liston’s door, she says, "You know, the monument is here, and we need to make the best of it."

Can the communities surrounding the monument grab hold of their destinies before they get overrun? Scott Groene, who witnessed Moab’s unchecked boom in the early 1990s, says wryly, "Everyone says they don’t want to be Moab, and yet they end up doing everything they can to ensure that they will. Once the people show up who only want to make money, it’s all over."

But Brad Barber is optimistic; he sees "an opportunity to create something great for southern Utah."

Pulling off Highway 12, I look out a seemingly endless expanse of domed, knobbed and sculpted rock. Like a dark and gleaming serpent, a narrow ribbon of road winds miraculously through this desert. Beyond, the dark rising of the Henry Mountains.

A canyon wall seems close enough to touch. I pick up a stone and give it a good heave. It looks good for awhile, riding high and strong, but then it slows and drops straight down, like Wile E. Coyote, into the abyss.

In this country, getting from here to there has never been easy.

New Life for the Lonesome Desert

The East Mojave Was Recently Designated A National Preserve, But Even So, Few People Have Discovered Its Subtle, Silent Pleasures

Kelso Dunes, Mojave National Preserve.

John McKinney
Los Angeles Times

NIPTON, Calif. — "Boom, boom!" shouts Sophia, my 3-year-old daughter, as she slides down the steep southeast face of the Kelso Dunes. "I have never seen more sand in the whole world!"

As we near the top of the dunes, our footsteps cause mini-avalanches and the dunes sha-boom sha-boom for us. Geologists speculate that the extreme dryness of the East Mojave Desert, combined with the wind-polished, well-rounded grains of sand, has something to do with their musical ability. Sometimes the low rumbling sound reminds me of a Tibetan gong, but on this particular day the sound is like a '50s doo-wop group.

Except for the musical dunes, it's absolutely quiet here. We have a 45-square-mile formation of magnificently sculpted sand, the most extensive dune field in the West, all to ourselves.

We're surprised at such solitude, even in the spring, prime time for visiting Southern California's newest desert preserve.

Two decades of park politicking finally ended in October, 1994, when Congress passed the controversial California Desert Protection Act, the Sen. Dianne Feinstein-sponsored bill that transferred the East Mojave National Scenic Area, administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, to the National Park Service. The act created two new national parks, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, and established the new Mojave National Preserve.

My wife, Cheri, and I, longtime desert lovers, figured (with more than a little apprehension) that the Mojave's elevated national profile would attract hordes of sightseers.

Wrong! During a visit here last week, there was only one other family making their way toward the dunes and fewer than a half-dozen campers in each of the campgrounds on a Monday. To many Southern Californians, the East Mojave is that bleak, interminable stretch of desert to be crossed as quickly as possible while driving Interstate 15 from Barstow to Las Vegas. Few realize that I-15 is the northern boundary of what desert rats have long considered the crown jewel of the California deserts.

About 17 million people live less than four hours from here, but not many city dwellers can locate the East Mojave on a map. They may be surprised to discover that the new preserve is quite accessible; on the south, it's bordered by another major interstate, I-40, and on the east by U.S. 95 (and the Nevada border). Just south of I-40 is one of the longest remaining stretches of old Route 66. Still, the area bounded by these three highways has long been known as "The Lonesome Triangle," and will probably keep this nickname for many years to come.

With few campgrounds and fewer motels--without even a visitors center--this land is a hard one to get to know. But it's an easy one to get to like. Its 1.4 million acres include the world's largest Joshua tree forest, wild burros and grazing cattle, spectacular canyons and volcanic formations, stalactites and stalagmites in vast underground caverns, back roads and footpaths to historic mining sites, tabletop mesas and a dozen mountain ranges.

This diversity--everything that makes a desert a desert--is appealing, but its silence is what draws us. It's a call of the wild that can't be heard, only felt. And in spring (the other prime time to go is autumn) temperatures are mild, the Joshua trees are in bloom and the lower Kelso Dunes are bedecked with yellow and white desert primrose, pink sand and verbena.

So where is everybody?

