'Don't zone me in:'

Property-rights measures on ballot in West

By JOHN MILLER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Seattle Post-intelligencer

BOISE, Idaho -- The West was won a century ago, but the battle over how it will look a century from now continues, with property-rights initiatives on the ballot in at least four states.

Measures in Idaho, Arizona, California and Washington ask voters to follow Oregon, where residents in 2004 forced local governments to pay private property owners when new regulations reduce their land's value.

Aiming to capitalize on anti-government sentiment kicked up by a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case in Connecticut, proponents say these "regulatory takings" measures protect people's freedom to profit from their land.

Opponents point to Oregon, where "Measure 37" has resulted in more than $4 billion in claims. They say these initiatives are financed by wealthy ideologues bent on preventing local governments from deciding where subdivisions, gravel pits, even rendering plants can be built.

It's the latest collision of the "Don't fence me in" ethos of the old West, where property rights border on the sacred, with the new West's vision of a landscape that only seems infinite - and requires laws to shape it appropriately. And it has attracted deep-pocketed backers on both sides: Millions from conservative activist and New York real-estate Howard Rich are propping up the ballot measures, while Paul Brainerd, Seattle-based founder of Aldus software, has injected at least $120,000 into the fight to shoot them down.

"I don't believe that developers should profit from dodging local land-use regulations," said Brainerd, who also owns a home near Ketchum, Idaho. "Each community should be able decide how to best balance the rights and responsibilities of land owners to the greater community good - not just the rights of an individual who wants to develop a subdivision with 250 homes on 20 acres."

Conservative activists including Boise's Laird Maxwell are pushing their initiatives almost solely with money from organizations linked to Rich and say foes have employed "esoteric, pie-in-the-sky scare tactics" to frighten voters on Nov. 7. They say their proposals are simple: If government changes laws to limit how people can use their land, it should pay for the damage.

"It is a battle over whether or not individual liberty will continue in the United States or not," Rich, also on the boards of the conservative Cato Institute and the Club for Growth, told The Associated Press. "The opposition are government bureaucrats, those that profit from taking other people's property without paying for it, and those that have radical agendas hidden under soft facades."

There could have been more measures: A Montana effort appears dead after a judge found signature-gathering fraud got it on the ballot. And the Nevada Supreme Court trimmed regulatory-takings provisions from a measure there.

As the West changes from a region where agriculture is replaced by subdivisions that seem to stretch from horizon to horizon, these battles are emerging in part because some fear they'll be left behind.

"Landowners see zoning laws as an obstacle to them transitioning out of resource use and into urban development," said Sy Adler, an urban studies professor at Portland State University and co-author of "Planning a New West." It would be nice to do this in a more planful way rather than a ballot-measure approach."

Proponents say that's the only way to get government to listen.

Ed Terrazas, an architect near Sun Valley, Idaho, signed onto Proposition 2 after the local government rejected his plan to build four homes on 115 acres of sage and grass he owns above the Big Wood River, near where it flows out of the Rocky Mountains.

"Largely from my years of planning experience, I've seen other people harmed by overzealous regulation that doesn't account for property rights," said Terrazas, who is suing Blaine County. "You're fighting your own government, and they have unlimited resources."

Some of the ballot measures are married to provisions meant to address eminent-domain abuse fears that arose after the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court's Kelo vs. New London case. The Connecticut city was allowed to condemn residential property to clear the way for a private economic development.

Still, foes in Idaho, including business groups, cities and counties, and Republican Gov. Jim Risch, say eminent domain is no longer a concern, since state lawmakers this year passed new laws greatly restricting when governments can seize private property.

Others argue the regulatory-takings measures would produce a system where land-use disagreements will wind up in courts, costing taxpayers millions. In Oregon, for instance, where Measure 37 allows landowners to claim compensation or a waiver of land-use rules, a man has demanded either $203 million - or the right to drill geothermal wells, expand a pumice mine and erect vacation homes inside a national volcanic monument.

"What we've got is this out-of-state sugar daddy who is supporting this far-out proposition that will put Idaho communities at risk," Dan Chadwick, Idaho Association of Counties director, said of Rich.

It's no surprise private-property measures have emerged in the Rocky Mountain West, home to some of America's fastest-growing states.

Arizona was No. 2 in 2005, behind Nevada, while Idaho and Oregon came in third and 10th, respectively.

"I would be interested to see whether there's an effective resistance that can be mounted to this kind of initiative," said Dan Kemmis, a senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana. "There's a growing perception in many of these places that if the West is going to prosper in the long run, and not just make a quick buck out of rapid growth for a short time, that we've got to be as smart as we can be in controlling our own destiny."

Bill Gives Western States More Access to Federal Land

A House measure would allow a right of way to be claimed on any mapped route in parks or other national areas. Critics fear a motorized influx.

By Julie Cart, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

A bill introduced by Rep. Steve Pearce, a New Mexico Republican, would give Western states and counties broad authority over rights of way across federal land, allowing them to convert footpaths, wagon tracks and cattle trails into roads.

Echoing a long-repealed 19th century statute, Pearce's bill would permit local governments to claim rights of way through national parks, national forests, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and military bases, provided the routes appear on any official map or survey made before 1976. According to his bill, such documents can include land office plats and "tourist maps."

Critics say the bill, which was introduced Friday, is a giveaway of public land that would open up more of the nation's parks and wilderness areas to motorized travel.

Pearce's staff said Tuesday that the congressman intends the bill to clarify for Western counties and states what constitutes a valid right of way across federal land.

Rights-of-way conflicts have been simmering for more than a decade in counties where the federal government owns the bulk of the land.

In recent years, a handful of counties in southern Utah have asserted claims to rights of way across Arches National Park, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Canyonlands National Park.

"The problem is that currently it's a patchwork, case-by-case legal review," said David Host, Pearce's communications director. "In his view you had an untenable situation. This will establish rights and increase predictability."

But critics say the broad language of the bill, which allows rights of way on "any public lands ever owned by the United States," could open land Congress has already protected from roads and other intrusions.

"It's so sweeping that it's almost impossible to believe," said Kristen Brengel of the Wilderness Society.

In recent years, counties have made rights-of-way claims under an 1866 law, RS 2477, which was designed to encourage the development of the West. The law was repealed in 1976, but grandfathered in previously granted rights of way. But controversy lingered over what constituted a legal right of way.

In California, San Bernardino County claimed authority over nearly 5,000 miles of rights of way — more than twice the total mileage of maintained roads in the county. The claims included 2,567 miles within the Mojave National Preserve.

Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton sought to resolve the matter in 2003 in an agreement with Mike Leavitt, then the governor of Utah.

The agreement would have opened millions of acres in national parks and wilderness areas to motorized transportation. Shortly after the deal was reached, southern Utah counties began upgrading primitive roads, and some officials tore down federal signs forbidding recreational vehicles.

Environmental groups challenged the agreement, and a federal appeals court ruled last year that the burden of proof was on counties to prove their case, in part, by showing 10 years of continual use of the rights of ways.

Pearce's proposal expands on the court's ruling, Brengel said. "It goes further than the court or Norton. It says that just a line on a map is good enough to establish a claim," she said.

But Kane County Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw, who has sued to control roads on federal land in southern Utah, said, "There's no intention to make claims on trails or roads in obscure areas."

Under Pearce's bill, Kane County could claim a right to every hiking trail in Bryce Canyon and Zion national parks, Habbeshaw said, but the county has no intention of doing so.

"We could argue that our rights of way across the national parks are valid, and we want them opened up as road today," he said. "We've made no effort and will not make an effort to do so."

Habbeshaw said that the Utah-based Western Counties Alliance wrote the bill and brought it to Pearce in an effort to broaden the issue beyond Utah. Pearce agreed to sponsor it, he said, knowing that it would generate opposition from environmental groups.

If nothing else, he said, the bill will start a discussion.

"We have to sit down and deal with RS 2477 as professional and practical people," Habbeshaw said.

"I'm not saying the current language is a lock and that we are not open to changes."

Stark Beauty, Solitude, Squalor and Sulfur -- Trona Has It All

Once a prosperous and tidy company town with desert vistas, Trona is in decline, cherishing its memories but living with crime and blight.

David Kelly
Los Angeles Times

TRONA, Calif. — Fed up with the crime, congestion and cost of Orange County, Fred Hermon went looking for a place where he could be alone, a place so remote, so unappealing that few would ever want to live there.

His strategy was simple: Locate the popular, pricey towns on a map and move steadily outward. That's where he found Trona.

When he searched the Internet for information, the word "hell" kept popping up — 'Is Trona Anywhere Near Hell?," "Where the Hell Is Trona?," "Long, Lonely Ride Through Hell."

Hermon didn't actually expect to find perdition as he descended through Poison Canyon into Trona three years ago, but the smell of sulfur, the blast-furnace heat and barren landscape made it feel uncomfortably close.

A real estate agent showed him a neighborhood with block after block of burned-out homes.

"I said, 'Oh my God, no,' " he recalled. "Another area looked like Los Angeles after the riots. I love the desert, but this was pushing it."

