Federal Plans Aim to Control Use of the Desert

Development and off-road use in the Mojave and Algodones Dunes would increase. Critics threaten to sue.

By Janet Wilson and Julie Cart, Staff Writers
Los Angeles Times

Federal officials on Thursday released a pair of desert management plans to accommodate recreation, development and wildlife in the booming western Mojave and in the Algodones Dunes, a popular destination for off-road vehicles in far southeastern California.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said its design for 9.3 million acres of the western Mojave Desert is the largest habitat conservation plan in the United States, encompassing parts of four counties and numerous towns.

The plan, one of nearly 500 around the country, is aimed at expediting development in western San Bernardino, Kern, Los Angeles and Inyo counties while seeking to preserve more than 100 rare plant and animal species, including the threatened desert tortoise and Mohave ground squirrel.

Such plans allow home builders, miners, water and sewage companies, and others to destroy endangered and threatened species in exchange for setting aside or paying to preserve wildlife habitat elsewhere.

"Everybody out there in this tremendously large, 9-million-acre area will know which areas are targeted for conservation and which areas would be allowed for development," said Jan Bedrosian, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management's California office, which began developing the plan a decade ago.

Larry Lapre, the BLM staffer overseeing final development of the plan, said the fast-growing area covered under the plan stretches from the San Gabriel Mountains east to Baker, and from Olancha in the Owens Valley south to Joshua Tree National Park. It takes in Morongo Valley, Yucca Valley, Apple Valley, Lancaster, Palmdale and Ridgecrest.

"It's an hour away from 15 million people," he said.

"Lancaster and Palmdale in particular are experiencing very rapid growth, and Victorville is too…. It's suburban sprawl."

"Every time you do a subdivision in Victorville, you have to do a tortoise survey and a ground squirrel survey and a burrowing owl survey, and usually you find one of each," Lapre said. "Then you have to go get permits, and there's hundreds of those pending. Hundreds of housing projects are being delayed."

Under the new plan, developers could pay fees or set aside land, then acquire one "take" permit covering all the species.

Lapre, a biologist who has worked on such plans for years, said the large swaths of land that would be set aside for the tortoise and other wildlife would help preserve them.

But environmental groups disagreed sharply. Daniel Patterson said the Center for Biological Diversity would sue if necessary to block the plan, which, he said, would ignore an existing recovery plan for the tortoise.

The BLM plan for the Algodones Dunes, long a mecca for off-road vehicle enthusiasts, calls for opening all of the areas that were placed off-limits as a result of a temporary court settlement five years ago.

However, Bedrosian of the BLM said the closures on slightly less than one-third of the area — 49,300 acres — would remain in place until at least Oct. 15 while a federal judge considers competing lawsuits from off-roaders and environmentalists.

Most of the currently restricted area — about 33,000 acres — will be opened to limited motorized use. The BLM said it would issue up to 525 permits per day for that part of the dunes, prohibit overnight camping, and close the area from April to mid-October.

For the time being, the BLM proposes instituting a zoning system that divides the entire 160,000-acre dune system into eight management areas. The 26,000-acre North Algodones Dunes Wilderness area would be closed to any motorized travel, for example, and the 21,000-acre Gecko area would be open to unlimited off-road use.

Altogether, more than 85% of the dunes would be open to off-road vehicles.

Daniel Patterson, a desert ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, assailed the plan as a reversal of the 2000 court agreement and said it fails to provide protection for a threatened plant.

"The worst part is that the plan fails to deal with the crowds," Patterson said. "They totally failed to consider the carrying capacity of the dunes. The caps are only for a small area. It's a paper plan that will have no on-the-ground enforceability."

On holiday weekends, as many as 250,000 people roar over the dunes in sand rails, trucks and dune buggies. Four years ago, three people were killed and dozens injured, including a park ranger who was run over during the Thanksgiving weekend.

Bedrosian said the agency considers the 33,000 acres of limited use a "laboratory," adding that vehicle limits could be adjusted if necessary.

Don’t Mince Birds

Wind power for Los Angeles faces down a new foe

Judith Lewis
LA Weekly

It began with a fanfare that fast became a public-relations nightmare; it has been stalled for nearly a year awaiting impact reports. And just when it seemed poised to go forward in advance of a mayoral election that could be decided by a handful of environmentalist votes, the Pine Tree Wind Farm has hit yet another obstacle: the defenders of the hundreds of songbirds that some ornithologists believe fly through the proposed 22,000-acre site in the Mojave Desert every year.

“It’s a prime location on the north-south migration pattern every fall and spring,” says Garry George, first vice president and conservation chair of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Audubon Society. “Flycatchers, warblers, vireos, those kinds of birds.” An environmental impact report (EIR) published in July 2004 acknowledged potential harm to red-tailed hawks, but estimated that Pine Tree’s 80 turbines would kill only four raptors per year (the average among all North American wind farms is 2.19 deaths per year) — not much impact to a healthy population. But there’s no evidence in the EIR that anyone even observed a single songbird. “They visited only one time and only for an hour during the birds’ peak migration period, which is April 15th to May 30th,” George says. “How could they conclude it wasn’t harmful to songbirds if they weren’t there when most birds come through?”

A proposed $162 million project that would supply clean energy to 120,000 Los Angeles homes, the Pine Tree Wind Farm could help the DWP meet a goal of 20 percent renewable energy by 2017, as set by the Los Angeles City Council last year. The DWP’s own Web site boasts that the project will reduce the utility’s carbon-dioxide emissions “by more than 210,000 tons each year.”

That obviously thrills clean-energy advocates, who say the DWP has been notoriously sluggish on clean power. “The DWP’s mantra is to build dirty coal plants out of state,” says Rhonda Mills, director of special projects for the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies (CEERT). “They prefer to diminish visibility in national parks in Utah than put any effort into wind or solar. For us this wind farm is a very promising project compared to what we’ve built in the last 30 years.

“But that doesn’t mean you do it at the expense of everything,” Mills cautions. “It means that you do it right, with all the reports in place.”

George agrees. “We don’t object to wind power in general; we just want them to do all the studies.”

Bird enthusiasts have found little comfort in the histories of other California wind farms, such as the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in eastern Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. In addition to killing anywhere from 800 to 1,200 birds of prey a year, including the protected golden eagle, Altamont’s mills also chew up some 3,000 meadowlarks and nearly 400 burrowing owls. The Center for Biological Diversity has filed suit against several companies managing the wind farm alleging unfair business practices (Wind Turbine Prometheus, which will develop Pine Tree with General Electric turbines, is not among them). Even the California Energy Company has recommended retiring the facility’s most lethal turbines.

“Wind turbine owners are not doing enough to mitigate bird and bat mortality,” says K. Shawn Smallwood, an independent ecologist specializing in minimizing bird kills on wind farms who worked on the Pine Tree draft EIR. “What the wind industry is doing right now is denying there’s a problem,” he says. “That’s too bad, because there’s a way to make wind power truly green. They just won’t do it.”

Tensions high in the preserve

Gun incident highlights residents' animosity toward the National Park Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The birth of a preserve

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

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

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

Some of those people opposed the creation of the preserve.

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

Ranching and land ownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, Blair said he knows some people feel intimidated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Response to "Water Fight in the Mojave"

Attention:
Letters to the Los Angeles Times editor
For the Record editor

Julie Cart's story, "Water Fight in the Mojave," in Friday's California section is a classic example of how The Times only gets half the story and only half right. It is filled with incorrect and mis-information reported without a lick of attribution.

The first mistake is the assumption that the "needs of game animals" are somehow at odds with the needs of "federally protected wildlife," and that hunters' interests are somehow different than other conservationists. It seems to me that hunters are interested in diverse healthy wildlife populations and show that by funding massive programs around the world that benefit all wildlife, not just hunted species. Good management of resources and wild systems benefits all wildlife in that system.

Then we come to the first error of fact: "...man-made water holes draw predators that prey on the threatened California desert tortoise." There has never been a single definitive study that shows this is true, and obviously no one who wanted to be quoted saying this was the case. There has been speculation by some biologists this happens, but that speculation is without any correlative science, and certainly without definitive work. In fact, most of the science would tend to suggest that additional water sources would tend to distribute predators at more places, lessening the likelihood that a tortoise would be potential prey.

Then the next paragraph has the next glaring error of fact: "...reverse a long-standing water policy in the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve." There is no policy. It is not stated in the Mojave's management plan. It is not in NEPA or even CEQA. In fact, by agreeing to the permanent capping of wells with the National Park Service Foundation, and moving ahead with those plans, the National Park Service violated its own management plan for the Preserve and NEPA. Both the plan and NEPA require that the NPS evaluate the impacts the removal of water -- in this case over 125 cattle watering sources -- would have on the preserve's wildlife BEFORE the water was removed. The NPS did NOT do that. It did no baseline surveys on wildlife populations around this man-made water and completed no study on impacts water removal would have, good or bad. There was only speculation that it would be a good thing. The NPS was in violation of the law and its own policy when it encouraged the removal of the cattle watering sources in the first place. This has probably led to a dramatic decline in dozens and dozens of different wildlife species, not just hunted species, on the preserve. But it was only the hunter-conservation groups like Safari Club who were concerned about this and immediately filed a protest. If the Times had bothered to ask Center for Biological Diversity lawyers about this, they would have told the papers' reporters that the NPS was in violation for allowing the removal of the wells, pipelines, and stock tanks in the first place before meeting the requirements of NEPA and its own management plan. Safari Club was trying to get the preserve staff to restore only 12 wells out of 125 water sources removed, and trying to do this quickly without a lawsuit to cut wildlife losses.