My family and I have an intense history with this part of the Southern California desert. The quietude of the dunes this time was in complete contrast to my first visit here eight years ago. On Thanksgiving weekend in 1987, I toured the East Mojave on a press trip with then-Sen. Alan Cranston, who had just introduced his California Desert Protection bill in Congress.

One of the bill's provisions would transfer administration of the East Mojave Desert National Scenic Area, as it was then called, from the bureau to the national parks. The measure was controversial, to say the least. Outspoken park supporters and equally outspoken park opposers badgered Cranston and anyone who would listen. By the time I started hiking up Kelso Dunes, I had thrust upon me a day pack full of position papers, from the Sierra Club to the mining industry, from the Wilderness Society to off-road vehicle boosters.

A similarly besieged magazine editor with a name tag that read Cheri Rae joined me to escape the political din. "All that arguing about a land nobody's seen," she commented. "I'll bet if more people experienced the magic of this place, the East Mojave would become a national park."

I agreed. While the East Mojave often made the news on environmental issues, these headlines offered few clues as to its beauty and recreational possibilities. That day Cheri and I began a relationship with the East Mojave that continues to this day. We explored the desert from Aiken Wash to Zzyzx, and fell in love.

McKinney writes the weekly hiking column for this section. He is the co-author, with Cheri Rae, of "Walking the East Mojave: A Visitors Guide to Mojave National Preserve."

The Lion of the Desert

Peter Burk's 18-Year Crusade Has Made California's Mojave National Park a Hot Topic

By Susan Reed
People Magazine - Vol. 41, No. 23

TO THE AVERAGE TOURIST, HIGHWAY 15 from Barstow, Calif., to the Nevada border is a bleak two-hour drive through the heart of the Mojave Desert, a barren expanse of sand and scrub where summer temperatures sometimes hit 130°. But take the same trip with Peter Burk, 48, a gangly 6'6" librarian and amateur naturalist from Barstow, and the landscape becomes a trove of ecological and historic treasures: more than 700 kinds of plants, among them the world's largest forest of Joshua trees—whose spiky limbs somehow reminded Mormon travelers of the biblical prophet—plus 300 species of wildlife, including mountain lions, bighorn sheep and golden eagles, as well as 2,000-year-old Native American petroglyphs.

Rattling along in his yellow pickup truck, Burk points excitedly to a moonscape of volcanic cones and 600-foot-high sand dunes. "People think of the Mojave as a wasteland, a dump, something to zip through on their way somewhere else," he says. "Very few people understand the tremendous wealth of life here."

Thanks to Burk's 18-year crusade on behalf of the Mojave, they will soon learn differently. In April, the U.S. Senate passed the California Desert Protection Act, landmark legislation that will create three new national parks, Mojave, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, as well as 74 separate wilderness areas. The bill, which the House is expected to approve this summer, encompasses 6.3 million acres—affecting more public lands in the lower 48 states than any legislation in history. "This desert is a masterpiece," says Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the bill's lead sponsor. "If it weren't for the Peter Burks of the world, these things wouldn't happen."

Burk's Mojave crusade began in 1976, during a daily hike with his wife, Joyce, also a librarian. Burk was complaining about the Barstow to Las Vegas off-road race, an annual event in which hundreds of motorcyclists, zooming across the Mojave, tear into the fragile desert floor. "But then I decided that instead of fighting against something like the race, we should fight/or something," says Burk.

In a model of grassroots organizing, the Burks began holding spaghetti dinners and selling T-shirts and booklets promoting desert protection. They won the endorsement of two Sierra Club chapters and began publishing a quarterly newsletter. In 1978, Burk persuaded Rep. George Brown (D-Calif.) to introduce a bill protecting the East Mojave.

Burk learned to love the desert while growing up in Redlands, Calif., near the Mojave. The son of Peter W. Burk, a civil engineer, and Betty, an English teacher, young Peter was a rock hound who ventured off to the wilderness on weekends to add to his collection. Intent on becoming a teacher himself, he enrolled at the University of California at Riverside, where he earned a master's degree in history and met Joyce Brady, whom he married in 1968.

But a stint in the Air Force—Burk was drafted in 1969 and discharged honorably a year later—changed his outlook. "There were a lot of things wrong in the world," he says. "Seeing what was happening in the [Vietnam] war changed me."

