Carrizo Plain

Membership on an elite United Nations roster of worldwide scenic and cultural attractions might be fine for Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty, but San Luis Obispo County this week turned down that possibility for the Carrizo Plain National Monument, a remote 250,000-acre swath of grasslands at its eastern end.

THE EFFORT TO add 250,000 acres of desolate, virtually unknown California grassland to a U.N. list of "world heritage" sites has come to naught -- and thank goodness. The last thing California needs is to surrender precious real estate to the United Nations for blue-helmeted troop maneuvers or as the seat of some future world government. True, putting the Carrizo Plain National Monument on the UNESCO World Heritage List would have had no effect on U.S. sovereignty.

Two years after the suicide of the superintendent of Carrizo Plain National Monument, an inspector general's report has absolved officials in the federal Bureau of Land Management's Bakersfield office of any blame for her death. The heavily redacted report, obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, chides Marlene Braun's supervisor, Ron Huntsinger, for failing to adequately resolve personal and professional conflicts.

First she killed her dogs, shot them in the head with a .38-caliber revolver and covered the two bodies with a quilt. Then Marlene Braun leveled the blue steel muzzle three inches above her right ear and pulled the trigger. "I can't face what appears to be required to continue to live in my world," the meticulous 46-year-old wrote in May in a suicide note. "Most of all, I cannot leave Carrizo, a place where I finally found a home and a place I love dearly."

The Carrizo Plain isn't for everyone. Achingly bare, its landscape is without the charm bracelet of undulating hills and swooping oak trees that decorate Cuyama to the south and San Luis Obispo to the west. Yet seen from the air, the Carrizo Plain assumes a remarkable identity, as photographer Bill Dewey discovered 20 years ago while piloting his Cessna from Santa Barbara to Mariposa.

Nobody in California has seen it all. It is possible to live in California, as I have, for more than 40 years, to travel across California each week as a journalistic scavenger, to read about the place, think about it, form all sorts of opinions about it . . . and still go out one rainy day and be absolutely floored by it. Monday was one of those days. It occurred here, on what is called the Carrizo Plain.