The next error in fact is about the claim by the 57 scientists who contend that because of groundwater pumping 90 percent of the preserves springs and seeps had been diminished on the preserve. There is no scientific documentation this is true. Only speculation by these 57 scientists. It is just as likely, if we can speculate, that groundwater pumping for human developments in Needles and Newberry Springs, drought, or global warming was the cause for any historic change, and not the modest pumping that supplied cattle (and wildlife) with water. In fact, it is speculative there has been a 90 percent change at all. This is NOT documented by science, it is their seat-of-the-pants belief. Show me the science.

These same scientists bemoan the added water as a huge detriment to wildlife. There are thousands of scientists in all of the Western states who will tell you the opposite, that water added in deserts is a huge boon to all wildlife. They have good science and examples to back up their beliefs, however, not speculation. One of the best examples of how added water has benefited wildlife is -- ironically -- on the Mojave National Preserve. The work was done before it was preserve, of course. The Old Dad Peak/Kelso Mountains complex on the far Western edge of the preserve historically held only a few wandering bighorn sheep. Never more than a dozen according to surveys done through the middle part of the last century. The Department of Fish and Game, working with the Bureau of Land Management, and one of those onerous hunter-conservation groups, the Society for the Conservation of Bighorn Sheep, put in several man-made water sources. They did this, by the way, before hunting of bighorn sheep was allowed in the state. Today, it is the largest herd of desert bighorns in the state, numbering over 200 animals. This once threatened species (just like the desert tortoise) was brought back by the addition of water. By hunters before there was hunting for sheep. Amazing, huh?.

Now come the big factual errors in the story:

1) There is no direct evidence that capping any wells has rejuvenated the preserves natural water sites. This is speculation. And the statement is made without attribution in the story. We could speculate that the wetter seasons this year and last year are responsible for any increase in spring flow over the short term, too. And in fact, that has far more credibility.

2) There is no evidence of a deer herd increase. The NPS did no population surveys before the water was removed and none after the water was removed. They were supposed to do this before removing the 125 water sources, but they didn't. The "increase" is interpolated from the Department of Fish and Game's deer harvest figures over the past several hunting seasons. Survey hunters and they will all tell you they are seeing fewer deer in fewer places, but that they have become more successful because the deer have fewer places to water. Like any smart predator, hunters are focusing their efforts around those remaining water sources and killing more deer.

3) Of the 133 small game guzzlers and six big game guzzlers, over 3/4s are out of desert tortoise habitat. Of the 1/4 that are in desert tortoise habitat, tortoise remains have been found in 1/3 of those. That is a far smaller number than quoted in the LA Times story, which makes them all sound like death traps. Also, the implication that because remains are found in a guzzler that the guzzler is somehow the reason for the tortoises death is, at best, speculative. Correlation is not causation. Department of Fish and Game research, actual science, suggests very few of the tortoises in guzzlers died as a result of the guzzler. Just as DFG research suggests that tortoise shells found with bullet holes were almost never killed by those bullets. The shells were shot postmortem, long after the tortoises were dead. But there are "scientists" that continue to insist that shooting is a major cause of tortoise deaths. This is a lie.

4) There is no scientific evidence that water sources attract more ravens, increasing desert tortoise deaths. None. In fact, other scientists speculate that the more water sources you have, the less impacts predators have on wildlife. The problem is that there are about 100 times more ravens now than there were just 25 years ago. That is attributed to desert communities that provide food (garbage) in great quantities. Ravens also eat baby tortoises, and 100 times more eat 100 times more babies. You do the math. A lot of scientists believe ravens are the crux of the tortoise decline. Bulldozing all desert communities from Barstow to Yucca Valley to Lancaster would probably alleviate the raven increase.

Most of the 21-page complaint talks about the supposed impacts of man-made water on desert tortoises. The reality is that all 12 of the wells proposed for retrofitting are above the elevations inhabited by tortoises on the preserve. Isn't this whole argument is moot? Why didn't the Times reporter, ask this question?

The NPS staff could indeed suggest that it needs to remove all of the cattle water and the guzzlers on the preserve because this is "unnatural manipulation" of the habitat -- and that is not their charge. But the staff IS required by law and their own preserve policy to document the impacts water removal would have on the preserve's existing wildlife resources. They did not do that -- and that was ILLEGAL.

Conversely, the NPS is ALSO required to protect and enhance the cultural heritage on the preserve. Cattle ranching and guzzlers have been a huge part of the preserve for 100 years or more, and the historic windmills and cattle troughs are wonderful symbols of that history. The fact that they also help wildlife is a bonus. Yet, the NPS wants to rip them all out. Couldn't the NPS recognize the wildlife benefits and direct visitors to these cultural heritage sites to see desert wildlife? The small game guzzlers are ideal places to watch wildlife in the spring and summer, when there is no hunting on the preserve, and many of us believe the guzzlers should be preserved for their historic AND wildlife values. The NPS staff has never considered that a valid argument.

The impact removing 125-plus water sources has had on preserve wildlife is profound. The cultural loss is significant. It is more than quail and deer and hunters that have suffered.

Instead of portraying Paul Hoffman as another of the Bush-administration bad guy who's trying to destroy American's wildlife heritage, the reality the LA Times couldn't or refused to see is that Hoffman is trying to compensate for a NPS staff that hates the fact that hunting is allowed in the Mojave Preserve and was willing to violate the law and destroy wildlife to try to make the preserve less appealing to hunters. Hoffman was trying to avert a Safari Club lawsuit and protect desert wildlife. And he's the villain?

I realize this is far too long for you to run as a letter, but I hope you will at least research and correct the factual errors.

Sincerely,

Jim Matthews
San Bernardino, Calif.

Water Fight in the Mojave

U.S. Sides With Hunters, Who Clash With Naturalists on Well Issue

By Julie Cart, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

A quarrel over waterholes in the Mojave is pitting hunters against naturalists, the needs of game animals against those of federally protected wildlife, and is resurrecting decade-old differences over the purpose of a national preserve.

Until recently, the dispute has been limited to mule deer and bighorn sheep hunters who favor the creation of more desert water sources and conservationists who argue that man-made waterholes draw predators that prey on the threatened California desert tortoise.

Now, a high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of the Interior has intervened on behalf of hunters and demanded the uncapping of 12 plugged wells, an action that would reverse a long-standing water policy in the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve. That, in turn, prompted a lawsuit this week by two environmental groups that say the order is illegal.

Ever since the preserve was created 11 years ago, the National Park Service, which manages it, has been working to buy out a handful of cattle ranches scattered through the preserve and cap wells that supplied water to livestock. Some of the buyout agreements, which were financed by the nonprofit National Park Foundation, called for the permanent capping of all ranch wells.

Earlier this year, Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Paul Hoffman, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, ordered the Park Service to allow the California Department of Fish and Game to reopen ranch wells and convert them to wildlife watering sites, known as guzzlers.

Hoffman issued the order over the written objections of Mojave Preserve Supt. Mary Martin.

The issue of man-made water supplies is especially important to hunters of mule deer, bighorn sheep, rabbits and quail. When the preserve was created in 1994, Congress directed that hunting be allowed.

However, in 2002 a group of 57 biologists, hydrologists and archeologists from around the country sent a letter to Hoffman asking for the removal of all guzzlers in the preserve.

The group said removal of artificial water sources was consistent with the principles of "conservation biology and park policy and law," and with Park Service management policies that prohibit "artificial manipulation of habitat to increase numbers of a harvested species above its natural range in population levels."

In addition, the scientists wrote that because of decades of groundwater pumping, 90% of the preserve's natural springs and seeps had been adversely affected.

This week, the Center for Biological Diversity and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility sued to prevent the first four wells from being uncapped and converted to water sites for wildlife. The lawsuit alleges that new guzzlers would be illegal, that well retrofitting requires environmental analysis, and that the watering devices have been shown to be harmful to other wildlife.

Hugh Vickery, an Interior Department spokesman, would not comment on ongoing litigation. Martin would not comment either.

Park Service hydrologists contend that the 30 or so ranch wells, some of which had been in operation for 100 years, siphoned water from a desert aquifer and compromised natural springs and seeps elsewhere in the Mojave.

Capping the wells, they say, has rejuvenated the preserve's natural water sites, and removing cattle from the desert has promoted regrowth of native plants. Park Service officials say both outcomes have helped sustain wildlife, including deer and sheep.

Park Service biologists say there is no need for more water sources, pointing out that one population of mule deer has increased slightly every year since the ranch wells were shut down.

Separate from the ranch wells, the Mojave Preserve maintains about 133 guzzler water stations for small game and six for large game. Some are designed to trap rainfall and surface water into cisterns, and others pump groundwater into concrete-lined depressions.

Conservationists and biologists say guzzlers attract ravens that prey on the desert tortoise. Preserve officials say tortoise remains have been found in nearly one-third of the preserve's guzzlers. Scientists surmise that tortoises either fall in and drown or are left in the water by predators.

Safari Club International, a hunting organization, and other groups have been pushing to reopen several wells. They met with Hoffman, Martin and representatives of the state Department of Fish and Game last August in Ontario.

Soon after the meeting, Fish and Game presented a plan to reopen 12 wells over three years. Martin balked, and a few months later Hoffman ordered her to allow Fish and Game to proceed with its plan.

