Mojave Desert

I'm all for the separation of church and state. I believe that government endorsement of any particular religious sect or tradition has a corrosive effect on both the state and the faith in question. But I also think the attempt to separate religion from government is veering toward a foolish, parochial and ultimately impossible quest to separate religion from culture. Last week, the ACLU of Southern California's Peter Eliasberg argued the case of Salazar vs. Buono before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Re "Firm wants to tap liquid gold in the Mojave Desert," May 16 The Cadiz Inc.project will drain an aquifer in the eastern Mojave Desert and pipe it to the lawns of Orange County, reaping billions for the company. Conspicuously absent from the debate is the government of San Bernardino County, which was required to produce an environmental review but punted it to a water district nearly 200 miles away. Now it has moved to exempt the Cadiz project from the local groundwater law, signing away its enforcement authority for the laughably weak provisions of the exemption agreement, which, among other things, waits an entire decade before even calculating harm to the aquifer.

For those who bring a ghoulish curiosity to their scrutiny of Southern California's environmental decay, I offer the case of the raven. The evolution of the raven to Frankenstein status may not be a major milepost of our decline, but it's a sign of something. You might put the raven in the same league with the solemya clam. Connoisseurs of this sort of thing will recall that the solemya clam was discovered thriving in the sewage sludge at the bottom of Santa Monica Bay.

CADIZ, Calif. - Three decades ago a group of businessmen pored over NASA satellite imagery as part of a worldwide hunt for large groundwater reserves they could tap to grow desert crops. They found the signs they were looking for here in the sun-blasted mountain ranges and creosote-freckled valleys of the Mojave Desert, 200 miles east of Los Angeles. The group, which founded Cadiz Inc., bought old railroad land, drilled wells and planted neat grids of citrus trees and grapevines, irrigating them with water that bubbled out of the desert depths at the rate of 2,000 gallons a minute.

Looking every inch a governor, the thickset Iraqi, in a pinstripe jacket, sits behind an imposing desk and glares at his American guest. When he drove to work that morning, Bassam Kalasho informed the newly arrived Army colonel, he found the road full of American checkpoints and his office surrounded by American soldiers. "It looks like you took over," he said, his voice growing louder with every word. Sometimes he gets so worked up, he said later, he forgets that his "office" is on an Army base in California and that he is only pretending to be an Iraqi provincial governor.

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

A little over 100 years ago Charles F. Lummis walked across the Mojave Desert, on his way to Los Angeles, a job with The Times, and a career of speaking out, often for "the little guy." Much of that desert is the same today as when Lummis saw it. Now a controversial plan to "preserve" the desert, by turning the current "East Mojave National Scenic Area" into a national park (Sen. Alan Cranston's SB 7), is being supported by the powerful urban media ("Protection for the Desert," editorial, April 4)

An earthquake measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale shook the Mojave Desert 80 miles east of Bakersfield early today. The quake was recorded at 4:41 a.m. with an epicenter 29 miles northwest of Ridgecrest in the desert. There were no immediate reports of damage in the sparsely populated area.

In an urgent move to protect the endangered desert tortoise, federal officials have imposed a quarantine on 59 square miles of the Mojave Desert, ordering the terrain off-limits to hikers, recreational vehicles and grazing sheep. "We're losing about 50% of the adult tortoises a year out there right now," said Lee Delaney, head of the federal Bureau of Land Management's area office in Ridgecrest. "If that continues, it would be a few short years before we don't have a tortoise population."

A dying man's request is nothing Henry and Wanda Sandoz take lightly. So when the sick and elderly Riley Bembry asked the couple nearly 30 years ago to maintain a memorial and a cross atop a lonely outcropping in the middle of the Mojave Desert long after he was gone, they had to say yes. The Sandozes never anticipated that their stewardship would take them one day to the Supreme Court, nor did they anticipate ever seeing a cross — Bembry's legacy,...

The Feb. 27 letter from the chairman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes was pleading and tough. It asked President Obama to slow the federal government's "frantic pursuit" of massive solar energy projects in the Mojave Desert because of possible damage to Native American cultural resources. The Obama administration didn't respond. But four days after Chairman Eldred Enas sent the letter, the Indians say they found an answer, delivered by spirits of the desert. Howling winds uncovered a human tooth and a handful of burned bone fragments the size of quarters on a sand dune in the shadow of new solar power transmission towers.

The first documented outbreak of canine distemper in desert kit foxes has spread beyond its origins at a construction site west of Blythe and could take a heavy toll on the species, state wildlife biologists said Tuesday. Biologists have nearly given up hope of containing the deadly virus. It was first diagnosed in October during construction at the $1-billion Genesis Solar Energy Project site, about 25 miles west of Blythe. Eight of the cat-sized foxes died there. Since then, distemper has been detected in living kit foxes and two dead ones up to 11 miles south of Genesis, said Deana Clifford, wildlife veterinarian for the California Department of Fish and Game.

If you go Randsburg is in the heart of the Mojave Desert, about a 2½-hour drive from Los Angeles. From L.A., take Interstate 5 north to California Highway 14 north to Mojave. About 20 miles north of Mojave is a sign for the turn to Randsburg and Johannesburg off Highway 14. Randsburg also can be reached by way of Interstate 15 and Highway 395. The best time to visit is on the weekend, when most businesses are open. White House Saloon, 168 Butte Ave., Randsburg; (760)

I half-expected to hear someone shout, "There's gold in them thar hills," as I rolled into Randsburg, Calif., which sits just off Highway 395 in the Mojave Desert south of Ridgecrest. The discovery of that precious metal gave birth to the town in 1896 when John Singleton, F. M. Mooers and Charlie Burcham filed a claim they called "The Rand. " Within a few months, a saloon, barber shop, general store and even an opera house had sprung up to form what was known as Rand Camp. By 1897 it was called Randsburg, a boomtown of almost 4,000 people.

Reporting from Providence Mountains State Recreation Area, Calif. -- California parks officials closed a gem of the state park system last spring, sadly shuttering Mitchell Caverns, a natural wonder that for eight decades had drawn visitors to this remote spot in the Mojave Desert. Workers hauled away the precious Native American artifacts and historical documents and locked the gates, assuming the area would sit undisturbed until the state could afford to reopen it. But several times in the last four months, vandals traveled 16 desolate miles north from Interstate 40 to plunder and damage the park's isolated structures.

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

To see the forest for the trees, drive north from Victorville on old Route 66 into the desert, past the cement factory where Elmer Long toiled for decades, to a grove of metal and glass that is more than the sum of its parts. Long's Bottle Tree Ranch is a folk art forest — two-plus acres crowded with hundreds of metal sculptures adorned with colored bottles and topped with just about anything one could imagine. A saxophone, caribou antlers and windmills. Half a surfboard, a rusted tricycle and furniture.