The Burks moved to Barstow, where Peter worked with foster families and abused children. Eventually, depressed by the suffering he saw, he left social work after nine years for a job as a librarian at Silver Valley High School in nearby Yermo. It was in 1973 when he joined the Sierra Club and embarked on the desert campaign that he found his true vocation. "In a way, we raised the park like we would have raised a child," says Joyce.

Not everyone shared the Burks' enthusiasm. In deference to a coalition of hunters, cattlemen and all-terrain-vehicle owners, California's Republican senators, Pete Wilson and John Seymour, blocked the Mojave Park bill. It was only revived when Feinstein and fellow Democrat Barbara Boxer were elected to the Senate in 1992. Now, on the cusp of the House vote, one final threat remains: The NRA is working furiously to downgrade the park to a preserve where hunting will be allowed. Still, Burk is cautiously optimistic. "We've come a long way," he says, "but it's not over until the fat lady sings."

Burk heard the first notes of that song April 13 when the Senate voted 69-29 in his favor. That day, he and Joyce taped the Senate debate on C-Span before sitting down that night to watch. "Imagine how it felt for a guy in a Podunk town watching Senator Feinstein stand in front of the Senate speaking almost verbatim from the booklets we put together," he says. "It made me feel like we do have a future, that little guys like me can make a difference."

Most Powerful Quake in 40 Years Hits California

Robert Reinhold
New York Times



Fault trace from the 1992 Landers earthquake is revealed in damaged roadway.


The most powerful earthquake to hit California in 40 years rumbled out of the high desert east of Los Angeles early this this morning, a jolt so powerful that it sloshed swimming pools as far north as Idaho and rocked houseboats on Lake Union in Seattle.

The quake, which measured 7.4 on the Richter Scale of ground movement and killed one person, was followed three hours and seven minutes later by another strong quake 19 miles away. The second quake cut off roads to the mountain resort of Big Bear Lake and touched off huge landslides that sent dramatic plumes of dust rising over the San Bernardino Mountains.

The jolts shattered windows, emptied store shelves, set fires, opened huge fissures in mountain roads and knocked down houses and shops here in the Yucca Valley about 125 miles east of Los Angeles. The Hi Desert Hospital in Joshua Tree reported treating 70 people for injuries that included cuts, fractures and suspected heart attacks, admitting 10. There was one fatality, Joseph R. Bishop, a 3 1/2-year-old child who was crushed by a falling chimney as he slept in Yucca Valley.

Power Impresses Californians

Residents all over Southern California said the first jolt, a prolonged rumbling that shook houses violently at 4:58 A.M., was the most powerful and frightening temblor they had ever experienced.

"It was something that I never felt in my life before," said Iona Bong, 61 years old, whose house is near the epicenter in the town of Landers, about 10 miles north of here. "It was a sinking that would not quit. Everything I own is on the floor."

Terrifying aftershocks continued to rock the area all day. The Governor's Office of Emergency Services declared a state earthquake alert after scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena warned that there was a chance of better than 50 percent of aftershocks measuring 6.0 or greater within 24 hours.

The state urged people to stay indoors and curtail normal activities, including travel on freeways. But the Dodger baseball game in Los Angeles and other events took place anyway. At 5 P.M. the authorities rescinded the warning and said it was safe to travel to work on Monday, although they continued to urge residents to remain alert to the possibility of more aftershocks.

The damage and injuries would certainly have been far greater had the quake hit during daylight hours or closer to the densely populated Los Angeles Basin than this dusty windy desert valley north of Palm Springs.

Late in the afternoon, Kerry Sieh, a seismologist from Cal Tech, who was inspecting the area from a helicopter, found that the ground had moved 18 feet in one place on the fault 43 miles north of Landers. Experts say that if such movement occurred in a city, damage would be extensive.

"Beyond Landers all hell breaks loose," Dr. Sieh said. He added that numerous faults come close to the surface in the area and several had broken it.