State Fish and Game managers argue that wildlife in the preserve has become accustomed to the man-made water sources and that taking any water away would harm animals and ultimately reduce herd size.

"Our wildlife biologists who work out in the desert believe the water enhancement projects are necessary," said Mike Haynie, a deputy regional manager for the department.

The project will cost about $40,000, according to the state agency. Its proposal says volunteers will build and maintain the pumps, pipelines and submerged tanks that support the guzzlers.

"It's common sense," said Pat Murch, a resident of Needles who said he has hunted in the Mojave all his life. "Our concern is that all of a sudden you go turn [wells] off and that's going to affect the wildlife. We are simply asking the Park Service to use common sense.

"Under an agreement with the Department of Fish and Game, local hunting groups provide volunteers to maintain the water devices. However, a survey conducted by preserve staff last year found more than half of the guzzlers in a state of disrepair and 15% no longer functioning.

Ken Schwartz, a spokesman for Safari Club International, said that because roads are prohibited in much of the preserve, volunteers have difficulty getting to some guzzlers. But, according to the preserve's survey, 93% of the guzzlers are within one mile of a road.

Groups file suit to stop well project

by Jim Matthews
San Bernardino Sun

This is utterly baffling. Two highly respected environmental groups apparently have been duped into filing a lawsuit to stop the restoration and conversion of four water wells in the Mojave National Preserve to wildlife drinkers.

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) announced the lawsuit Tuesday. The 21-page complaint and the press release, however, are riddled with factual errors.

John Buse, the lead attorney on the lawsuit in CDBs Chicago office, said "the desert tortoise is certainly the largest concern we had' in filing the lawsuit. The complaint argues that restoring the four wells would endanger desert tortoises and violates both the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the preserve's own management plan.

The problem is simply this: First, the four wells are situated at elevations well above desert tortoise habitat. Tortoises never have been documented in the area around the four wells. That is why these locations were chosen by the hunter-conservation groups that fought to have them restored.

Second, the National Park Service, specifically park superintendent Mary Martin, violated NEPA and the preserve's management guidelines by directing the private land owners who were forced off the preserve to remove the wells. The preserve's management plan said that the staff was required to document any impacts on the area's wildlife before the wells could be removed. Martin illegally avoided this requirement by saying that the private owners wanted to remove their private windmills and stock tanks.

Buse and local CDB attorney Brendan Cummings admitted that the National Park Service violated NEPA and its own management plan when it allowed the wells to be removed, and CDB is contending it is now violating the same rules again by trying to restore them.

Why didn't CDB file a lawsuit when the NPS removed over 125 cattle water sources the first time around? My call is they were duped. Or it is about anti-hunting bias.

The PEER press release riles against Paul Hoffman as a Bush Administration bad guy who went over the preserve staff's head to allow the well restoration, saying it was Hoffman who was forcing the park service to violate the law.

Interestingly, the PEER mouthpiece on this issue is Paul Buono, a former deputy superintendent at the preserve, who is part of a small clique of park service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees who are resentful the Mojave was not made into a national park, where hunting is banned, instead of a national preserve, where hunting is allowed.

The anti-hunting bias is pervasive within this small group, and they also form the core of a tiny minority of scientists who believe that wildlife drinkers are detrimental to wildlife, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

One of the most dramatic examples of how the addition of water into a desert ecosystem can benefit wildlife is on the Mojave National Preserve.

Before the area was a preserve, the Department of Fish and Game (DFG), Bureau of Land Management, and Society for the Conservation of Bighorn Sheep did surveys on Old Dad Peak. At most it had a dozen sheep. The problem? There were no permanent water sources. The DFG added big-game drinkers, and now that herd numbers more than 200 animals.

Hoffman is no villain. He's the hero in this episode; a hero who was trying to avert a lawsuit from the hunter-conservation community over the illegal NPS' removal of 125 cattle water sources.

It's pathetic that CBD and PEER were conned into filing this lawsuit, a lawsuit that is about anti-hunting bias and not science or environmental law.

Jim Matthews is a freelance writer.

Lawsuit aims to halt guzzlers

Environmentalist groups upset about artificial water sources in Mojave National Preserve

By KELLY DONOVAN/Staff Writer
Victorville Daily Press

BARSTOW — Two environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the National Park Service, aiming to stop the expansion of artificial water sources in the Mojave National Preserve east of Barstow.

In the lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility ask that the National Park Service stop working on plans to convert four former ranchers' well systems into guzzlers — man-made watering holes for wildlife.

The lawsuit contends that the conversion plans should be subject to review under the National Environmental Quality Act.

PEER and the center argue that guzzlers are problematic for desert tortoises, which are listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act. For example, guzzlers can attract tortoise predators such as ravens, according to the suit.

The question of whether to convert the wells in the preserve surfaced in recent years as the National Park Foundation bought the grazing allotments of ranchers there. The ranchers moved out of the area — leaving behind their well systems.

Documents show that the Mojave National Preserve staff had concerns about artificial watering sources in the preserve, but nevertheless authorized the conversion of the former ranch wells into guzzlers for mule deer.

Preserve Superintendent Mary Martin wrote about artificial water sources in a June 17, 2002, memo to Paul Hoffman, the Interior Department's deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.

Among her remarks in the six-page memo, which the groups provided to the media, was that the preserve staff had "identified the need to return human-disturbed areas to their former natural conditions," which "might entail ... the removal of existing small and large wildlife guzzlers."

She also wrote that while "hunters had the impression that enhancing wildlife populations by artificial watering sources would be a simple change in philosophy," that would be "contrary to our mission, policies and legal foundation."

However, she authorized the conversion of the former ranchers' wells into guzzlers in a Jan. 31 letter to the California Department of Fish and Game.

PEER board member Frank Buono and Center for Biological Diversity Desert Ecologist Daniel Patterson said they believe Martin received orders — probably from Hoffman — to have the guzzlers installed. Buono retired in 1997 as the preserve's No. 2 official.

Patterson points to a July 30, 2002, e-mail from Hoffman to a hunting advocate in which he said that he was "still working ... to determine what we can or cannot do in the way of maintaining at least some of the water developments" in the preserve.

"I think the Mojave National Preserve staff there in Barstow had it right when they said we don't really need these additional guzzlers," Patterson said. "We don't need this kind of political meddling."

Guzzlers for game are widely viewed as a benefit for hunters, but Patterson said the center is not opposed to hunting in the preserve, and he is a hunter himself.

"I think hunting would be better if you maintain a natural ecosystem," he said.

Hugh Vickery, an Interior Department spokesman, and Ben Porritt, a Justice Department spokesman, both said Tuesday that they couldn't comment on the litigation.

The Mojave National Preserve encompasses more than 1.5 million acres east of Barstow, sandwiched between Interstate 40 and Interstate 15. The preserve staff's office is in Barstow.

ARTIFICIAL WATERING THREATENS MOJAVE WILDLIFE

Political Appointees at Interior Vetoed Park Objections; Lawsuit Filed

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility News Release (www.peer.org)
For Immediate Release: March 1, 2005
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337

Washington, DC — A top political appointee of the Bush Administration has overruled the National Park Service and ordered it to allow the installation of artificial water systems in California’s Mojave National Preserve. Contending that the artificial water sources are illegal and will harm the native wildlife, Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Center for Biological Diversity today filed suit to stop the plan.

Paul Hoffman, a former Dick Cheney aide serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, intervened to quash Park Service objections about adding more artificial water sources (called “guzzlers”). Hoffman, who has no biological training and spent the ten years prior to his appointment by President Bush at the Cody Wyoming Chamber of Commerce, contends guzzlers enhance “coyote and varmint hunting” on the Preserve, according to one of his emails.

The Mojave National Preserve covers more than 3 million acres of desert and is home to more than 2,500 native species of which approximately 100 are considered imperiled. For example, the desert tortoise, the flagship species of the Mojave Preserve, is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Wildlife experts contend expansion of artificial watering in the Preserve hurts native flora and fauna by –

• Drying up natural springs and wetlands upon which native plants and animals depend;

• Drawing concentrations of ravens and other animals that prey especially on young tortoises. One survey found dead or dying desert tortoises at 30% of the current guzzlers. Another study found a ten fold increase in ravens congregating around guzzlers; and

• Sustaining non-native species like burros. There is even a concern about the watering systems helping to spread Africanized honeybees.

“Nearly a century ago, Congress charged the National Park Service with conserving the wildlife of the parks. Now, the Bush Administration is eroding the long history and tradition of protecting park wildlife and of preserving healthy ecosystems,” stated PEER Board member Frank Buono, who served as deputy superintendent at Mojave NP, pointing to a letter signed by 57 scientists specializing in desert ecology who oppose the guzzlers. “Paul Hoffman is setting wildlife policy on the basis of good-ole-boy ignorance.”

On January 31, 2005, the Mojave superintendent under orders from Hoffman granted permission for the installation of four guzzlers with eight more still under consideration. The lawsuit from PEER and the Center contends that the artificial water systems violate laws and policies governing the Park Service. The guzzler approval also flouts advice from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In addition, the water sources run counter to the management plan that the NPS adopted, after four years of public involvement and thousands of public comments, for the Preserve in 2002. In making the move in January, the Park Service made no effort to revise its plan or notify the public.

“There are already many natural waters and guzzlers on the Mojave National Preserve, which is a natural area, not a game farm," said Daniel R. Patterson, Desert Ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Hoffman's illegal political push for unneeded guzzlers would harm native desert wildlife, and violate an agreement Interior made to keep these wells capped.”