Nevertheless, he found a house for $24,000, installed an enormous swamp cooler and now spends his days digging for old artifacts while caring for nine cats, an inquisitive packrat and two desert tortoises, Speedy and Kid.

Hermon, 60, has already spent $2,600 on a chain-link fence and rarely leaves home for fear of being burglarized. On his first night in town, someone swiped his $15 garden hose. He stays for the solitude but wonders how Trona came to this.

"Something must have been going on for a long time to bring the town to this level of devastation," he said.

Over the years, Trona, once a thriving community of 6,000 on the ragged edge of Death Valley, has shriveled to just 1,800. Drug dealers looking for cheap housing have moved in. Parolees abound. Arsonists have torched dozens of vacant homes, leaving charred skeletons behind. Business owners, unable to make a profit, have simply locked up and walked away.

The result is blight on an industrial scale. San Bernardino County has torn down a handful of houses, but officials say it's too costly to demolish entire blocks of dilapidated, asbestos-riddled buildings.

Meanwhile, many Tronans are fleeing to Ridgecrest, 25 miles away, leaving mostly senior citizens and a smattering of young professionals behind.

Whether Trona can survive as the population dwindles is an open question.

Most workers at Searles Valley Minerals, the major employer, now live elsewhere. The high school has just 160 students with a graduating class last year of 15. The football team, unable to field 11 players, now plays with eight.

"A lot of people are leaving town," said Ruth Soto, the high school guidance counselor. "Closing the school has been talked about."

Many who stay love Trona for the friendships they've made, memories of better times and the desert's stark beauty. Others are simply stuck, unable to afford a house elsewhere.

Homes here are among the cheapest in California, with a median price of $40,000, according to DataQuick, which tracks real estate sales.

Even die-hard Trona boosters agree that it has seen better days. They concede that streets lined with torched houses, combined with the pungent odor from the chemical plant, add up to a poor first impression.

Pastor Larry Cox of the First Baptist Church said his first words on entering Trona were "People live here?"

The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department has offered deputies willing to work in Trona free housing and less jail duty. Most prefer jail.

Hollywood comes calling when scouting places resembling alien planets or how they imagine the end of the world might look.

Parts of "Planet of the Apes" and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" were filmed at the Trona Pinnacles, towering mineral formations near town. Conspiracy buffs have long held that Trona was the site of NASA's "moon landings."

An old highway sign put it this way: "End of the World 10, Trona 15."

Yet this extreme environment has bred people as tough as the rock and desert around them. They endure months of 120-degree temperatures and winds that fling boulders down mountainsides.

Seniors hit the links at the bare bones Trona Golf Club, batting balls on a mostly sand and dirt course while skirting the occasional rattlesnake.

"The sand leaves the clubs a little dog-eared," noted 82-year-old Barbara Crowther.

The Trona Tornadoes, named after dust devils spinning off dry Searles Lake, may be the only high school football team outside Alaska to have an all-dirt field. Astroturf would blow away, they say.

The white lines contain eye-stinging sodium sulfate to better stick to the field.

"It gives us a psychological edge in home games," said Coach John Foster.

The town was a stopover for the homicidal Manson family, who loaded up on water before heading to Barker Ranch about 20 miles east, where they were eventually arrested in 1969.

"I got my picture taken with Manson — with the girls too," said Robert "Ballarat Bob" Dunlap, an 83-year-old gold miner living in a desert shack.

Dunlap is one of the last in a long line of miners who burrowed and dynamited their way through here hoping to find a fortune.

In 1862, John W. Searles came looking for gold and found borax instead. His mining business would lay the foundation for a new town.

Named after a kind of sodium carbonate, Trona was established in 1914 by American Trona Corp., which owned the community outright. It built the schools, homes and dance halls and issued its own money to be used in town. Even when the business changed hands, residents were well cared for.

Teachers earned among the highest salaries in the state, often $96,000 a year in pay and benefits, thanks to royalties the company paid in exchange for mining on federal land. Sometimes local schools got $5 million or $6 million a year.

Lately, that number has dropped to about $1.6 million, school officials said. "I came here from Cleveland in 1945," said Kathe Barry, 75. "I loved it here because so much was going on at the time. We had a dance every Saturday night. There wasn't an empty house in Trona. It was just wonderful."

Ralph Garner, 94, stumbled on Trona during the Depression.

"They told me it was darn hot but I said I could take it," he said. "I was a mechanic and earned about 49 cents an hour. I had a good life here."

But times changed. In 1954, the company, then American Potash & Chemical, sold its homes to employees.

Workers were no longer required to live in Trona. In 1982, more than 400 chemists and engineers were relocated to Oklahoma.

For many, this was the beginning of the end. Layoffs and bitter strikes followed. The workforce shrank. Houses that couldn't be sold were abandoned.

Touring Trona with Russell Rector, 75, is a jarring journey from what was to what is, a landscape of memories rudely interrupted by jagged reality.

He nosed his red pickup toward the empty tennis courts.

"Everyone used to play out here," he said. "We would have beer parties in the desert and everyone would come. It's not the same place anymore."

He passed the old dance hall, once alive with laughter, now closed. The bookie's house stands empty. Trona had 13 saloons; now there are two.

Down at the First Baptist Church, Pastor Cox typed a sermon in his small air-conditioned office. He came from Simi Valley three years ago and feels like a missionary in a remote land.

"You step into Trona and you are stepping into a Third World country," Cox said. "This is a place where a lot of people have been forgotten. When a house burns down, it stands for 10 or 15 years. I tell people if they are looking for the middle of nowhere, we are in the middle of that."

The pride of Trona is the Old Guest House Museum, a shrine to the town and the minerals that made it. There are old photos of John W. Searles. His violin sits behind glass. Small bottles of potash, borax and fly ash are displayed, along with maps, history books and assorted mining and railroad paraphernalia.

Margaret Brush, 79, is curator and the town's most energetic promoter. She recently won funding for a kiosk along the road to Death Valley offering information about Trona.

"We needed something to attract people to Trona and to our museum," she said.

The heart of the town is Searles Valley Minerals, a vast, twisting array of pipes snaking above mountains of chemicals.

Arzell Hale, 69, has lived in the community for 28 years and handles public relations for the company.

"I'm going to die here, no question," he said cheerfully.

Yet he concedes that Trona suffers an image problem. The mere sight of it, he said, can scare off potential hires.

"When I first came here it was 10 at night, so it wasn't as bad as the daytime," Hale said.

That was in 1978 when the company had 1,450 employees. Now it has 650.

Hale drove around Searles Lake, a 42-square-mile expanse of mud and brine producing a million tons of soda ash a year and nearly a million tons of boron. The former is used to make glass, the latter soap and detergent. So far only 10% of its reserves have been used, Hale said.

"People drive out here and say, 'I wouldn't live in that godforsaken place for anything,' " he said, scanning a landscape more lunar than earthly. "But you don't know a place until you know the people, and the quality of people here is unreal."

True, but some are higher quality than others.

On a recent afternoon San Bernardino County Sheriff's Cpl. Tim Lotspeich drove into the hardscrabble Argus neighborhood and quickly found trouble brewing.

A shirtless man apparently high on methamphetamine was screaming abuse at another man down the street.

Lotspeich warned him to calm down and not do anything he would regret later.

Eric Cartmell, 37, watched from behind his chain-link fence.

"Look around you," he said, pointing to the trashed houses along the road, "and see what meth can do to a town. The drug addicts have stripped these houses of toilets and whatever they can sell for drugs. If they cleaned this place up, there would be no better town."

Lotspeich, who has patrolled Trona for three years, must carefully decide when to make an arrest.

The nearest county jail is 100 miles away in Barstow, and he has only two other deputies.

"I could spend all day out here doing under-the-influence arrests, but by the time I drive them to Barstow that's half my day, and sometimes they are back before I am," he said.

Minutes later he rounded a corner and spotted a man wanted for a parole violation and arrested him.

He arrested another parolee shortly after. With two men handcuffed in his SUV, he stopped a teenager riding a motorbike on the street.

"Take it out to the desert," he said.

A woman flagged him down to point out a homeless man wandering her neighborhood.

The corporal had been on patrol just 20 minutes.

Methamphetamine abuse is a scourge in Trona, leading to other crimes, such as burglary. Arsonists also have helped destroy much of the town.

"That was the mentality — you had a problem with someone, you set their houses on fire or you set their car on fire," Lotspeich said. "That was just what you did up here. Once we made an arrest and they saw they would actually do time, it stopped. We haven't had arson in a year."

He credits aggressive policing for an upsurge in arrests. Trona went from 12 felony arrests in 2002 to 56 in 2005, according to sheriff's records.

"The good outweighs the bad here, but there is a lot of bad," the officer said.

Not far away, the Trona Tornados took to their dirt field for practice. "It's 115 degrees but it feels like 105 with the breeze," said Coach Foster, 41.

The team has won its league three times and has a reputation for hitting hard.

"No one else plays on dirt," said running back Emilio Horta, 16. "They all cry about it."

Asked if he will stay in Trona after graduation, he shook his head. "It's not where I want to be," Horta said. "I want a more civilized place."

A hot wind blew, carrying a bracing whiff of rotten egg.