The United States Geological Survey's Earthquake Information Office in Golden, Colo., classified today's 7.4 quake as a "major" event, the largest in California since July 20, 1952, when a 7.7 magnitude jolt rocked the Tehachapi-Bakersfield area in Central California, killing 12 people, injuring 18 and causing $60 million in property damage. By comparison the first quake today was nearly three times as powerful as the Loma Prieta earthquake measuring 7.1 that hit the San Francisco area in October 1989, killing 63 people.

Hotel Tower Evacuated

The Geological Survey put today's second jolt, which occurred at 8:05 A.M., at a magnitude of 6.5. It was along an entirely different fault, with an epicenter six miles southeast of Big Bear Lake. The extent of damage and injuries in that area could not be determined by this afternoon, because telephone and road links were cut.

The authorities were particularly concerned about this earthquake because it was very close to the San Andreas fault running most of the length of California, which many experts believe could be the source of a very powerful earthquake. Such concern led President Bush to cancel a golf match and return to the White House from Camp David, Md., for a briefing on the quake. Mr. Bush also called Gov. Pete Wilson of California and said he told Mr. Wilson "the Federal Government would do whatever we possibly can do."

The first earthquake today was felt as far east as Colorado and woke up residents all over the Los Angeles area. In one home in Hollywood, beds started to shake vigorously and the residents, heeding warnings, jumped up and stood under doorframes. The house creaked loudly for about 30 seconds and chandeliers swung. In other parts of the region people ran out of their homes and stood in the open to avoid falling objects. One tower of the the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim was evacuated. But there was little damage in Los Angeles itself.

The same cannot be said for the Yucca Valley, a string of dusty towns along a mountainous road just north of the Joshua Tree National Monument in San Bernardino County.

Shops all along Route 62, the main route that bisects the valley, had their windows broken and merchandise tossed around violently. The worst-hit business was the New Yucca Bowl, a 16-lane bowling alley where the entire east wall fell away, leaving a gaping hole through which girders and air-conditioning ducts could be seen hanging over the littered lanes. In another few hours, the alley would have been crowded with Sunday bowlers.

"I would have been buried by now," said Larry Rochester, who worked at the control desk, standing in windy 106-degree heat outside the wrecked bowling alley. Like most residents, he was at home sleeping at the time. "This is my fifth quake over 6.0, but this is the first one I was really scared," he said. "The longevity was unbelievable." He said he grabbed his wife and daughter and rushed outside into the darkness.

The owner of the alley, an Egyptian immigrant who would identify himself only as Nick, put the damage to the 27-year-old, 20,000-square-foot building at about $1.5 million. He said he did not have earthquake insurance.

Shane R. Cashman, a 24-year-old construction worker in Yucca Valley, was among the injured. "I was in bed and this just amazing shaking started," he said. "At first, I thought I'd just ride it out. But it went on forever, so I just had to run. I couldn't help myself. I ran down the concrete stairs at our apartment building, but the stairs were shaking so hard I couldn't keep my balance." He said he fell down the stairs and suffered leg injuries for which he was treated at Hi Desert Hospital.

'I Was Pinned There'

"It dumped me out of bed and dumped a bureau on top of me," said Emma Drages, a 68-year-old woman who lives in Landers, the town closest to the epicenter. "I was pinned there for a while. I walked into my house and I saw the dishes that belonged to my grandmother that I was saving for my children and they were all gone."

The early quake caused heavy damage to Old Woman Springs Road, a major route north of Yucca Valley to Landers. At one point the road broke, rising three feet on one side. In Landers, a 500,000-gallon water tank burst, leaving most of the 10,000 residents without water for at least three days, and four homes burned to the ground.

Mrs. Bong's brown stucco home shuddered violently, and she said she started to fly off her bed. Her husband, Leonard, a retired ceramic tile maker, grabbed her arm. When the shaking stopped, the Bongs's bedroom was filled with smashed belongings. They carted out a huge garbage can of broken glass from the kitchen. Mrs. Bong said she lost two figurines she had had since she was 16 years old.

The highway patrol sealed off Landers to all but residents, and even they could not get through without four-wheel drive vehicles.

At the San Bernardino County Firehouse in Yucca Valley, Doug Anderson, a firefighter, was recalling his wakeup call. "It seemed like it would never end," he said. "The intensity was incredible."