Read the June 17, 2002 memo from the Mojave National Preserve superintendent to Hoffman outlining objections to the guzzlers

View Paul Hoffman emails to Jim Matthews of Outdoor News Service, a leading guzzler proponent

Guzzlers for Mule Deer in Mojave National Preserve

By Keith Lair, Staff Writer
San Gabriel Valley Tribune - West Covina, CA

Safari Club International received permission from the Department of Fish and Game, Mojave National Preserve and the U.S. Department of Interior to convert four ranching well developments into wildlife guzzlers for mule deer on preserve land.
It is one of the few times the preserve has allowed an organization to improve guzzlers.

The four wells in question are the Eagle, Watson, Caruthers and Lecyr. According to the preserve, the wells must be converted in this order and work must be completed by the end of 2005.

The decision stems from a ground-breaking meeting orchestrated by SCI that was held in Ontario. At that meeting, members of the Mojave National Preserve, the DFG, the DOI and SCI discussed the issues in question and reached a consensus on how to restore necessary water sources to preserve wildlife.

"This extraordinary accomplishment would not have been possible without the support of SCI chapters and members in California, and the SCI Governmental Affairs and Wildlife Conservation staff in Washington, D.C.,' Executive Director Tom Riley said. "This effort proves that SCI, when called upon, will lead the way to help promote conservation worldwide.'

For volunteer information, contact Andy Pauli at (760) 240-1372 or project coordinator Cliff McDonald at (760) 326-2935.

Donation checks for the project should be made payable to Safari Club International Foundation and mailed to Safari Club International Foundation, c/o California Mojave Desert Wells Restoration Project, 4800 W. Gates Pass Road, Tucson, AZ., 85745.

Rancher wins big in libel suit against enviros

by Mitch Tobin
High Country News

Calling itself "nature’s legal eagles," the Center for Biological Diversity has earned a national reputation by suing the federal government. Largely through its lawsuits, the center has forced the listing of fully one-quarter of the 1,264 plants and animals now protected under the Endangered Species Act.

So it was no surprise to find the Tucson-based group back in a courtroom in January, arguing about grazing on public lands. Only this time the center was the defendant — and on the losing end of a $600,000 libel case.

In July 2002, the group unsuccessfully appealed the renewal of a grazing permit awarded to Arivaca investment banker and fifth-generation rancher Jim Chilton. It posted a two-page "news advisory" about the appeal on its Web site, along with 21 photos it cited as proof that Chilton had allowed overgrazing to damage habitat on his 21,500-acre allotment on Arizona’s Coronado National Forest.

Chilton responded by suing the center. In court, his attorney, Kraig Marton, showed jurors wide-angle photos — taken at the same locations as the ones on the Web site — that revealed oaks and mesquites dotting lush, rolling grasslands. Barren moonscapes blamed on cows were identified as a campsite for hunters and a parking lot for an annual festival. Marton told jurors that four of the photos weren’t even taken on Chilton’s allotment, though the center says they show a private inholding and a Forest Service exclosure on the allotment.

"They were out to do harm, out to stop grazing and out to do whatever they can to prevent the Chiltons and others like them from letting cows on public land," Marton said.

Members of Chilton’s family testified that the center’s news release caused him to become withdrawn and suffer from sleeplessness and stomach pains. A rancher and real estate broker who was a paid witness for Chilton said the center’s actions cut $200,000 from the value of the allotment, purchased for $797,000 in 1991.

The environmental group countered that its material was not defamatory because it was honest opinion and none of the photos were doctored. And because the photos were part of its appeal of Chilton’s grazing permit, the group argued that they were public records and therefore shielded from libel claims. "We must enforce the people’s right to express their opinion and have public debate over issues," Robert Royal, the center’s attorney, told jurors.

At the end of January, after a two-week trial, jurors gave Chilton a resounding victory, awarding him $100,000 for harm done to his reputation and cattle company, plus $500,000 in punitive damages, intended to punish the center and deter others from similar libel. "We really feel victimized by a wealthy banker who can afford to hire a large legal team to nit-pick you to death," says policy director Kierán Suckling. "If there were some mistakes, they were honest mistakes."

The jury’s award amounts to one-quarter of the nonprofit’s net assets at the end of 2003. But Suckling says the group, which he helped start in 1989, will not back down on its aggressive litigation. He fears, however, that the case may have a "chilling effect" on other activists.

The group is likely to appeal, and its insurance should pay for at least some of the damages, if they’re upheld.

The author covers environmental issues for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.

In the footprints of dinosaurs

By: RUTH MARVIN WEBSTER

[San Diego] North County Times

In a remote northeastern corner of the Mojave Desert lie slabs of sandstone embedded with the footprints of dinosaurs that walked there some 200 million years ago. Dating from the Jurassic period, they are the only known dinosaur tracks in California.

Alan Trujillo, associate professor and chairman of the Earth Sciences department at Palomar College in San Marcos, has traveled to the Mojave Desert many times to photograph, trace and measure the footprints since he and his students first discovered them in 1992.

"We saw that it said 'dinosaur tracks' on the very detailed Bureau of Land Management map, but when we asked Steven Spear (also an Earth Science professor at Palomar College) about them, he said that he had never seen them. So we thought maybe it was just legend."

The group decided to spread out to best search the high desert terrain that "was definitely a four-wheel drive kind of place," Trujillo said. "I told the students to look for tracks about the size of a dog; I was just guessing.

And before too long, one of the students found trackways ---- the term for a sequence of footprints ---- in the Aztec sandstone. They turned out to belong to about eight species of dinosaurs that roamed the region when it was coastal sand dunes.

The time period of the tracks is determined by the age of the surrounding sedimentary rock.
"Sand buried into the depressions left by their feet; they were covered and hardened into the rock," Trujillo explained."

After that, they were uplifted by thrust faults and only recently exposed. It is (a) mineral-rich area." Flagstone quarries and extensive mining operations are located nearby.

The footprints are believed to be those of three bipedal (two-legged) coelurosaurs and about six quadrupeds (four-legged animals).

"The quadrupeds are probably mammal-like reptiles ---- not dinosaurs," said Robert E. Reynolds, a paleontologist at LSA Associates in Riverside, who has studied the trackways. "One resembles the tracks of a desert lizard."

Also found in the area are trails and tracks of invertebrates ---- probably worms and tarantulas ---- from the same period.

In some ways, the footprints pose more questions than offer answers.

"Every time we go there, we find new questions," Reynolds said. "What is different from finding fossil bones is that these trackways show what the animal was actually doing at the time. And since no fossil skeletons have been found in the Mojave, much of the information we have about them must be surmised from only the footprints, and there is much educated guessing involved.

"A number of dinosaur skeletons have been found in Orange and San Diego counties, but they are primarily from the Cretaceous period," Reynolds said. "These are one of the few (trace) fossils from the earlier Jurassic period.

"Researchers use the length and width of fossil footprints to estimate the dinosaur's size, including leg length, posture, gate, foot structure and in some cases, even social behavior. The spacing of the prints also reveals whether the animal was walking along or running and at what speed they may have traveled.

Indeed, the top speed for the most famous bipedal dinosaur of all, the tyrannosaurus rex, has been the subject of discussion in paleological circles. Scientists from UC Berkeley reported a couple of years ago that rather than traveling at the speed of a car, as they did in the movie "Jurassic Park," T Rex's maximum speed based on trackways was probably closer to 27 mph.

"That's still faster than Olympic sprint champions," Trujillo said, "and like a sprinter, they probably didn't sustain that speed for long, either.

"Of course, how energetic dinosaurs were also is a matter of debate. "If they were warm-blooded, like birds, then they may have been more active," he said.

Of the 116 tracks found in the Mojave, the two-legged tracks are thought to be made by coelurosaurs. And since those are distinguished by only their footprints, two have been assigned the ichnogenera "anchisauripus" and "arallator." The third remains unnamed. "When the animal did not die in its tracks," Reynolds said, "we give them the ichnogenera, which means 'footprint group.'

"Researchers have compared the dimensions of the feet to coelurosaur skeletons found in other Western states. Coelurosaurs had three toes and claws and probably ate a variety of things, including vegetation and meat. "Their teeth are for catching animals," said Reynolds, who added that their footprints are 4 to 6 inches in length and the stride is about 3 feet. "We think they were ostrich size and may have run quite rapidly," he said.

The grallator's footprint is notably asymmetrical. Trujillo has estimated its leg length at 3 feet ---- about the size of a human ---- and its speed (based on left and right stride of the prints) to be about 3.6 mph. "That's about half our walking speed, because walking 3 miles an hour is a good clip for most people," he said.

Though the trackways in the Mojave have not been preserved per se, the Bureau of Land Management regularly patrols the area containing where they have been found. They have also been inventoried and studied, and replicas have been made of the prints by Reynolds and Ted Weasma, a geologist with the Mojave National Preserve in Barstow.

For Trujillo, though, learning more about the dinosaurs and their trackways is just a hobby. His real work, he says, is writing oceanography textbooks and teaching at Palomar full time, but he certainly understands the mystique dinosaurs hold for modern man.

"Finding the dinosaur trackways was really exciting," he said, smiling with enthusiasm. "Walking in the same footprints of a dinosaur? It is very cool."

What are trace fossils?

Fossils can be divided into two general groups ---- body fossils and trace fossils.