Foster smiled.

"I said I wanted to leave as a kid," he said. "I went to the Navy for four years, then I came back. I like the small-town atmosphere and I love knowing where my kids are at night. I have no plans on going anywhere."

Return to his own habitat

Interior Secretary hears about Inland environmental issues

By JENNIFER BOWLES
The Press-Enterprise

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, returning Thursday to his hometown of San Bernardino, said he came to listen.

He heard from a woman whose family property in Colton can't be sold because of an endangered fly; a building industry representative looking for more incentives for property owners to set aside endangered species habitat; an Inland tribe that wants to be trusted to protect endangered sheep on its reservation in Palm Springs; and a fly fisherman worried about the drop of native salmon in California streams.

The meeting at the Clarion Hotel and Convention Center in San Bernardino was near the end of a nationwide series of 25 so-called listening sessions on cooperative conservation. After the final session Oct. 9 in Idaho, Kempthorne said, conclusions will be crafted on better ways to approach conservation.

If changes are to be made to the Endangered Species Act and its habitat requirements, he said, they won't be done without a public process.

"There are ways we can put a greater emphasis on recovery," of endangered species, Kempthorne said to reporters before the session.

He said he would rather see more work done to successfully remove species from the endangered species list, rather than dealing with the number of lawsuits over placing more of them on the list.

Of the approximately 50 speakers, the majority spoke in favor of maintaining the Endangered Species Act as one of the nation's toughest environmental laws. They said it spurs cooperative conservation because it forces people to the table to work on habitat preservation.

What is needed, they said, is more funding from the federal government to make those agreements work.

Many of the complaints came from Colton and Mayor Deirdre Bennett. She said restrictions on development to protect the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly, an endangered insect, have prevented her city's chance to blossom into a thriving area with hotels, restaurants and shops.

"The environmental injustice must stop," she said, saying that her city is saddled with more habitat limitations than Ontario and other cities where small pockets of the fly's dunes habitat remains.

She said the city this year developed the Colton Best Management Plan to conserve patches of the fly's habitat in four areas north of Interstate 10, while allowing development to go ahead.

Colton City Manager Daryl Parrish said they are hoping that officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service accept the plan.

"Either way," he said, "the city of Colton will not be held hostage for another decade as the species continues to decline."

Some local environmentalists asked to revive a stalled effort to develop a multispecies habitat conservation plan in the San Bernardino Valley, much like western Riverside County has done.

That plan, they said, could have resolved the problems faced by Colton and garnered more federal dollars to help purchase and restore the fly habitat, parts of which are litter-strewn and choked by invasive weeds.

Mark Thom, a University of Redlands student, said he helped restore dunes near Eureka with similar problems.

"We definitely should see hope that we can restore what was once there," he said.

Video: Record Wildfires Ravage Mojave Desert

The deserts of Pipes Canyon in southern California's Mojave Desert had never had a recorded fire until this year.

But this summer about 90 percent of the canyon was devastated when lightning sparked a raging blaze.

As fires become more frequent in the historically fire-free Mojave, experts say that a variety of factors, including the introduction of alien grasses, might be fanning the flames.

Witness the destruction in Pipes Canyon, and learn about the unprecedented issues that are creating a recipe for disaster in the desert.

Ivanpah's soil perfect for rare plant, but will it ground airport?

By Launce Rake
Las Vegas Sun

The Ivanpah Valley - shown on old maps as Roach Lake - is just a dusty patch of desert between Jean and Primm, 30 miles south of Las Vegas.

But Clark County has big plans for the dry lake bed. By 2018, the county Aviation Department, operators of McCarran International Airport, wants to have a fully functioning airport bringing cash-carrying passengers to the new Ivanpah facility.

The department has reason to hurry.

McCarran International Airport saw more than 44 million visitors arriving and departing last year, up almost 7 percent over 2004. At that rate, the existing airport could reach its planned capacity within just a couple of years.

Early next month, the Aviation Department, Federal Aviation Administration and Bureau of Land Management will hold a series of meetings to take public comment on environmental issues affecting the plans. Randy Walker, department director, said he doesn't see any show-stoppers on the environmental side - but he knows that identifying environmental issues and mitigating any impacts are critical to getting the new facility.

"Obviously, the formal environmental review process is a very key step in the whole process of trying to build an airport," Walker said.

Environmentalists for years have raised objections to the project. They say that it would lead to development sprawling miles away from the urban core, would be near habitat designated by Clark County for the threatened desert tortoise and could affect a rare desert plant.

Jane Feldman, an activist with the local arm of the Sierra Club, said the project could affect a type of plant called a penstemon, or beardtongue.

"There are many different varieties, but this is one that grows in lower elevations in very sandy, windblown soil," she said, the kind of soil that collects in some areas of the Ivanpah Valley. The penstemon variety "has a very limited range. It lives in the southern part of Clark County and a couple of other places, and nowhere else.

"If we interrupt the way that sand is deposited, we may lose the species."

Development also could impact the tortoise translocation center on the west side of Interstate 15, she said: "For us to put that airport there was extremely shortsighted."

But environmentalists know it will be a tough job fighting the federal and local officials lined up to support the Ivanpah airport. Feldman noted that federal legislation allowed Clark County to buy 5,800 acres in the Ivanpah Valley for the airport in 2004.

"The land has already been given to the airport, which means that any study of alternatives is really going to be perfunctory," she said.

Other critics have raised concerns about the flood-prone character of the dry lake bed that is the base of the planned airport. But a Las Vegas civil engineer said in an interview earlier this year that such issues are not unusual in the West.

"Airports are constructed on dry lakes all through the Southwest," said Julianne Miller, a UNLV engineer. "There are always environmental issues, but all these things can be engineered around."

Walker said that environmental objections are premature: "We're moving forward on the environmental processes. The goal is to successfully determine that there are no environmental impediments and to go ahead and built the airport ¦ That's what the environmental process is all about - to identify the environmental issues and identify any potential mitigation."

Walker said the county is in the second year of a five-year process to deal with environmental issues for the new airport.

While the continuing growth of McCarran's passenger load is a concern, Walker is not panicking.

"It depends on how fast the community grows, how many hotel rooms get built," he said. "If for some reason hotels don't get built, there won't be a problem."

Current projections are for 40,000 hotel rooms to come in the next six years, Walker said.

And if all are built, "then I believe we will not be able to meet the demand."

While waiting for the new airport to come, McCarran officials will try to squeeze in more passengers .

"You try to do whatever you can. You try to be creative," Walker said. "If the demand is strong enough, then maybe people start doing things that aren't common in the industry."

That could mean booking more flights on what are relatively slow days at McCarran: Tuesdays and Thursdays.

But Vegas-bound consumers might be the ones to pay the price, Walker said: "Whenever you have more demand than supply, prices go up."

Preserving a town time almost forgot

Old railroad town, bypassed by Route 66, gets a helping hand from devoted couple

Andrew Edwards, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

GOFFS - "Hooch" Simpson has been dead for nearly a century, but this cantankerous desert character has not been forgotten.

In a photograph, Hooch's lifeless and shackled body hangs from a noose. A sign shown in the picture states that the dead man was hanged on Easter Sunday 1908 in Skidoo, a Death Valley mining town that no longer exists. The black-and-white image hangs on a wall inside a museum in Goffs, another desert town that itself could have been lost to history, but instead became a place where the past is remembered.

Goffs, once a railroad town west of Needles, is now the home of Dennis and Jo Ann Casebier and the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association. The Casebiers founded the association in 1993 and have restored the ghost town's red-roofed schoolhouse and transformed it into a museum that boasts a variety of Mojave Desert exhibits. Dennis Casebier said the association's collection includes 6,000 books, 50,000 photographs and the transcripts of 1,000 oral-history interviews.

"We've gotten ourselves embroiled in the history," he said.

Hooch, just one character in the Mojave Desert story, was executed after committing murder in Skidoo, Jo Ann Casebier said. Next to his picture is a display case containing a noose that, according to the museum, was the very instrument of Hooch's demise.

The National Park Service has more to the tale. According to its version, there is a desert legend saying that Hooch was hanged twice by townspeople. The first hanging killed him, but he was supposedly strung up a second time for photojournalists who weren't around the first time. You could call it an early version of the "perp walk."

Goffs has a story, too. The history of the town, as summarized by the association, is the tale of a railroad town that was founded in 1883 and owed the first decades of its growth to the Santa Fe Railroad.

National Old Trails Road also led to Goffs and became part of Route 66 in 1926. But five years later, Goffs began to fade. Route 66 was realigned about six miles south of the town and in 1937, the last classes were held in the schoolhouse that now houses the Mojave-themed museum.

During World War II, Army troops trained around Goffs, and inside the museum, a mannequin wears the green uniform of the 7th Infantry Division, a pack of Domino cigarettes tucked inside the band around his helmet.

"They trained here but they never went to the North African desert. They went to the Aleutian Islands and South Pacific," Jo Ann Casebier said.

Dennis Casebier, 71, grew up in Kansas and joined the Marines as a young man.
In a roundabout way, the military played a role in bringing him to the desert. He entered the service in 1953 before the end of the Korean War, but fighting a war on the other side of the Pacific wasn't in his future.