The authorities said about 100 people sought emergency shelter. Considering the power of the quake and the huge population of Southern California, it could have been a lot worse, and someday almost certainly will be.

Bagdad Fades Into the Desert--in California

Postcard image of Bagdad on Route 66 in 1939 (Burton Frasher)

By CHARLES HILLINGER
Los Angeles Times

BAGDAD, Calif. — Ever since Iraq invaded Kuwait, curious motorists passing through the Mojave Desert have stopped to ask the way to Bagdad, the California ghost town named in the 1800s for the Middle Eastern capital.

"Every day they come into our gas station or restaurant and ask, 'Where's Bagdad? We can't find it,' " said Buster Burris, 81, owner of the town of Amboy, population 27, eight miles east of where maps indicate Bagdad is located.

Burris tells them Bagdad is but a memory these days.

Situated in the middle of the desert, Bagdad is 75 miles southeast of Barstow on old Route 66 in a long valley between the Bristol and Bullion mountains.

Today, its only inhabitants are snakes, lizards, scorpions, pack rats and an assortment of other wildlife. There's a lone palm tree, half a dozen scraggly salt cedars and a scattering of sagebrush growing in the desert sand.

Bagdad has always been one of the driest places in the United States. It recorded the longest period of drought anywhere in the history of the country from July, 1912, to November, 1914: 767 consecutive days without precipitation.

There is an eerie quiet here that is broken from time to time by the 30 to 40 trains that rumble through Bagdad each day.

In 1883, railroad officials who dubbed two nearby settlements Siberia and Klondike named this desert town after the Iraqi capital, omitting the "h" in a divergent spelling for the city on the Tigris. As many as 50 Chinese railroad workers died while laying tracks, falling victim to a cholera epidemic. An unmarked burial ground is believed to be somewhere nearby.

A "Bagdad" sign, along the mainline Santa Fe tracks marks the site of the town that boomed from the late 1800s through the early 1900s, finally gasping its last breath in the late 1960s.

Bagdad was an important railhead, a watering place for railroad engines during steam days and a center for nearby gold, silver, copper and lava mining camps--for mines such as the Orange Blossom, War Eagle and Lady Lou.

There were homes, hotels, saloons and stores here, a post office from 1889 to 1923, a school, a passenger railway station and a Harvey House restaurant. By the 1940s, however, all that remained was the depot, a few homes, the Bagdad Cafe, a gas station and cabins for overnight stays on U.S. 66.

Its population dwindled from a few hundred during its heyday to fewer than 20 in the mid-1940s, when Paul Limon worked here pumping gas at 23 cents a gallon. Limon, now 63, lives in Cadiz, 20 miles east of Bagdad. He recalled the town as he knew it during the 1940s and 1950s:

"Bagdad was a lively little place. People from all over the desert would come here because of the Bagdad Cafe, owned and operated by a woman named Alice Lawrence. The Bagdad Cafe was the only place for miles around with a dance floor and juke box.

"The Bagdad Cafe was a happy-go-lucky, popular spot. When I hear or read about the war in the Persian Gulf and Baghdad is mentioned, I think about Bagdad, Calif., and all the good times I had in this town," Limon said during a sentimental visit here. Many who drove U.S. 66, America's main street from the Midwest to California, will remember Bagdad, allowed Limon.

"Overheated cars from every state would stop to get water. Cars in those days were always boiling over. And a lot of those people ate in the Bagdad Cafe."

In fact, the town served as the original inspiration for the 1988 movie and subsequent television program, "Bagdad Cafe"--which was actually filmed at the Sidewinder Cafe in Newberry Springs, 40 miles to the northwest.

Percy Adlon, 55, a German film producer and founder of the Pelemele Film Corp., said he and his wife were driving in the desert in 1985 and, noticing Bagdad on the map, went off in search of the town.

They never did find it, but the name intrigued Adlon so much that he produced a film about "a Bavarian lady stranded in the desert in a cafe next to a dusty hotel," he said Wednesday in an interview. A CBS series that spun off the film starred Whoopie Goldberg and Jean Stapleton and ran 19 episodes before it was canceled in November.