Body fossils are the preserved anatomical parts of the plant or animal and provide direct evidence, while trace fossils are produced by the animal's activities. A trace fossil, therefore, is indirect evidence of ancient life and provides information on the behavior of the organism.

There are many different types of trace fossils. Dinosaur tracks and trackways are perhaps the best known. Often, animals' burrows become filled with sediments and are preserved. Nest structures are another type of trace fossil.

Evidence of feeding can be preserved as trace fossils, such as insects chewing on leaves. Tooth marks on bones may be left by a predator while feeding on its prey or by rodents chewing on bones for the minerals. Eggs, gizzard stones and dung are also considered trace fossils. The study of trace fossils is called ichnology.

----Park Paleontology, published by the Geologic Resources Division of the National Park Service, summer 2002

USGS kills hopes of plentiful water in Joshua Tree

JOSHUA TREE - Think Joshua Tree's got plentiful groundwater? Think again.



By Sara Munro
Hi-Desert Star



Mojave Water Agency
Water Delivery Facilities

The results of a five-year study completed by the United States Geological Survey and released to the public Wednesday set the record straight on groundwater recharge, dashing any lingering hopes perpetrated by a fraudulent study portraying copious water stored in underground rivers and lakes.

"You are de-watering your aquifer," said USGS hydrologist Tracy Nishikawa. "You are extracting water faster than it's being recharged."

USGS hydrologists employed three methods of study showing that natural recharge is taking place at 71, 158 and 200 acre feet per year, significantly below the 1,800 acre feet the district extracts each year.

Tests indicate the Joshua sub-basin level has dropped 35 feet between 1958 and 2001.

Those seeking hope for rising aquifer levels due to recent rainfall will also be disappointed. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, rainfall has little to no impact on groundwater recharge.

"Summer storms do nothing for groundwater recharge," said Nishikawa, who used a Power Point presentation to show that winter precipitation is the source of natural recharge. He also explained that most of the water dropped in storm events like the most recent rainfall, runs off. What doesn't won't percolate into the aquifer for several hundred years.

The study indicates that the youngest water coming out of the taps of Joshua Tree is 2,400 years old, and the oldest is 32,000.

The good news is the water quality remains high, and there's no septic material in the groundwater.

Showing their concern over groundwater contamination due to nitrates from septic tanks, the board asked a slew of questions on the matter.

"At present, you are not seeing it in the groundwater supply," said Nishikawa. "It doesn't mean it's not saturating."

Nishikawa said the issue "may need to be considered in future scenarios."

General manager Joe Guzetta pointed out the business of the district is to take this information and use it to ask some pertinent questions, to predict future water levels and budgets, to investigate recharging alternatives and to consider "what if" pumping scenarios.

It is estimated that probably only 10 to 20 percent of the groundwater can be extracted cost-effectively.

"We're working with our geologist to determine what percentage is reasonable to extract," said Guzetta.

District policy sets how much of the extractable water can be removed.

The question on everyone's mind is: How much time can the district maintain pumping at current levels?

Director Rick Beatty said, "We know the problem is important, we don't know how urgent it is."

Woman giving up in battle over Mojave land

LEAVING: A long eviction fight with federal authorities is nearing an end for Connie Connelly.

By MICHAEL FISHER / The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA)

After decades of living in the windswept Mojave National Preserve, Connie Connelly is resigned to leaving her rustic home for land in remote Wyoming that the National Park Service is buying for her.

"I plan on moving on as quick as possible," said Connelly, 44, who has spent years battling federal authorities' efforts to evict her from the venerable general store her family turned into a homestead in 1966. The house sits on 5 brushy acres near the California state line, about 23 miles from Primm, Nev.

Connelly, who pleaded ont guilty in August to a charge of trespassing on federal land, was due in federal court Friday but that hearing was postponed.

If convicted, she faces up to six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. Prosecutors have said they will take Connelly's move into consideration as they decide whether to pursue the case.

Faced with possible jail time and a fine she cannot afford, Connelly said she ultimately had no choice but to agree to move. But she would prefer to stay in the six-room home she shares with 11 dogs, a cat.

"I am still praying for a miracle," Connelly said. "I just feel sick.

National Park Service officials declined comment Thursday, citing the pending case.

Under a deal with Connelly, the Park Service is paying $65,000, plus $3,000 in moving expenses, toward relocating Connelly to a double-wide mobile home on 3 acres near Lovell, Wy., about 145 miles east of Yellowstone National Park.

Escrow is expected to close Jan. 21, after which Connelly will own the home and land.

Connelly has seen photos of the tree-spotted land in Wyoming, which sits less than two miles outside the 2,200-resident town.

"I was hoping to get a place way, way out in the tulies, and this is pretty close to a neighbor," Connelly said. "It's kind of crowded."

Connelly says that her father purchased their Ivanpah house, a former mining company general store, when her family moved from Hemet in the 1960s. Parks officials say the family leased, but never owned the land, a contention Connelly disputes.

The property sits within the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve, which was created in 1994.

Connelly's father died in 1990 and her mother, Pauline, died two years ago. Authorities argue that Connelly's name is not on the lease, and she is not entitled to live on the land.

The home is surrounded by a corral and a jumble of scrap lumber, rotting furniture and deteriorating travel trailers. A railroad track runs just a few house. "I'll keep listening for that train."

Thieves steal artifacts from Mojave desert museum

Associated Press


Historic Auto club signs stolen from the Daggett Museum.



DAGGETT, Calif. - A break-in discovered Christmas Day has robbed the museum in this Mojave Desert town of its most prized possessions, including antique dolls and Native American artifacts on loan from local families.

The thieves methodically cleared out glass display cases in the Daggett Museum, said curator Beryl Bell, who discovered the burglary when she went to feed her goldfish over the holiday.

"It's really heartbreaking for a small museum," Bell said Wednesday.

The stolen Native American artifacts include a basket appraised at $3,500, a Navajo sash and two large clay Acoma pots that had never been appraised but are very valuable, said Leslie Lloyd, the president of the Daggett Historical Society, which runs the museum.

The thieves also took antique dolls, model trains and other toys, farming implements and examples of rocks from the area, Lloyd said.

The thieves ignored the computers and copy machine in the office of a local government agency that shares the low-slung modular building with the museum, but they stole $2 in coins from Lloyd's desk and a museum donation jar that contained about $10, she said.

Despite the theft of the change, Lloyd believes the burglars were experienced since they left no fingerprints and took steps to disable the alarm system - even though it wasn't operational at the time of the break-in.

"This appeared to be a very neat operation and it appeared they had a shopping list," she said.

The historical society has notified the Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association, which plans to post news of the break-in on its Web site and will inform its 250 members by e-mail to look out for the stolen artifacts, said Alice Kaufman, the organization's executive director.

The historical society is offering a $500 reward to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the theft.

"What we're hoping is that if we raise enough fuss it will at least raise their tail feathers some," said Lloyd, 47, who has lived in the desert town of about 400 people all her life.

The museum, some six miles east of Barstow and about 125 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, plans to increase security to protect what remains of its collection and is only offering tours by appointment.

Historian Lowe, member of pioneer family, dies

Celesta Lowe was not only a descendant of a pioneering Nevada family, she lived Nevada history and chronicled what she learned of growing up in Death Valley, Calif., for periodicals including "Desert Magazine" and "Old West."

As a child, Lowe experienced the hardships of being raised in a Western desert town, residing for a while in Shoshone, Calif., in a house made of tent canvas and stacks of sand-filled, five-gallon gasoline cans.

Friends say Lowe often regaled them with tales of the Old West that she heard from her grandparents, pioneers Celestia Adelaide "Ma" Fairbanks and Ralph Jacobus "Dad" Fairbanks, for whom Fairbanks Springs in Nye County is named.

Celesta Adelaide Lowe, the first director of the UNLV library's Special Collections and an inductee into the Nevada Women's History Project Roll of Honor, died Thursday in Henderson. She was 87.

Services for the Las Vegas resident of nearly 70 years will be at 10 a.m. Wednesday at Bunkers Mortuary.

"What Celesta knew was very broad and deep, and she used that information to guide her research interests," said Southern Nevada historian Liz Warren of Goodsprings.

"She was a primary source. She experienced so much in the recorded history of Southern Nevada. But not only did she live it, she would find out more about it and give readers as accurate and as true a picture as she could."

Lowe wrote of diverse subjects ranging from 19th century Mormon silk worm raising in homes to noted 20th century Western character, prospector and showman Frank "Death Valley Scotty" Scott, who had attended her wedding.

Some of Lowe's work has been featured as part of the The Pioneering Women of Death Valley exhibit at the Shoshone Museum, including a display of research materials for her biography of female Western author B.M. Bower.

Born Celesta Lisle, Lowe lived for a while on a Fernley ranch. Her grandfather had the contract for grading the railroad bed from Milford, Utah, to Las Vegas. Her father, John Quincy "Jack" Lisle, was a prospector and copper miner. Her late brother, Ralph Fairbanks Lisle, was a Nye County commissioner.

As a child, Celesta also lived in Baker and Tecopa, Calif. She graduated from El Monte (Calif.) High School in 1934.

A year later she married David Walker "Deke" Lowe, a station agent for the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad. The couple, in the 1940s, owned and operated the Goodsprings Hotel. He preceded her in death.