"The North Koreans knew I was coming so they signed the armistice," he said.

Instead of Korea, Dennis Casebier wound up stationed in Twentynine Palms, where he "got bit by the desert bug." After the Marines, he went back to college in Kansas, took a job in Norco and retired in 1990. He and his wife moved to Goffs that same year.

The Casebiers are visited in Goffs by volunteers who help maintain historical records. Jackie Ridge of San Diego is one of them. She said she comes to Goffs once a month to help catalog records. She began her work in the desert after the museum helped her find Brant, a place where her husband's great-grandfather worked as a railroad-station manager in the early 20th century.

Brant was east of Kelso, Ridge said. Kelso, inside what is now the Mojave National Preserve, was an old railroad stop whose depot still stands. Time has been harsher to Brant. Little remains except for what may have been a chicken coop and burro pen and a rock foundation for a house.

"The railroads have been regraded but it's amazing how close that house was to the railroad tracks," Ridge said. "It wasn't a quiet place to live."

Goffs is quiet, but Dennis Casebier is working to bring the noises of construction to the town. He wants to build a replica of Goffs' railroad depot to serve as a library. In 2005, he received a grant of about $500,000 for the project from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment. The groundbreaking for the depot project was in July, and Dennis Casebier said he's collected about $200,000 of the $250,000 he needs to fully fund construction.

One of Dennis Casebier's other priorities is interviewing as many Mojave Desert old-timers (or their descendants) as possible before their knowledge of desert living is lost.

"Oral history is a wonderful thing," he said. "We're trying to track down people who have first-time experience here."

Firefighting doubted

Probe of Hackberry tactics requested

George Watson, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun


Winkler's Cabin burned to the ground.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Postmus has asked Rep. Jerry Lewis to request an outside investigation into the suppression tactics of the National Park Service during a 2005 wildfire in the High Desert.

In a Sept. 5 letter, Postmus wrote that the Park Service's decision to use an unapproved fire-management plan during the Hackberry Complex Fire must be examined.

The Park Service has already conducted a review of its own and concluded it did nothing wrong in battling the blaze.

"The Park Service letter to you seems to absolve the Service and its employees of any inappropriate action," wrote Postmus. "However, given the continuing nature of the controversy, I believe that a review external to the Park Service might be appropriate."

Several residents believe their homes burned because of the Park Service's fire-management decisions. They have said the Park Service did not use enough bulldozers and planes and refused residents' offers to let their firefighters tap into local wells, instead choosing to refill water supplies from locations farther away.

Postmus suggested the Department of the Interior's Inspector General's Office could handle the investigation.

Lewis' spokesman, Jim Specht, said the Redlands Republican, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, has been tied up trying to finalize bills for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

"Once he gets those done and has a chance to review the information, I am sure he will have a conversation with Mr. Postmus about it," Specht said.

Last March, Lewis expressed his disappointment with the Park Service's handling of the Hackberry Complex Fire, which torched 70,000 acres of desert covered with pinyon pine, juniper and sage brush. Lewis wrote that he believed too many houses burned and questioned whether the Park Service's responsiveness may have been the cause.

Dennis Schramm, the supervisor of the Mojave National Preserve, which is where the fire occurred, has called the blaze "an event that has not been seen before in this part of the desert."

Schramm placed blame on hot, dry weather coupled with an abundance of fuel meaning trees and brush that were ready to explode. He also has said the Park Service saved many homes from burning.

Brad Mitzelfelt, Postmus' chief of staff, agreed with Schramm that the conditions were ripe for an uncontrollable fire.

"We believe they could have had more water available and that they could have used heavy equipment to help fight this fire, but at the end of the day that's no guarantee the outcome of this disastrous fire would have been any different," Mitzelfelt wrote in an e-mail.

Still, Mitzelfelt said, the county questions whether the Park Service properly implemented its fire plan once the Hackberry fire ignited.

"This is one of the things we hope the (inspector general) can determine," Mitzelfelt wrote. "At the time the Hackberry fires started, the county had not been notified that the plan had been adopted and in fact hadn't heard any response to its input from the scoping for the Fire Management Plan."

Gold or Just a Fever?

A 1930s prospector insisted that a Mojave peak hid an underground river flowing with the ore. Some are chasing that dream today.

By Ashley Powers, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

KOKOWEEF PEAK, Calif. — The earthen ridge rises 6,038 feet from scrub brush and sand, an unspectacular summit were it not for the legend: a river underneath, overflowing with gold.

At least since the 1930s, leather-skinned prospectors have chased the tale to a mining shantytown at the base of the peak, on the edge of Mojave National Preserve, where the cheeriest structure is a pink shed that bears the warning "Keep Out."

Today a hard-bitten crew of treasure hunters huddles in plywood homes, enduring icy winters and roasting summers. Their big-city neighbor is an apt one: Las Vegas, about 75 miles away, which also welcomes dreamers happy to risk savings and sanity.

Kokoweef — a name believed to stem from Southern Paiute words meaning "gopher snake canyon" — lures its own kind of gamblers, though these days barely enough for a hand of seven-card stud: a military surplus merchant, a cocktail waitress, a retired construction manager and a few others.

Their quest, however, comes with this caveat: It consumed Earl Dorr, the brusque miner who fathered the legend — and who may have concocted it for his own nefarious ends.

The bleak sands of the Mojave conceal a bounty of treasure. Native tribes pocketed agate and turquoise long before Nevada's silver rush in the 1860s, which sent fortune-hungry miners scrambling into the Providence, Mescal and Clark ranges.

Tent cities sprouted in the sand. Some matured to communities of shelters cobbled from rocks and juniper poles — with most towns building the requisite general store and saloon and sometimes a brothel.

Ivanpah, among the largest on the California-Nevada border, boomed to several hundred residents, but it and most smaller outposts went bust when the silver, copper or tin markets crashed.

The mining rush slowed to a trickle by the 1930s. Into this desolate landscape wandered Dorr, a prospector with blue eyes, a shoulder-holstered gun and "immaculate table manners," said his nephew Ray Dorr, 78, a retired contractor in Cañon City, Colo., who is writing a book about Kokoweef.

Earl Dorr, born in the 1880s to wealthy Colorado cattle ranchers, traveled the Southwest in search of a mine that would make him rich. He would visit Ray's father in Pasadena, striding to the door in a Stetson hat with a sack of penny candy for the kids, whom he entranced with tall tales.

Along the way, Dorr either "discovered the richest gold deposit in the United States … or he was the most imaginative liar in the state of California," his nephew wrote in a 1967 article for Argosy magazine.

Dorr told The Times in 1936 that he came across Kokoweef when he checked into a Death Valley tale that three men who stumbled upon the golden river had deposited $57,000 in a Needles, Calif., bank.

Dorr told his nephew a different version: that he had befriended three Indian brothers who had discovered a river thick with ore in a Kokoweef cavern. After one brother plummeted to his death in the cavern, the other two refused to return to the mountain and told Dorr the tale.

The mountain, near the Ivanpah range, has three sizable, nearly vertical caves with limestone chambers: Kokoweef, Crystal and Quién Sabe — Spanish for "who knows." In 1934, Dorr produced a sworn statement that said he and an engineer, whom he identified only as Mr. Morton, descended several thousand feet into chambers he called "one of the marvels of the world."

On the floor of a half-mile-deep canyon, Dorr said, he came across a river, about 300 feet wide, that rose and fell as if it were breathing. The water receded to reveal black sand. Dorr said he panned it and found gold. Lots of it.

Dorr told The Times that upon returning to the surface, he dynamited the cavern's entrance to keep others from plundering his bounty while he filed a mining claim.

Within the next decade or so, cave explorers from Pasadena, curious about the tale, shimmied into a cavern and found "D-O-R-R" seared onto a wall.

Dorr's statement was published in the California Mining Journal in 1940, and it has been the source of endless speculation ever since. Why would he write up such a strike when he went to such lengths to hide it? Yet, if he were telling the truth, weren't untold riches just waiting to be rediscovered?

Larry Hahn opts for the latter.

In the 1980s, Hahn, who owns a military surplus store in Las Vegas, became the latest in a series of folks to entrance investors with Kokoweef. He is a partner in Explorations Inc., which has leased land from a company that owns 85 acres near the mountain and has mineral rights to 300 more and would share profits from any cache discovered.

Hahn, 68, said he had coaxed 300 to 500 investors to chip in for drilling, blasting and zapping the mountainside with electric current to pinpoint where to drill.

His newsletters promise gold like a televangelist promises salvation: "It only takes that one lucky hole that is connected to the big void to show us the way," one newsletter reads.

On a recent afternoon at base camp, Hahn said the search seemed as feasible as dredging for gold doubloons. "But in this day and age, we don't have buried treasure; all of it's been found. This is the last frontier," he said.

Only the most devout trundle up Zinc Mine Road, a tire-busting path that zigzags past boulders and Joshua trees about a mile from where long-extinct coelurosaurs imprinted what might be the state's only dinosaur tracks. The occasional hand-lettered sign reassures that the path peters out at "Kokoweef" — a graveyard of sagging buildings and rusting mining equipment.