Bagdad was bypassed in 1972 when Interstate 40 opened 20 miles to the north and the two-lane stretch of Route 66 through here became a deserted, seldom-used road.

But Bagdad had died years before the freeway opened. And the cafe, depot and what few structures remained were destroyed by vandals.

A network of dirt streets outline the town that was. Two speed-limits signs--15 m.p.h.--still stand. Concrete building foundations, rusted automotive parts, mining equipment and pipes, shattered glass and dinnerware, old pots and pans and other debris litter the area.

"This is where the Bagdad Cafe and gas station were," said Limon, standing on what is left of the eatery--the front steps.

He drove over the dirt streets to the old Bagdad Cemetery, a handful of graves marked with weathered crosses with names no longer legible. Signs were evident that grave robbers had recently desecrated the final resting place of Bagdad residents who died here in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

"This really sickens me," sighed Limon, as he looked down at holes dug at two of the grave sites.

Hoist a Root Beer for Family of Yucca Cutters

Milton Blair uses a chainsaw to cut a yucca tree on Mojave Desert leased land. Watching are two of his daughters, five sons. (Ben Olender / Los Angeles Times)

By CHARLES HILLINGER
Los Angeles Times

HACKBERRY MOUNTAIN, Calif. -- Next time you have a root beer, think of Milton Blair and 10 of his 14 kids.

The Blairs harvest 14 tons of yucca trees each week on land leased from the Southern Pacific Railroad on the Mojave Desert in eastern San Bernardino County. Root beer foam comes from the sap of the thorny desert tree.

"Harvesting Spanish daggers (yucca trees) is dirty, hard, nasty work," said Blair, 50, as he revved up a chain saw to cut a yucca.
Blair is blind in his left eye. Four years ago a yucca spine punctured his eye.

Blair and his oldest son, Milton Jr., 26, cut the trees and strip the trunks of the dangerous spikes. The rest of the family hoists the heavy yucca sections into a truck.

"This is the best time of the year to cut daggers," said Melissa Blair, 17, her mouth bulging with a plug of chewing tobacco.

Occupational Nuisances

"In summer we're wringing wet with sweat from sunup to sundown. Ants crawl up our bodies and bite. We get stuck with daggers and cactus. We gulp gallons of ice water," she said.

The Blairs sell the yucca to Ritter International, a Los Angeles firm, where it is processed for scores of uses including foam for root beer, an additive to carbonated beverages, shampoos, cosmetics and industrial deodorants. Yucca foam has been used for snow scenes in television and motion pictures. It was used by the Navy during World War II to smother fires.

Don Emery, botanist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, noted: "The yucca is a renewable resource just as a tree in a forest, providing it is properly harvested as the Blairs are doing." Even though the Blairs are harvesting the desert trees on private railroad land they are still required to have government permits and must cut the yucca in a prescribed manner.

The family divides its time harvesting yucca and running 200 head of cattle on their Lazy Daisy Ranch 450,000 acres of dry desert terrain leased from the railroad, the federal and state governments.

They live 14 miles by miserable dirt road from their nearest neighbor in a home without electricity, phone, or television. Kerosene lamps furnish their light.

"My wife is secretary and bookkeeper of the outfit. I ain't worth a damn at that," Blair said.

There are 10 boys and 4 girls in the family: Milton Jr., 26. Joe, 24, Mary, 22, Susie, 21. Eddie, 19, Melissa, 17. Luke, 16, Dan, 14, Annie, 12, Austin, 9, Mark, 8, Johnny, 6, Mike 4, and Matt, 2. The Blairs have a three-bedroom home and bunkhouse. They use the work stove for cooking and warmth.

"The real chore is keeping track of our cows. They're scattered all over hell and gone," said Joe Blair. "We lost 25 head last year to spot-lighters." Members of "varmint clubs" drive out to the desert in pickup trucks and armed with high-powered rifles. "They use spotlights on their pickups to look for coyotes, bobcat and fox. They see an eye and WHAM! They shoot. Twenty-five pairs of those eyes last year belonged to our cows," Joe Blair said.

The biggest excitement of the week for the Blairs is the 40-mile drive into town (Needles) every Saturday. "My wife and two of the girls spend a couple hours at the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and a couple hours shopping. The rest of us wait for them at the Hungry Bear Cafe," Blair said. "We sit and drink coffee waiting for the women. Then we hop back into the pickup and head for the ranch."