In the 1950s, Lowe attended Nevada Southern University, now UNLV, and took home economics classes, before becoming secretary to the school's librarian, James Dickinson. Lowe became the first Special Collections librarian when the department was created in 1967, said UNLV manuscripts librarian Su Kim Chung.

In addition to writing for magazines, Lowe wrote a column for seven years in the Sunday supplement of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Lowe was a charter member of the Las Vegas chapter of the National League of Pen Women and a founding member of the Southern Nevada Historical Society.

She is survived by four children, David Lowe of Sandy Valley, Lisle Lowe of Amargosa Valley, Janet Lowe of Santa Fe, N.M., and Carlsbad, Calif., and Dale Lowe of Las Vegas; nine grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.

Tug of Wear Over Desert Homestead Shanties

Russell Scofield of the federal Bureau of Land Management visits an abandoned cabin in Wonder Valley. (Irfan Khan / LAT)










By Hugo Martín
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

The days of homesteading are long gone. But in the Mojave Desert, on the eastern edge of the ever-expanding Southern California metropolis, the sun-bleached remnants of that pioneering era dot the landscape.

Off Cactus Jack Road in Wonder Valley is a bare frame structure with a collapsing roof and blown-out walls. Outside, a line of red ants and an occasional darting lizard are the only signs of life. Inside, a vintage record player, broken and faded by the sun, lies near a dog-eared Bible on a bare concrete floor.

The shack is one of hundreds of abandoned structures in the desert, left from a time when the federal government offered small parcels of scrubland for a nominal fee to anyone willing to put down stakes.

As more and more suburban neighborhoods sprout up in the desert, however, the weatherworn shanties have lost their decades of isolation, and they're now at the center of a local dust-up. Some longtime desert dwellers see the dilapidated structures as eyesores and want them torn down, while a growing number of newcomers want to preserve the shacks as historic landmarks.
"A little empty shell that is sitting out there is a beautiful thing," said Perry Hoffman, an artist and photographer who moved from San Francisco five years ago to live in a renovated homestead cabin in Wonder Valley.

Beautiful is not how Bob Dockendorff describes them. The Yucca Valley resident helped organize a federally funded program several years ago to demolish the most blighted structures. He said some of the buildings that were razed were havens for drug makers, squatters and vermin.

"When you drove through the area, you got a bad impression," he said.

Dotting the Landscape

Such disparate views are common in the Morongo Basin, a 5,200-square-mile expanse of desert just north of Joshua Tree National Park. The basin is home to more than 66,000 residents and an estimated 2,500 abandoned homestead shacks in various states of deterioration.

Most of the tiny cabins are on 5-acre parcels that were deeded by the federal government under the Small Tract Act of 1938, one of the last of the government's homestead acts. The government's goal was to distribute 457,000 acres of desert that the Bureau of Land Management deemed disposable, most of it in the California desert. By the time the act was repealed in 1976, about 36% of the land was privately owned. The rest is federally protected desert.

Under amendments to the act, homesteaders were granted a deed only if they built a structure with dimensions no less than 12 by 16 feet. No water or power was required. The government was required to charge fair-market prices, but the land was cheap. A couple in Joshua Tree paid $125 in 1954 for a 5-acre lot about a mile from the nearest paved road.

The offer of cheap land drew thousands of applications from World War II veterans and suburban dwellers looking for inexpensive vacation homes. Several construction companies sprang up in the desert, offering to build cheap structures that met the government's minimum requirement.

A few homesteaders stayed and raised families, but many more abandoned the cabins, yielding to the desert's searing temperatures, pounding wind and fierce dust storms. Other homesteaders died, leaving the deteriorating shacks to their children, who had no love for the harsh landscape.

As development has spread into the desert, business leaders and government officials have begun to look disdainfully on the ramshackle structures. The basin's population has grown by about 24,000, or 60%, from 1980 to 2000, according to the U.S. Census.

Five years ago, Dockendorff and other desert residents teamed up with San Bernardino County officials to demolish the most dilapidated and visible examples, particularly those along heavily traveled roads. The program, dubbed Shack Attack, was funded by a $500,000 federal grant and disposed of 116 shacks. At the behest of program organizers, the owners of 335 other cabins demolished their structures.

"The worst of the worst were taken care of," said Bruce Davis, an aide to county Supervisor Dennis Hansberger, whose district includes many of the homestead shacks.

But the cleanup program eliminated only a fraction of the shacks built throughout the basin. Sun and wind have reduced many to sun-dried wood frames. Some shacks still have remnants of the pink or lime-green roofing tiles that were used on the exterior walls as a cheap alternative to stucco or wood panels.

"I think they are eyesores," said Pat Flanagan, the marketing coordinator for the Twentynine Palms Chamber of Commerce, who converted a homestead shack into a guest house at her home in Desert Heights. "They do give a bad image to the area."

Law officers who patrol the Morongo Basin say the cabins occasionally attract squatters and teenagers on motorcycles who throw rocks through the windows. But the cabins do not represent a major law enforcement problem, said sheriff's Sgt. Richard Boswell.

"We don't have an inordinate amount of calls," he said.

Still, the Bureau of Land Management has received at least 50 complaints about illegal dumping at the abandoned shanties in the last eight years.

Russell Scofield, the habitat restoration coordinator for the BLM's office in Yucca Valley, said the dumping sometimes included hazardous materials such as car batteries, which can contaminate underground water supplies.

"The main problem is that they are attractive nuisances" — meaning they attract trouble — "the same as an abandoned warehouse in Los Angeles," he said.

Consensus Is Elusive

Even family members living in the desert sometimes can't agree on what to do about the buildings.

Ronald Phenning, a carpenter who bought, expanded and moved into a homestead cabin in 1982, overlooking several abandoned shacks in Wonder Valley, considers the buildings historic reminders of a bygone era.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's part of our heritage," he said.

Phenning installed electricity soon after he bought the cabin. Over the years, he has added several rooms and a workshop, where he builds tables and other furniture. He must still haul in water from the local water district in a huge tank. An outhouse is a bathroom.

The cabins are also part of Phenning's past. His parents were homesteaders who built a 16-by-12-foot cabin near Joshua Tree in 1950. The family used the cabin as a weekend getaway where Phenning and his brothers chased lizards and organized tortoise races in the sand.

Phenning's mother, Marjorie, has fond memories of the cabin, which the family sold once the boys were grown. But she disagrees with her son, seeing blight in the abandoned shacks.

"They just look unattractive," she said. "Why don't they tear them down?"

In the last few decades, the Morongo Basin has become a refuge for artists attracted to the serenity and beauty of the desert. Over the last year and a half, Hoffman, the artist and photographer who moved from San Francisco five years ago, has renovated a homestead cabin in Wonder Valley with colorful tile, pastel paint and desert-themed artwork. He rents the cabin to other artists, so they too can be inspired by the solitude.

The shacks are not eyesores but picturesque elements of the landscape, Hoffman argues.

"I love them," he said. "They are part of the desert out here."

Christine Carraher is an artist and medical transcriber who bought a home in Wonder Valley 10 years ago and converted an adjacent homestead cabin into a studio. She said she favored the removal of individual shacks that draw neighborhood complaints. But she fears that a wholesale demolition of the abandoned cabins would ruin the character of the region and open the door to widespread commercial development.

"The day that this place looks like San Bernardino and everyplace else, I'm gone," she said.

The Man Behind the Land

COLUMN ONE
David Gelbaum has shunned publicity while giving millions to preserve California wilderness and teach youths about nature.

By Kenneth R. Weiss
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

He has given more money to conservation causes in California than anyone else. His gifts have helped protect 1,179 square miles of mountain and desert landscapes, an area the size of Yosemite National Park.

His donations to wilderness education programs have made it possible for 437,000 inner-city schoolchildren to visit the mountains, the desert or the beach — often for the first time.

Over a decade of steadily growing contributions — including more than $100 million to the Sierra Club — this mathematician turned financial angel has taken great pains to remain anonymous.

In manner and appearance, David Gelbaum has maintained a low profile for someone who can afford to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.

At age 55, retired from the rarefied world of Wall Street hedge funds, he lives in Newport Beach with his wife and two of his five children in a large home where visitors on occasion have mistaken him for the gardener. Bespectacled, 5 feet 5 and slightly built, he speaks softly, barely above a hoarse whisper. He drives a Honda Civic hybrid, wears jeans and T-shirts to business meetings and helps the kids clean up at the wilderness camp-outs he sponsors.

Those who know him say he is never more uncomfortable than when asked to talk about his wealth or how much of it he has given away.

His donations, which according to public records and other sources total at least $250 million, have preserved hundreds of miles of wildlife corridors across mountains and deserts, tying together once-isolated national parks and wilderness areas. One conservation deal, land trust experts say, is the largest single purchase of private land ever handed over to the U.S. government for one purpose: to leave it alone.

He has given more than $20 million to schools in Orange County and handed over 108 rolling acres in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains for use as an outdoor-education camp.

He has contributed $3.5 million to Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona's foundation to help the poorest children attend the camp's wilderness programs. Carona is both grateful and a bit mystified by the benefactor.

"He's one of these strange guys who doesn't want any publicity but wants to take care of kids and the community," Carona said. "When you look him in the eye and say, 'You've made a positive change in these kids' lives,' he does not want to take any credit for it. He's almost embarrassed when you say thank you to him."

(A federal grand jury recently subpoenaed financial records of Carona's foundation. Federal officials have not disclosed why they want the documents.)