At the plywood-and-pallet home that he built, one wall plastered with his great-grandfather's claim certificates for a gold mine, Randy Stenberg, 59, a retired construction manager, tends to his dreams.

His wife, Bernice, 50, a cocktail waitress at the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas, had dismissed Larry Hahn as a huckster who had blinded her husband with a fable. But nearly 15 years ago, the Stenbergs descended from their 13th-floor condo near the Las Vegas Country Club for a tour of a tunnel that miners had chiseled.

Hahn's pitch was simple: "If you hit it, you're talking about the biggest thing that ever happened."

The couple threw in about $1,000, inspecting their investment on weekends and scraping rock and debris from the mine. It wasn't until four or so years ago that they settled at base camp, where electricity churns from solar panels and, for about two hours a day, a generator.

Residents fetch water from a pool that seeps from rocks in the Mescal range. One neighbor, a retired factory worker in her 70s, plans to spend the rest of her days staring at the spindly Joshua trees that hem in the hodgepodge of structures.

Randy Stenberg passes time slogging through one 1,200-foot tunnel into Kokoweef Peak and gazing at the zinc mine's ballroom ceilings and relics of miners past, such as a leather jacket and a V8 juice can ossified in dust.

"Gambling's for fools," he said recently from a frontyard whose sole decoration was a pink flamingo. "I don't consider this gambling — looking for something that's possibly there. You'd go down in history with it."

The miners under Hahn's direction long ago abandoned the sometimes dodgy work of blasting Kokoweef with dynamite. They instead poke at the mountain with more inventive tools, including microphones that help measure sound from small explosions to see if it pings off ore.

The latest novelty is a drill. It is as tall as a two-story home and topped with a skull-and-crossbones pirate flag. Several miles from base camp, the machine labors six to eight hours a day, burrowing deep into the dirt. The rationale: When the drill hits nothing, it will have found the cavern, or the path to it.

Geologists scoff at the legend, saying Kokoweef Peak could never harbor such a deep cave or a raging underground river. The desert is too dry. The amount of gold said to be packed into the riverbed — at least 50 tons, by Dorr's estimate — is too great. Not even Gold Rush miners in the Sierra Nevada foothills unearthed such a cache.

Paleontologists working with the San Bernardino County Museum dug at Kokoweef Peak in the 1970s, recovering more than 200,000 animal remains, including fish bones. Birds had carried the fish from the Colorado River, scientists determined, but some miners took them as evidence that Dorr's golden river — and its mother lode — existed.

"If it would have been there, this guy would have mined it all and be rich as can be," said Ted Weasma, a Mojave National Preserve geologist.

Dorr's nephew and at least one prospector who has lived at Kokoweef are convinced that Dorr pulled a bait-and-switch on his fellow miners — signing the sworn statement to attract investors without giving up the gold's location or even guaranteeing that he had found it.

The prospector may not have shimmied through a small hole near Kokoweef's Crystal Cave but elsewhere in the Mojave, said Ralph Lewis, 54, an electrical apprentice who has distanced himself from Hahn's operation and is writing a book about the legend.

As evidence of such a subterfuge, both men point to a mining shack Dorr built, about 8 feet wide with a double bunk — not in the Ivanpah Mountains, but in the nearby Mescal range. Lewis, who lived in Kokoweef off and on for a quarter-century, is convinced that this is the so-called Dorr Peak, depicted on rudimentary maps as providing a second path to the underground river.

Dorr's lifelong search for another route to his treasure gnawed at him, especially after the legend piqued a mining company's interest in the 1930s. Its workers discovered zinc and gave up on the gold. Dorr claimed that the zinc mining had destroyed routes to his horde.

"I got the wrong class of men, all talk — the class we old desert prospectors call drugstore miners. It was too big for them — too big a thing," Dorr told author Howard D. Clark after the firm ditched its plans to find gold.

"I stuck as long as I could, until I was eating cooked watercress, chipmunk soup and sagebrush tea. I starved out and had a light stroke, which put me on my back for a whole year," he said.

After deserting the shack in the Mescals, he worked as a shipyard welder, then as a watchman at an Adelanto tungsten mine. The prospector died in the 1950s, his pan empty.

Remembering a local author, Bill Mann

By Stevie St. John / City Editor
Desert Dispatch [Barstow, CA]

BARSTOW — Harvey House overflowed at noon on Saturday as family, friends and community members gathered to remember prominent local author Bill Mann, who died from acute leukemia in August.

Among the speakers was Mann’s younger brother Dennis, who read a letter to Mann’s widow, Dottie, from her nephew Larry Mann.

“The journey is at least as important as the destination,” he read.

And the way those remembering told it, Mann loved a journey, particularly the parts that involved getting to know others and telling a good story.

Mann always had a new story, his brother said, “and they were great.”

From 1988 until Mann launched his writing career in the 1990s, he and Gene Stoops led field trips to introduce people to some of the desert’s secrets such as mines and ghost towns. Mann previously led the trips but had stopped for while after his wife was hurt in a wreck that left her a wheelchair-user.

“He never met a stranger,” said Stoops, who credits Mann with getting him to be more open by encouraging him to tell stories around the campfire.

The pair led nine trips each year with one excursion per month starting in October. Stoops continued leading the trips until last year.

“We just really had a ball doing those trips over the years,” he said at the reception at Idle Spurs after the memorial service.

And over the years, Mann collected stories. Finally someone suggested they be written down, and Mann went on to pen several books.

Still, the prominent citizen was remembered not as much for his books as for himself. People described him as a joker, a devoted grandfather, someone who raised children teachers raved about and a man who told great tales.

BOOKS BY BILL MANN

• “BILL MANN’S GUIDE TO BIG BEAR AND ITS HIDDEN TREASURES”

• “BILL MANN’S GUIDE TO THE BEAUTIFUL AND HISTORIC LUCERNE VALLEY AND VICINITY”

• “BILL MANN’S GUIDE TO THE REMOTE AND MYSTERIOUS SALINE VALLEY”

• “BILL MANN’S GUIDE TO THE CALICOS: GHOST MINING CAMPS AND SCENIC AREAS”

• “BILL MANN’S GUIDE TO 50 INTERESTING AND MYSTERIOUS SITES IN THE MOJAVE”

• “BILL MANN’S GUIDE TO 50 INTERESTING AND MYSTERIOUS SITES IN THE MOJAVE, VOLUME 2”

Conservationist worked 42 years for park service

Obituary: STANLEY ALBRIGHT, 74

BY VALERIE J. NELSON
Los Angeles Times

Despite many accomplishments during 42 years with the National Park Service, Stanley T. Albright was often known as ''the nephew of.'' His uncle, Horace Albright, co-founded the park service in 1916.

Stanley T. Albright died Aug. 18 in a care facility in West Linn, Ore., after a long illness, said his wife, Kris. He was 74.

During the Reagan administration, Albright served under Interior Secretary James G. Watt, who was known for favoring profit over preservation when it came to federal land. A resolute conservationist, Albright preserved many national park programs Watt sought to dismantle, according to the park service.

In 1987, Albright became director of the western region, overseeing national parks in California and five other states for ''10 tumultuous years'' as the park budgets flattened, the park service said.
However, he trained the generation of superintendents now running many of the nation's parks.

And he played a key role in the passage of the 1994 California Desert Protection Act that created Death Valley National Park. With 3.4 million acres, it is the largest national park in the contiguous United States. The act also spawned Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve.

Tapped in 1997 to return to Yosemite -- he had served on the ski patrol decades before -- park superintendent Albright led an effort to repair extensive damage to the park from a Merced River flood.

Two years into his Yosemite stewardship, Albright was replaced. He ended his career as a natural resources consultant before retiring from the park service in 2000 .

Albright was born in Oakland and grew up in Bishop, Calif. After serving in the Army during the Korean War, he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1958 with a degree in biology. He became a fire lookout in the Inyo National Forest, and later managed concessions at the Grand Canyon.

As state director of the National Park Service in Alaska in the 1970s, Albright helped lay the groundwork for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, which created 10 national parks and expanded several others. The 44 million acres effectively doubled the size of the national park system.

In addition to his second wife, Kris, Albright is survived by a son, Sean Albright of Walnut Creek, Calif., and a stepson, Jon Finney of Lake Oswego, Ore.

Desert Fires' Damage Will Last

It will take centuries for plant life to recover. Many experts say invasive vegetation is largely to blame.

By Janet Wilson, Times Staff Writer
ktla 5 [Los Angeles, CA]


Sawtooth fire as it moves through the Morongo Valley desert landscape.

April Sall stood in the charred remnants of a Joshua tree forest, bark peeling off melted black limbs. Above her, ridges once thick with 1,000-year-old piñon and juniper pines were scorched bedrock and stumps.

More than 90% of the surrounding Pipes Canyon Preserve was consumed in last month's Sawtooth blaze. It was one of half a dozen fast-moving fires this summer that burned 65,000 acres of the Mojave Desert, fueling debate over whether the desert is burning more frequently and explosively as a result of invasive weeds, smog, development and climate change.