'Desert Padre' Author Putnam Dies at Trona

January 6, 1950

The Ridgecrest Herald
Ridgecrest CA

Amelia Earhart and George Putnam made an unusual husband-and-wife team.





Major George Palmer Putnam, author, lecturer, explorer and a veteran of World Wars I and II, died at Trona hospital Wednesday at 6:05 a.m.

A resident of Lone Pine since 1939, Major Putnam had been owner and operator of Stove Pipe Well hotel in Death Valley.

He was 63 years of age.

Although direct cause of death was not revealed, it is known that Major Putnam had been suffering internal hemorrhages since Sunday, Nov. 27, when he was taken to the hospital at Trona. Late last week uremic poinsoning set in, it was reported Tuesday, after announcement had been made Monday evening that it was doubtful he would survive the night.

He had been in a coma since before noon on Monday.

His widow, Mrs. Margaret Haviland Putnam, told a Chalfant Press representative Tuesday that just last week Major Putnam had dressed himself and had gone for a short automobile ride. The relapse occurred this Monday.

Two sons, David Binney Putnam and George Palmer Putnam, III, residents of Fort Pierce, Fla., had been advised Monday of the turn for the worse, but failed to arrive before their father’s death. They were due at Metropolitan airport in Los Angeles Wednesday evening.

As a former member of the New York publishing house, George Palmer Putnam and Sons, Major Putnam negotiated with Charles A. Lindberg for publishing rights to the famous aviator’s book “We.” Above his desk at Stove Pipe Wells hotel is displayed a cancelled check to Lindberg in the
amount of $100,000 for the book.

A colorful figure, with a career of exploring and backing history-making aviation events, especially those of his wife, the celebrated Amelia Earhart–Putnam was born in Rye, N. Y. and educated at private schools in New York state, at Harvard and the University of California.

He married Miss Earhart, his second wife, in February, 1931 – backed her many flying accomplishments and guided her to world fame that reached a tragic climax when she was lost in 1937 in a flight from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island.

For many years Putnam held faith that his wife would be found alive, but she was declared legally dead in January, 1939.

As an explorer, Putnam had several notable Arctic expeditions to his credit and was associated with such exploits as Adm. Byrd’s North and South Pole expeditions, Sir Hubert Wilkins flights and the exploration and publishing activities of Roy Chapman Andrews, William Beebe, Rockwell
Kent, etc.

He was born into the century-old publishing house of G. P. Putnam’s Sons and once headed the concern, giving up its direction in 1931.

In 1939 he was kidnapped from his North Hollywood home and found bound and gagged some hours later in an uncompleted Bakersfield home.

He told police two men had tried to make him disclose the author of a book, “The Man Who Killed Hitler,” which he was publishing at the time. He was unhurt.

A prolific writer, as well as a publisher, he was the author of “Smiting the Rock,” “In the Oregon Country,” “The Southland of North America,” “Andree, the Record on a Tragic Adventure,” “Soaring Wings, the Biography of Amelia Earhart,” “Wide Margins,” and autobiography, “Duration,” a World
War II book of life in Washington; “Death Valley and its Country,: and numerous other volumes. His latest book, “Hickory Shirt” was a novel of Death Valley in 1849.

Putnam served in both wars, as a lieutenant of field artillery in World War I and as a major of intelligence with a Superfortress outfit in World War II. He saw considerable service in the China theatre.

After coming to the Owens Valley he purchased the stone cabin at the Whitney Portal owned by the late Father John Crowley, beloved padre of the desert. For years he wrote a column of observations for Chalfant Press newspapers entitle “Shangri-Putnam by GPP.”

He had several other books ready for publication, one of which deals with Owens Valley and its struggle for water.

His first wife was Dorothy Binney Putnam. They were married in 1911 and divorced in 1928. Both his sons were born of this union. Putnam was married twice after Miss Earhart was declared dead. In 1939 he married Jean-Marie Consigny, author of “Gardening for Fun,” “Who’s Who in the
Garden,” and other books.