Gelbaum, a native of Minnesota who moved to California as a teenager, was a math prodigy who parlayed his talents into a highly lucrative three-decade career using mathematical formulas to pick stocks and bonds for wealthy investors in hedge funds.

He won't say how much he made. He started giving his money away in ever-larger amounts in 1994.

"Most wealthy people spend their lives trying to make more and more money rather than give it away," Gelbaum said during a series of interviews that he agreed to only reluctantly. "They wait too long. They are depriving themselves of a lot of joy. I'm doing what I want to do. It's not like it's money that I or my family will ever need.

"It's a joy to see this land preserved and opening these kids' eyes to the natural world. It's not like burning the money. It goes into the land or into the kids' experiences. Both last forever."

Some charitable foundations have given more money to conservation causes, but much of it is aimed at saving tropical rain forests or other overseas ventures. The only individual whose contributions to California conservation rival Gelbaum's is Caroline Getty, granddaughter of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. She recently donated $150 million to the Preserving Wild California project of the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation.

Gelbaum said his interest in land conservation was inspired by camping trips he took with his father and brothers to lakes in northern Minnesota, as well as Yellowstone National Park and Mt. Whitney. "Those were the happiest memories of my childhood."

It isn't enough, he said, "to protect wilderness just for people who can afford to go to it. I think bringing kids out to the wild is unquestionably the right thing to do. These kids have pretty tough lives. It opens their eyes to the world outside of their neighborhood. Some of the kids will grow up to protect the land they learn to love. You could look at it as an investment into the environment."

When making donations, Gelbaum usually insists that his identity not be revealed — out of concern, he says, for his family's security.

Besides, he said, "I don't think that if you have a lot money and you give away a lot of money, you should get a lot of recognition. You shouldn't be able to buy that."

Gelbaum has made his largest contributions to the 10-year-old Wildlands Conservancy, an Oak Glen, Calif.-based group that he co-founded with David Myers, who has remained the group's executive director.

Myers, an ardent environmentalist, wanted to sell 640 acres of desert land he owned near Yucca Valley and use most of the proceeds for other conservation projects. In 1994, he placed a newspaper ad seeking "a conservation-minded donor" who would buy, but not develop, the land. Gelbaum answered the ad. They have been working together ever since.

Gelbaum now acknowledges that he has been the biggest benefactor of the conservancy and its sister organization, the Wildlands Endowment Fund, which has taken in $157.8 million for land preservation, outdoor education and related programs.

But for the last decade, Myers avoided revealing the identity of his reclusive angel, despite growing curiosity about who was bankrolling this obscure conservation organization that was buying and swapping real estate with the gusto of a 19th century land baron.

Beginning in 1995, the group began making strategic land purchases, now totaling 70 square miles, in order to link the San Bernardino, San Jacinto and Big Horn Mountains with Joshua Tree National Park.

The next year, Wildlands purchased a 97,000-acre former cattle ranch in the foothills of the San Emigdio Mountains, northwest of Gorman, where a developer once hoped to build thousands of luxury homes.

Just outside metropolitan Los Angeles, the ranch, renamed Wind Wolves, has become the West Coast's largest privately owned nature preserve, its cascading hills and steep canyons an hour and half drive from the nation's second largest city.

By 2000, Wildlands had filled many of the largest holes in the wilderness tapestry created by the California Desert Protection Act of 1994. The legislation created the Mojave National Preserve, enlarged Joshua Tree and Death Valley national monuments and elevated both to national park status but left intact several privately owned parcels.

Wildlands bought out the largest of the landowners, the former real estate arm of the Santa Fe Pacific Corp. railroad, which had threatened to open the desert to development. Wildlands acquired 1,000 square miles and turned over the land to the federal government.

In 2001, Gelbaum branched out with two back-to-back anonymous gifts to the Sierra Club Foundation that dwarfed all previous individual contributions to the club. The $101.5 million in donations led to a 10-fold increase in the club's Youth in Wilderness programs and expansion of many other club activities.

But the windfall caused a stir internally. Gelbaum's identity, known only to a few Sierra Club officials, became an issue in a bitter struggle for control of the club's board of directors.

A slate of candidates, which wanted the club to call for tighter controls on immigration to stabilize the U.S. population and its impact on the environment, demanded to know the source of the donations. The candidates contended that the club's leadership opposed their election partly because of pressure brought by the secret donor.

"Is this foreign money? Is it money that comes with special obligations? I would want to know I'm not running a laundry or being a front group for an entity that doesn't have the best interests of the United States at heart," said former Colorado Gov. David Lamm.

Lamm and other like-minded candidates were soundly defeated in a vote of club members last April, and the source of the money was not revealed. But clues surfaced during the flap.

A Sierra Club official let slip a comment about a pair of unnamed brothers. That and other bits of information led The Times to Gelbaum, who, with his brother, Daniel, sat on the Wildlands Conservancy's board of directors, along with Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope.

David Gelbaum insisted that he played no role in the election. He dismissed allegations that he is calling the shots at the club in any other way.

"None of that is true," he said. "I'm not some Svengali. I'm not that engaged."

But he said Pope long had known where he stood on the contentious issue. "I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me."

Gelbaum said he was a substantial donor at the time but not yet the club's largest benefactor. Immigration arose as an issue in 1994 because Proposition 187, which threatened to deny public education and health care to illegal immigrants, was on the state's ballot.

He said he was so upset by the idea of "pulling kids out of school" that he donated more than $180,000 to the campaign to oppose Proposition 187. After the measure passed, he said, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to civil rights lawyers who ultimately got the measure struck down in court.

Gelbaum, who reads the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión and is married to a Mexican American, said his views on immigration were shaped long ago by his grandfather, Abraham, a watchmaker who had come to America to escape persecution of Jews in Ukraine before World War I.

"I asked, 'Abe, what do you think about all of these Mexicans coming here?' " Gelbaum said. "Abe didn't speak English that well. He said, 'I came here. How can I tell them not to come?'

"I cannot support an organization that is anti-immigration. It would dishonor the memory of my grandparents."

Born in Minneapolis, the second of four sons, Gelbaum moved to California when his father, Bernard Gelbaum, became founding chairman of the UC Irvine math department.

David Gelbaum showed early prowess in math, taking calculus at UC Irvine while still in high school. Months before he graduated from UCI in 1972, he was hired by math professor Edward O. Thorp to help with a business that needed a math researcher.

Thorp, who wrote the book "Beat the Dealer," about how to count cards and win at blackjack, was applying mathematical wizardry to the largest crap game in the world: Wall Street.

His formulas, which later appeared in his book "Beat the Market," led him to launch the nation's first market-neutral hedge fund — one intended to make money for investors whether the market goes up or down. From 1970 to 1989, the fund never had a losing quarter and increased investors' money more than 13-fold.

Gelbaum was one of his first math researchers hired to track and exploit the price discrepancies between a company's stocks and its options, warrants and convertible bonds.

"He was smart. He was idiosyncratic. He was always looking for more," Thorp said.

Thorp recalls a conversation with young Gelbaum about his salary.

"I said, 'I think we can multiply your salary by five times in five years.' He came back to me five years later with the same question. I said, 'I think I can multiply your salary by five times in five years. But I don't think I'll be able to do that again.'"

The firm, called Princeton-Newport Partners, was dissolved in 1989, when five of the firm's stock brokers based in Princeton, N.J., were convicted of scheming to create illegitimate tax losses. The convictions were overturned on appeal. Neither Thorp nor Gelbaum was implicated in the scandal.

Gelbaum emerged from the wreckage as a principal in a new investment firm, operating a new hedge fund using math formulas pioneered by Thorp.

Gelbaum declined to talk about the firm, Sierra Enterprises Group, from which he retired a few years ago. His business success, he said, "was all a matter of chance. It certainly wasn't because I worked 5,000 times as hard as the average person or was 5,000 times smarter than the average person."

He was more forthcoming about his venture into the cattle business. In the mid-1990s, he bought a pair of ranches "to run in an environmentally sensitive manner."

The Kane and Two-Mile ranches are in northern Arizona, a place Gelbaum learned about in a college ecology class. This is where Theodore Roosevelt once hunted mountain lions to reduce predators and increase the number of deer. The deer population soared and then starved in what became a textbook case of disrupting nature's balance chronicled by America's foremost ecologist, Aldo Leopold, in "A Sand County Almanac."

"It caught my imagination," Gelbaum said. So he bought the ranches and arrived with a message. "I told people when I came to Arizona I wanted to be good to the land and good to the people."

He won praise for removing cattle from wilderness areas and for raising wages of the cowboys and providing them housing and health care. He recently agreed to sell the ranches to the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group, for $4.5 million.

The ranches cover about 1,000 acres and control grazing rights on 900,000 acres of surrounding federal land.

Four years ago, President Clinton turned a large swath of these grazing lands into the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and Gelbaum won the admiration of then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

Babbitt's plan provoked the ire of local ranchers, who complained that it would run ranchers off good grazing land. At the height of the protests, Gelbaum's ranch manager stood up in a packed meeting hall and explained that his boss controlled all of the grazing rights in the area and considered the monument perfectly compatible with his ranching operations.

The speech hushed the protesters and allowed the monument to go forward.

"I half-thought about recommending to the president to name the national monument after David Gelbaum," Babbitt said. "Without David Gelbaum, it might well not have happened."

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.

They're All Over the Map

COLUMN ONE
The Auto Club's intrepid cartographers traverse the rural Southwest cataloging the uncharted features of a changing landscape.