"It's heartbreaking to see," said Sall, a biologist who manages the preserve and whose grandmother homesteaded the land a century ago. "We'll never see those piñon or juniper trees again in our lifetimes, nor will our children, nor will their grandchildren. It's a bitter pill…. This land isn't meant to burn."

Many scientists agree, saying the recent blazes offer fresh evidence that deserts across the Southwest are undergoing a profound shift, as ancient native pine, shrubs and cactuses give way to young, highly flammable weeds and grasses.

"Right now we're losing very large pieces of landscape," said Todd Esque, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Henderson, Nev., who studies the cause and effect of fires in the desert. "It's happening in Joshua Tree National Park, it's happening in Mojave National Preserve … up in southwestern Utah … and in Arizona. We lost 750,000 acres of desert to fire in Nevada alone last summer."

This summer, five blazes have seared parts of Joshua Tree, where a fire only every few years was the norm for the last 50 years.

Esque and other researchers say that unlike forests and chaparral, the sparsely vegetated desert is not meant to burn frequently.

"The public has come to understand that fire is a necessary part of the life of forests," Esque said. "That is not the case with deserts. We have a major problem going on."

A vocal minority disagrees, contending there is no clear-cut evidence of far-reaching change. They blame this year's fires on bumper crops of wildflowers nourished by heavy spring rains two years ago. According to the theory, dried remnants of the prolific blooms fueled a 50,000-acre fire in the Mojave National Preserve last summer and in this year's conflagrations.

"The winter of 2004-05 was the wettest ever in 100 years of recorded data in the desert. We had a phenomenal crop of annual native wildflowers, and it was dry the next year and it stayed there," said Richard Minnich, a professor of Earth sciences at UC Riverside. "It's flash fuel of 1 to 2 tons per acre. What's really scary is, there's still a lot of it out there."

Scientists do agree that it will take centuries, if not millenniums, for the desert to recover.

"It won't be on a timeline we humans would like, but it will happen," said Tasha LaDoux, Joshua Tree National Park's botanist.

Inside the park, new growth provides fodder for the debate over whether the fragile, arid landscape is undergoing dramatic change.

At the scene of a 1995 fire, not a single juniper or piñon pine seedling has come up after 11 years. But healthy, 3-foot "pups" have sprouted from the roots of once seemingly dead Joshua trees. The pups may or may not survive, scientists say, because in drought years they may be gnawed by thirsty rodents and ground squirrels. Meanwhile, native apricot mallow, bright-green cheesebush and golden California marigold are blooming even in August.

Along a sandy road in the western section, the scene of a 1999 blaze that scorched 14,000 acres, a beige sea of grasses spreads beneath burned Joshua trees bleached silver by sun and rain. The new growth consists of native bunch grasses and a pair of noxious, ankle-scratching weeds.

These two nonnatives, known as red brome and cheatgrass, form highly flammable carpets between native shrubs and trees, and many scientists believe they are the main culprits behind increasing fires.

"These invasive grasses fill in the spaces between the desert plants. They carry the flame through at a very high rate, and much hotter. It spreads a lot faster," Sall said.

The weeds are also bad for animals.

"The ranchers call it cheatgrass because for the first few years it's good grass, but after that it cheats the cattle of their nutrients," Esque said.

Native to Mediterranean Europe and Asia, the weeds were probably blown across the West by the wind, tracked in by hikers' boots and construction equipment, and excreted by livestock. Researchers at UCLA and elsewhere say the weeds appear to capture nitrogen from smog-laden air more readily than native plants, eventually choking them out.

But Minnich of UC Riverside said years of drought had actually caused most of the red brome to die out, while annual native grasses remain safely stored in natural seed banks on adjoining, unburned islands of habitat.

Richard Halsey couldn't disagree more.

"You're going to see a solid blanket of yellow felt next year," he said, meaning a blanket of dried nonnative grasses. Halsey, a former biology teacher who is now a researcher and firefighter, was asked by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to evaluate the role of vegetation in the Sawtooth fire.

"No one else on the planet agrees with Rich Minnich," Halsey said. "I went out there during the fire and after the fire and looked…. Not only didn't I see the volumes of wildflowers he's talking about, but in the burn area specifically…. I had a hard time finding natives. The predominant fire fuel mix was cheatgrass and red brome."

Robert Webb, a hydrologist with the Geological Survey's Tucson office who has studied botany in the Mojave for 30 years, laughed when he heard about the debate.

"The truth is, they may all be right. The desert is very complicated. There is incredible local variability," he said. Echoing other scientists, he said, "Minnich often heaves these ideas out there that are different…. It's healthy, it makes us all look very carefully at our own data."

Webb is writing a paper with other researchers that looks at three post-fire scenarios for the Mojave, all plausible, all different. Rather than focusing on Joshua trees or pines, they studied ancient black brush, a gray-brown shrub that has evolved to withstand desert temperatures and scarce rain.

A single bush can survive thousands of years. But it is highly flammable, proof to Webb that fire is not natural in the desert. One scenario does show nonnatives replacing black brush and causing more frequent fires. But he said data gathered so far made that scenario "only slightly more likely" than two others in which black brush grows back.

"Some of those Joshua trees may sprout too," Wall said, referring to the Pipes Canyon Preserve. "They're an amazing tree."

But others say such a destructive fire in a preserve like Pipes Canyon did lasting harm.

Tom Scott, a zoologist affiliated with UC Berkeley and UC Riverside, said the canyon preserve encompassed "one of the greatest transition zones in North America. If you look at where it starts way up on top of the San Bernardino Mountains, and then descends down to the desert, you're covering this incredible array of habitats, from montane forest down to low desert."

Scott said there were probably smaller pockets of plants and animals that evolved over millenniums in nooks in the preserve, only to be wiped out by this summer's catastrophic fire.

"If we've introduced grasses that are driving fire much further than it used to go, and you've got a lot of these small patches that are really unique in terms of species, then you're erasing them with large conflagrations," he said.

Esque worries about vulnerable desert species such as the reclusive desert tortoise, Scott's oriole, logger-headed shrike and least Bell's vireo songbirds, as mature shrubs that offered shelter are replaced with grasses.

"When you have less cover, with that goes less diversity," he said.

Webb is most concerned about warming temperatures in the desert. Besides causing less winter snow, warmer weather generates more summer thunderstorms and lightning strikes. Lightning started all the fires that ravaged Pipes Canyon Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park this summer.

Others said urbanization, motorized recreation and military activities were also taking a toll on the natural desert.

"What will be the one thing that does in the desert as we know it? It's not one thing. It's the onslaught of all these things," Esque said. He said there was little that could be done to turn back the clock. Many nonnative weeds are too far spread to be dug out, while native seeds are not widely available and can cost millions of dollars to gather and plant.

Beyond planting a bit of native seed, Sall said, she plans to let Pipes Canyon come back on its own, however long it takes.

Greg Hill of the Bureau of Land Management's Palm Springs office said his agency will take a similar approach to other burned areas in the desert.

"We'll let it regenerate naturally," he said. "It's the largest big chunk of undeveloped land left in Southern California."

Handling of '05 Hackberry fire called inadequate

'Too many structures burned,' says Lewis,
Mojave chief defends Park Service

By George Watson, Staff Writer
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Historic Pettit corral burned to the ground.

Earlier this year, Rep. Jerry Lewis criticized the National Park Service's handling of a 2005 wildfire in the Mojave National Preserve.

In a March 22 letter, Lewis, a Redlands Republican, wrote that "the appropriateness and responsiveness" of the park service's management of the Hackberry Complex Fire needed to be closely examined.

"In my opinion, too many structures burned during this fire," Lewis wrote in his letter to the agency's director, Fran Minella. "I would like to know how this happened and what steps the NPS will take to insure (sic) this doesn't happen again."

Apparently, the agency's fire management priorities remain an issue, not only for Lewis but at least one San Bernardino County leader. At the heart of the matter appears to be a divide over how wildfires are fought by firefighters -- whether the primary action should be to defend the occasional homes in the preserve or the vast environment that makes up the area.

Lewis was not available for comment. His spokesman, Jim Specht, said the congressman remains concerned about the matter and has a staff member keeping track of the issues.

Last Tuesday, a resident whose property was engulfed in flames from that wildfire sought help from the county's Board of Supervisors. Jim Walker, of Anaheim, told the supervisors that he feared another wildfire would cause similar results for others who own property in the Mojave National Preserve.

Board Chairman Bill Postmus, whose 1st District encompasses the High Desert, had stepped out of the meeting at the time and missed Walker's comments.

But as soon as Walker concluded speaking, Postmus' chief of staff, Brad Mitzelfelt, strode to a microphone.

"I can't disagree with much of what he actually said, and I just want to update you on where our office is at," Mitzelfelt told the three supervisors in attendance.

Postmus believes the problems, Mitzelfelt said, could be an "outgrowth of the park service's unwillingness to work cooperatively with the county, and part of that is their refusal to adopt, update and maintain partnerships with the county as the (Bureau of Land Management) did when the BLM had management of the preserve."