John O'Dell
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

VIRGIN MOUNTAINS, Ariz. — Shane Henry steered his truck along a dusty road, emerging from a steep, cool pine forest and dead-ending on the edge of a precipice. The uncharted spot provided a breathtaking, 30-mile-wide panoramic view of the Virgin River Gorge, stretching northeast into Utah.

For Henry, a field cartographer for the Automobile Club of Southern California, it was a great day of discovery. After finding the overlook, he spotted ruins of a forgotten century-old cattle ranch near a pair of freshwater springs. Between overlook and ruins, he had also found 10 miles of a drivable dirt road. None are on the Auto Club's current "Indian Country" road map, but all his finds will be on a new version due out in two years.

Despite the popularity of Global Positioning System navigation and earth-blanketing satellite photography, there are still places few have seen and roads few have traveled. Henry and his senior road-mapping colleague, John Skinner, are helping to find them.

The duo of Skinner and Henry doesn't have the same poetic ring as Lewis and Clark. But 200 years after the famous explorers began their mapping trip through the American West, Skinner and Henry are doing much the same work, traveling the rugged backcountry of the Southwest, looking for something new.

The two explorers are a rarity in the modern world of mapmaking. Rand McNally Co. and the various AAA groups are the primary publishers of U.S. road maps. Most full-time field researchers work on roadways in urban and suburban areas.

Skinner and Henry "are probably the only ones in the U.S. doing what they do" with backcountry mapping, says Bill Scharf, head of the Auto Club's cartography division. The Los Angeles-based club publishes 90 different maps and distributes 7 million road maps annually. It tries to update them every other year.

Every dirt road and trail shown on them will eventually be driven and rated by the Auto Club's field cartographers. But they rarely work together.

"There's too much work to do to team up," Skinner says.

They spend 10 months a year on the road, racking up about 60,000 miles each in four-wheel-drive trucks. The Auto Club provides the trucks, which are adorned with the club's logo and a banner: "Map Unit."

Their territory is vast. Skinner and Henry cover the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, rural regions of 13 Southern California counties and all of Baja California. They also map the Four Corners area — a 130,000-square-mile region surrounding the point where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah all touch — which is included in the club's celebrated Indian Country map.

That map is a fixture in tourists' cars and ranchers' pickups alike. Its accuracy is why "everyone around here uses it," says Ed Chamberlin, curator of the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site museum on the Navajo Reservation in Ganado, Ariz.

Novelist Tony Hillerman, whose mysteries featuring Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn have brought the Four Corners region alive for millions of readers, has also made the map a key part of his fictional cop's crime-fighting arsenal.

Henry, 42, a former actor, has been on the job for three years; Skinner, 59, is a trained geographer who has been riding trail for the Auto Club for 22 years.

John Skinner reviews a map while working near Barstow. (John O’Dell / LAT)

Skinner quit in the '90s and moved to Arizona for three years in pursuit of a romance that ultimately failed. When the heartbreak healed, he asked for his old job back and hit the road again.

"This job is not good for relationships," says Skinner, who has been engaged three times but has never married.

Skinner and Henry work in trucks loaded with GPS navigation systems and highly detailed federal topographical maps to trace their tracks. Backseats and cargo areas are filled with piles of extra maps, cellphones, tents and food. They carry jacks, flares, survival kits, tire pumps, extra fuel lines, transmission oil and fan belts.

As they drive, Skinner and Henry continually check special odometers, accurate to within one-thousandth of a mile, to verify that the distances already listed on maps are precise. They also rate road conditions to ensure that routes haven't been washed out by flash floods or altered by construction. Their discoveries may include stone quarries, mines, washes, overlooks, abandoned towns and a dizzying variety of unpaved roads.

Dirt roads on AAA maps are rated from graded and gravel-topped thoroughfares to badly eroded and rutted tracks best suited for four-wheel-drive enthusiasts.

"We want to make sure that if a mom in her Volvo decides to take one of these roads, she'll be able to make it," Henry says.

On the job, Skinner and Henry usually sleep in motels, not tents. Still, notes Denis Cosgrove, a cultural geography professor at UCLA, the two are throwbacks who resemble "the early topographers, trekking out into inaccessible places and trying to reduce a part of the world to a page on a map."

The job has its perils.

Skinner and Henry have had encounters with mountain lions and rattlesnakes. And they give wide berth to desert compounds littered with the glass vials and metal cooking pots that mark the illegal drug-making operations of modern outlaws.

The mapmakers say their work requires a big helping of self-confidence. Henry was on a rough dirt road in the mountains northwest of Lake Powell in Utah when he saw the road ahead disappearing between some rocks. Usually he would get out and walk the route to see where it went before proceeding, but it was late and he was tired, so he just drove on.

As Henry passed the curve it turned into a narrow, terrifying stretch made up of loose rock rubble with a 200-foot drop on one side. He kept going, in part because an Auto Club map indicated that the road led across the mountain summit.

But about 200 yards from the top he found himself trapped. The road's loose rock had turned into a series of 18-inch-high granite ledges.

"Those steps were just a little too high for my truck tires to roll over," Henry says.

He couldn't make a U-turn because the road was too narrow. One option was to back downhill, but he faced a mile-long path of scree with the long drop on one side. So he decided to keep going up. He exited the truck very carefully, so he wouldn't slip off the precipice, then gathered rocks to build a little ramp so he could drive over the step. Then every 30 feet or so he stopped because of another granite step and had to build a new ramp. It took Henry four hours to drive 200 yards.

"This is a good example of why we drive all these roads," he says. On the older map it showed as a rough but usable dirt road across the summit. "But it had deteriorated so badly it was impassable for most people, so I took it out" for the new map, he says.

Skinner and Henry can trace their jobs back to 1905, when AAA published its first road map and helped pioneer the industry at a time when motorists were few and marked roads fewer. In those days, maps were basically logbooks written to describe trips with descriptions of key geographic spots, gas stations, historic buildings, river bends, anything to guide drivers.

Later, auto clubs and other promoters invented names for roads and posted road signs for travelers to follow. But there was no uniformity. The same road could be called one name by a city, another by a real estate developer who had published his own map and something else by a local travel and touring club.

It wasn't until 1916, when Rand McNally started its own route numbering system, that travelers heading south from Boston to Florida could follow a route that retained the same name from state to state — as long as they used Rand McNally maps. Finally, in 1924, the federal government adopted a uniform numbering system so that major travel routes would retain their identities across the country.

Both Skinner and Henry took circuitous routes to land their current jobs.

Skinner was a ship navigator in the Navy, then earned a degree in geography from Cal State Fresno. He worked four years for a local AAA office as a tourist counselor, offering maps and advice on trips. When a job opened up as a field cartographer in 1979, he took it.

Shane Henry inspects a U.S. Geological Survey marker. (John O’Dell / LAT)

Henry grew up in rural Oregon and earned a master of fine arts degree in classical theater at the University of Alabama. He spent 15 years traveling the country as an actor and dancer in regional theaters. He met Skinner by chance when Skinner was on a mapping trip in Los Padres National Forest and was fixing a flat tire. Henry was out hiking and struck up a conversation. Skinner told him about an opening for another map researcher.

A typical day of mapping covers 30 to 50 miles of dirt roads.

On trips to Baja California and Indian Country, Skinner and Henry often travel for three weeks at time. But the Auto Club requires them to take off one day in seven.

"It can be a real pain when you are out in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing you can do with your day off is sit around a lonely motel or campsite," Henry says.

Although he and Skinner meet plenty of storekeepers, restaurant workers and travelers in their work, their return visits are so far apart that friendships rarely form.

"You do have to like to work by yourself," Henry says.

Yet of the 10 field cartographers the Southern California club has hired in the last 35 years, only one has quit for good to pursue a more normal lifestyle. That was Dan Goodwin, now a 44-year-old environmental health and safety manager for a manufacturer in Pasadena.

In 1986, with a newly minted geography degree from UC Santa Barbara, Goodwin thought the job would be perfect, but eventually the loneliness got to him.

"I found myself wishing that I had someone with me on those road trips to share it with," he says. Goodwin quit in 1989.

The club prides itself on the accuracy of its maps, but errors do occur. Sometimes a field researcher fails to properly record the distance between road junctions, or omits a creek or gives a bad road a better rating than it deserves.

"Every once in a while we'll get a call or a letter from someone who took a car or a Winnebago too far down a road and got stuck or found that the road was a lot nastier than the map suggested," says Jim Kendall, the local Auto Club's map research chief. So when Skinner or Henry makes a rare appearance at the club's Costa Mesa office, he is often handed a pile of complaints to check out before the next map is printed.

Sometimes the cartographers find the mistakes on their own.

On a trip near Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah last year, Henry drove across a little creek and stopped for lunch. Then a sudden thunderstorm hit and dumped enough water to swell the creek into a torrent. A creek that had been 6 inches deep was now 3 feet deep, and it would have flooded Henry's engine had he tried to drive back. But his Auto Club map showed he was near a dirt road leading to a highway, so he took it.

Unfortunately, the map failed to show that the road crossed the same creek again before reaching the highway. When he arrived at the second crossing, the water was deep and running fast. But Henry carries a pair of 6-foot boards in his pickup for just such emergencies, and he spent several hours piling up rocks so he could lay the boards over them as a makeshift bridge.

After driving across, Henry says, "I saw a homemade sign someone had put up that said, 'Creek may rise without warning.' "

That second crossing is now on the Auto Club's Indian Country map.