Dennis Schramm, the Mojave National Preserve's supervisor, disagreed with Lewis and Postmus.

The Hackberry fire, which charred 70,000 acres of land filled with pinyon pine, juniper and sagebrush, was an anomaly caused by a destructive compilation of weather conditions, he said.

"This was an event that had never been seen before in this part of the desert," Schramm said.

The Mojave National Preserve was created in 1994 through the California Desert Protection Act -- despite the objections of the county. The law gave greater protection to protected species living within the preserve, along with the vegetation that makes the area so unique.

At the time the Hackberry fire ignited, several other wildfires were burning in Nevada, Arizona and California, which meant resources, particularly the number of available firefighters, were spread thin.

Lightning strikes caused eight wildfires to ignite on June 22, 2005, according to the Burned Area Emergency Response report. The blazes merged together, creating the Hackberry fire. Winds gusting up to 28 miles per hour spurred the flames, and high humidity allowed them to burn faster and hotter.

"People want to say, we didn't do this or that or couldn't save these houses," Schramm said. "What doesn't get out there is how many homes we did save."

But Lewis was not impressed with the Burned Area Emergency Response team's report.
"There seems to be a lack of review of the fire management itself," Lewis wrote, adding later, "I also find it hard to believe that the NPS did not consult with anyone from San Bernardino County or from the private sector while completing this report."

Walker took the issue of defending homes in the preserve to another level.
"The lightning strikes did not burn us out," said Walker, who had planned to retire to the property. "The restrictions out on the firefighters by the National Park Service burned us out."

Schramm vehemently disputed the contention that some other property owners share with Walker.

"It's coming out of their emotions, and some of those feelings are about the past superintendent, but it's just nonsense," Schramm said.

He added that he was unsure how much the property owners' issues were related to his predecessor, Mary Martin. Some of them had called Martin's actions too liberal toward protecting the environment ahead of man-made property.

"Over time, they developed some problems with the way she managed things," Schramm said.

He added that while he has a different background than Martin, even mentioning that he grew up a hunter, "Mary and I had to follow the same laws and regulations."

Schramm also addressed one other concern mentioned by Lewis and Postmus. During the wildfire, officers relied upon a fire management plan that had not yet been approved.

Technically, Schramm said, the plan was not yet valid at the time of the blaze.

But the plan proved a valuable tool that helped augment the management skills of the officers, he said.

"It was a draft plan," he said. "But it had some of the best information out there."
Still, the county also had complaints about the plan because its firefighters were not consulted. Since then, the county has been able to have its viewpoints considered.

Bush signs bill transferring Mount Soledad cross to federal control

By Dana Wilkie
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

White House photo
President Bush prepares to sign the bill transferring the Mount Soledad cross to federal control Monday. Behind Bush were, from left, Bill Kellogg; Phil Thalheimer; San Diego Congressmen Brian Bilbray, Darrell Issa and Duncan Hunter; and Chuck LiMandri.

WASHINGTON – President Bush on Monday signed into law a plan to transfer San Diego's Mount Soledad cross to federal control in an effort to avoid its court-ordered removal.

In an Oval office ceremony, the Republican president signed a bill by three San Diego-area congressmen that immediately transfers the memorial land to the U.S. Defense Department in an effort to avoid a court-ordered removal of the cross that has towered over La Jolla on-and-off for nearly a century.

He was flanked by cross supporters from San Diego and the bill's chief architect, GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter of El Cajon.

“The president was pleased to sign this important piece of legislation into law,” said spokesman Peter Watkins:

“Today is a great day for America's veterans and the San Diego community,” said Hunter, whose bill passed the House last month with a 349-74 vote and passed the Senate unanimously two weeks later.

“The president's endorsement of this legislation validates years of tireless work and sends a clear message that America appreciates and respects its military men and women.”

James McElroy, the attorney for an atheist who first sued to remove the cross 17 years ago, said he petitioned the federal district court in San Diego last Thursday to void Congress' transfer.

“It's unfortunate that this is what our politicians do instead of respecting our constitution and the fact that we've had 17 years of decisions that have all come out the same way,” said McElroy, whose client won a ruling from a federal judge to remove the 29-foot cross by Aug. 1, an order the U.S. Supreme Court has put on hold.

The bill's final approval may mark a new era in the long-running parochial battle over the cross. Not only will the cross' future likely rest on interpretations of the federal Constitution instead of California's, it could become a national cause for supporters and opponents of religious symbols on public property.

“The president and Congress have no business intervening in this way in an ongoing legal proceeding,” said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Today's action is an unwarranted, heavy-handed maneuver that undercuts the separation of church and state and the integrity of the judicial system.”

About 35 people were milling around the cross and memorial as the legislation was being signed.

Sue Bourne, 53, a Catholic school teacher's aide from San Diego was visiting the cross with her mother Betty. She said it was wonderful that the president had signed the bill and that she was tired of the ongoing fight.

“We vote for things to become law and then we have people that fight it,” she said. “If they don't want to look at the cross then don't come up here.”

She said she hopes the legislation would put an end to the fighting.

“How can they go against the president?” she said, shaking her head.

Kurt Olney, 57, a landscape contractor from La Jolla, came to the cross to take some pictures. His father, a World War II veteran, is on one of the plaques on the memorial and he is a Vietnam veteran himself. He said he thinks now that the tide has turned on the fight to keep the cross and that the memorial wouldn't be the same without it.

“What are they going to do, take the crosses off Arlington?” he asked

Catherine Williams, 54, a housewife from San Diego, said she came to the cross Monday specifically to be there when the president signed the law.

“I never knew how much the cross meant to me until the fight came and we almost lost it,” she said. “I'm proud to be in a city that puts up such a hard fight to keep it. And I'll be one of them.”

The first Soledad cross was built in 1913 and was featured in Easter sunrise services. The one built there in 1954 and dedicated as a veterans' memorial replaced another that had fallen in a windstorm.

Those fighting to remove the cross say it's a Christian religious symbol and should not sit on city land atop a prominent hill. They note that even historical maps refer to the monument as the “Mount Soledad Easter Cross.”

Bush clearly sided with those who believe the cross is part of a long-standing and culturally significant tribute to the war dead honored at the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial, and that it does not amount to a government preference for one religion over others.

Hunter's legislation aims to preserve the cross by vesting title to the memorial in the federal government and having it administered by the Secretary of Defense. The Department of Defense would manage the monument and the Mount Soledad Memorial Association would maintain it.

“As a native of San Diego for some 51 years now, I share the happiness of so many other people in the city that we're that much closer to being able to permanently preserve this great icon,” said Charles LiMandri, an attorney advising a group of cross supporters.

LiMandri was among those who attended the signing ceremony at the White House. Also there were Phil Thalheimer, chairman of the private group San Diegans for the Mount Soledad National War Memorial and William Kellogg, president of the Mount Soledad Memorial Association.

Mayor Jerry Sanders, who has fought to keep the cross atop 800-foot high Mount Soledad, could not make the ceremony, a spokesman said. He was planning to speak at the cross Monday afternoon.

“Today's action allows our Federal government to take the lead in preserving the integrity of the memorial against all those that would alter this key part of San Diego's history,” Sanders said in an early version of the remarks he planned to deliver at the cross.

“I believe the President has substantially improved the chances that the desires of a vast majority of San Diego voters – all those that voted to preserve the integrity of the memorial – will finally be fulfilled.”

Charlie Berwanger, attorney for the Mount Soledad Memorial Association, said the memorial's land would be transferred to the Defense Department immediately upon Bush's signature.

But he said federal attorneys must still file a notice of condemnation proceedings in federal court in San Diego. He said it remains unresolved what amount of compensation the federal government will offer the city and the association for the land.

“If we strike a deal with the (Defense Department) that we can manage and operate the property and do fundraising up there and have events, my client may not be too terribly concerned about compensation,” Berwanger said.

Many believe that with the cross in federal hands, the U.S. Constitution, not California's, will now become the yardstick by which its constitutionality is measured.

Cross supporters say the courts have been more willing to allow religious symbols on public land on federal constitutional grounds, particularly if the symbol has historic or cultural significance. Cross foes note that a pair of 5-4 rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in separate cases involving the Ten Commandments established fuzzy guidelines.

The court found that a display inside a Kentucky courthouse was unconstitutional, but that a six-foot granite monument outside the Texas Capitol was legal.

Senate votes to put Mount Soledad cross in federal hands

By Dana Wilkie
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON – With a speed and decisiveness that surprised some, the Senate on Tuesday approved a plan to transfer the land beneath the Mount Soledad war memorial to federal control in an effort to avoid a court-ordered removal of the cross that stands there.

The Senate's unanimous vote sent the cross-transfer plan to President Bush for his expected signature. It creates what some consider an entirely new dynamic in the 17-year effort to save the cross, but which others say is a hopeless attempt to preserve a symbol on city land that courts have said unconstitutionally favors one religion over others.

“Obviously we're delighted,” said Charles LiMandri, an attorney advising a group of Soledad cross supporters. “I think even the more liberal side of the Democratic party has to recognize that there is widespread, grassroots support for preserving veterans memorials in general, and the Soledad cross in particular.”

James McElroy, the attorney representing atheist Philip Paulson – who first sued to remove the cross on the grounds it amounts to an unconstitutional preference of the Christian religion over others – said the bill is “still unconstitutional.”

“I guess the Senate has a short memory,” he said. “You've got a local issue here. What business does the federal government have getting involved?”

The legislation would preserve the 29-foot-tall cross on Mount Soledad by vesting title to the memorial in the federal government and having the Secretary of Defense administer it. The Department of Defense would manage the monument. The Mount Soledad Memorial Association, a private group that built the current cross in 1954 to honor Korean War veterans, would continue to maintain the site.

“Today's vote represents a significant step forward,” said El Cajon Rep. Duncan Hunter, the Republican who joined his two GOP colleagues from San Diego to write the cross-transfer legislation, which passed the House late last month. “The action taken by both the House and Senate reaffirm the overwhelming desire of the San Diego community to keep the memorial exactly where it has proudly stood for over 50 years.”

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, who has fought to keep the cross atop 800-foot-high Mount Soledad, said through spokesman Fred Sainz that he was grateful for “the resonance” with which the Senate spoke on the issue.

“I think that the Senate was able to put political correctness aside for a moment and understand this truly is a war memorial,” Sainz said. “The fact there that a cross is part of it is an issue that senators of all religious faiths were able to come to terms with and accept.”

In July the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked a lower court order forcing the city to remove the cross by yesterday (Aug.1) on grounds it violated the state constitution's ban on government support of religion.

The deadline was set by U.S. District Court Judge Gordon Thompson Jr., who first ordered the cross removed in 1991. It would have imposed a $5,000-a-day fine for failing to comply.

Senate approval came less than two weeks after the House voted 349-74 on July 19 to seize the land and give it to the Defense Department. After some brief wrangling among senators over who would carry the Hunter legislation through the upper chamber, the bill was placed on a so-called “consent calendar,” which indicated it had little opposition. “It's a hot potato, and I suspect the Senate would just as soon pass it and get it to the president and let the courts deal with it,” said Charlie Berwanger, attorney for the Mount Soledad Memorial Association, which has fought to keep the cross where it is.

McElroy said he didn't expect California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats, to embrace the measure as they did.

“I didn't expect them to go with this fad,” McElroy said. “But this has become good fodder for politicians in an election year.”

Feinstein and Boxer tend to be staunch church-state separation advocates. But both also support a plan to spend federal money to preserve California missions that hold church services because, the senators argue, the missions have historical significance.

“The Mount Soledad cross has been a great source of hope and inspiration for decades, and it has important historical significance to veterans and San Diegans alike,” Feinstein said.

Boxer said, “I believe this monument to be a memorial to our veterans, and therefore should be allowed to stay. The Hunter bill was drafted in a way that is consistent with the latest court action.”

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also supported the Senate action, saying that “allowing this landmark to be destroyed would send the wrong message to our nation's veterans.” Should the Mount Soledad cross end up in federal hands, its future likely will rest on interpretations of the federal Constitution, not California's. Cross supporters say the courts have been more willing to allow religious symbols on public land on federal constitutional grounds, particularly if the symbol has historic or cultural significance.

Last year, a pair of 5-4 rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in separate cases involving the Ten Commandments established fuzzy guidelines: The court found that a display inside a Kentucky courthouse was unconstitutional, but that a 6-foot granite monument outside the Texas Capitol was all right.

“The time may be ripe for the court to revisit the issue,” said LiMandri. “They'll take this case because the law needs clarity.”

Cross foes note that the courts have ordered the removal of other crosses based on federal constitutional grounds. Five years ago, the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued to remove a 5-foot-tall cross of metal tubing in the Mojave National Preserve, although the removal is on appeal.

“I don't think the Supreme Court is going to rewrite the Constitution or the last 50 years of precedent,” McElroy said. “This is not like the Ten Commandments cases. The Latin cross is a powerful symbol of religion.”

For now, congressional action does not interfere with various lawsuits being pursued in state and federal courts.

In state court, cross supporters are appealing a decision by a Superior Court judge that invalidated Proposition A, a measure approved last fall by 76 percent of San Diego voters that would have donated the cross to the federal government, but which the judge said violated the state Constitution.

In federal court, the city is appealing Thompson's order to remove the cross or be fined. That case is to be heard in October.

Experts sow seeds of hope for regrowth

Sawtooth Complex Wildfire Recovery

By Mark Wheeler
Hi-Desert Star


PIONEERTOWN - “Don't give up on the plants.”

This was an oft-repeated and important message delivered Wednesday night at a fire recovery workshop staged in Pioneertown by the SummerTree Institute and Unique Garden Center, with the California Chaparral Field Institute.

Representatives from these three groups stood before approximately 175 to 200 victims of the Sawtooth fire who essentially had one burning question.

“Is all the natural beauty we once had here gone forever?”

Three experts on desert plants and plant ecology answered this question with an only slightly qualified “no.”

The pines and junipers which gave the Sawtooth and Pipes Canyon areas much of their botanical character, the speakers were sorry to say, would not regenerate to their prefire status in any near- or even mid-term future.

Many of the other icon species though, they were happier to report, would make reasonably good progress toward restoration; that is, if their prospects weren't interfered with by poor land management activities in the meantime or competition from invasive species.

Native desert plants are strongest underground, listeners were assured. What this means, they were informed, is that many of the plants here will regenerate from the roots.

Of course, this maxim will apply variably throughout the plant diversity in the area, and some species will demonstrate greater vigor than others in their recovery efforts. However, the primary message from the experts was to give nature a chance.

It's been taking care of itself for a long time, quite nicely enough without our help, they observed.

Not that neighbors can't take some action to help facilitate restoration, and most of the meeting's content was a steady stream of practical suggestions for everything from local sources for seedlings and transplants to growing tips to landscape design against future fire threat.

Central to all the individual suggestions was a single concept all the speakers elaborated on at length and urged with the greatest emphasis. Preserving the integrity of the soil crust, they insisted, would not only be vital to promoting restoration of the beloved native landscape, but would also be the first line of defense against exposing homes and properties to future fire threat.

Specifically, listeners were warned not to scrape, blade, drag or in any way break the soil crust, not even in their sensible efforts to disperse or dig-in the ash and soot on their properties.

They were advised to thin the residue with a leaf rake, and each speaker took pains to explain that the advisory against disturbing the soil crust was based on the vital need to discourage rampant invasion of non-native grasses.

These are powerful rivals of native plants for water, sun and space. In many places in the West, they are displacing natives and weakening ecological diversity.

Moreover, the spreading and dense nature of their growth patterns establishes a fuel highway over the landscape that carries fire easily and quickly from place to place, and their habitat of choice is disturbed soil.

Overheard in the audience were comments on the workshop that expressed everything from awe at how integrated the desert ecology is to vows that, “I'll certainly pay more attention to my landscaping in the future.”

For the most part, people were grateful for the hope they heard in the professional testimony. They were given good reason to believe the Hi-Desert around them would once again flourish with beauty and that they could, in all reality, expect to see it.

In their different ways, the three speakers did, indeed, apply their expertise to the germination of hope. This was the starting place SummerTree's Robin Kobaly said in her opening remarks was the purpose of the workshop.

Continuing with her own part of the presentation, she gave the audience solid botanical reasons to expect that many of the native plants would, in fact, regenerate.

Nursery owner Mike Branning advised listeners how best not to interfere with nature's recovery processes on their property and how to cultivate natives and arid land plants they could obtain from nurseries.

For his part, fire ecologist Richard Halsey explained how landscapes are quite capable of recovering from fire's effects and that we can apply ourselves most appropriately to restoration by not making land-use errors which only increases wildfire fuel loads.

“This is an opportunity,” Halsey encouraged. He and the others defined that opportunity throughout the evening as one for learning from nature's own processes.

Nature will heal itself, the speakers urged, and the abundant instruction in their presentation that evening was to inform people how they might best participate in that process and also, somewhat, help nurture beauty, finally, from their own grief.

Visitor Days: New Math for USFS and NPS

Posted by Property Rights Foundation of America, Inc.

The San Bernardino National Forest was recently caught using a highway counter strip at Big Bear Dam in Big Bear Lake, California to count all vehicles entering and leaving this community of 16,000 people. This was used to “document” the Visitor Days for this portion of the national forest; however, every day many of the local folks are commuting to and from their jobs in the Inland Empire.

These are residents and definitely NOT visitors to the national forest.

The American Land Rights Association (www.landrights.org) revealed the National Park Service was doing the same thing to commuters living in Virginia on the George Washington Parkway in Washington D.C.

Recently, I have been told by a reliable source that the National Park Service staffer in charge of documenting Visitor Days to the 249,000-acre Channel Islands National Park (a U.N. biosphere reserve off the coast of Southern California) has been counting passengers and crew on commercial airplanes and cruise liners that pass within eyesight of the islands. This NPS employee allegedly even calls the cruise line and airline offices to get the exact number of passengers and crew on board. They then become “Visitor Day” visitors to the National Park.

This national park is very difficult to visit, and is very desperate to justify its existence.