Suburban Oasis : Antelope Valley: Lancaster moves ahead with plans to save Joshua tree site, buying five acres for a planned nature preserve.

A boom town still trying to find its way after a storm of development, Lancaster is attempting to save its most abundant Joshua tree site from illegal dumpers, off-road vehicle enthusiasts and the bulldozers of developers.

With the purchase last week of five new acres of land, the city is halfway toward reaching its goal of creating a 95-acre woodland preserve, a high desert oasis in the middle of expanding suburbia.

“As the (San Fernando) Valley encroaches on the desert, we’re looking more like a city,” said Lyle W. Norton, director of Parks, Recreation and Arts. “We just have to try to coexist as best we can.”

Development in the Antelope Valley during the 1980s destroyed an estimated 200,000 Joshua trees, one of the Mojave desert’s unique plants, inspiring land use reform in Lancaster and Palmdale. Where once the Lancaster desert was dotted with the contorted arms of these oddly beautiful yuccas, there is now a continuum of housing tracts and shopping centers.

At first glance, it would be easy to mistake the woodland site--an irregular, 45-acre lot just south of K-4 Street--for nothing more than another illegal desert dumping ground. Near magnificently thick stands of Joshua trees lie the dilapidated hulk of an abandoned swamp cooler and an assortment of shredded couches.

But the broken glass, mud-stiff rags and rusting cans that litter the ground belie the abundant flora and wildlife to be found here. This is the richest concentration of Joshua trees--some with hundreds of branches covering a rare series of sand dunes--in the city of Lancaster. Alongside the Joshua trees, California junipers shelter the warrens of desert cottontails and white-tailed antelope squirrels.

An enormous creosote bush, 10 feet high and 20 feet in diameter, has been estimated to be nearly 800 years old by biologists, said Norton.

Despite the fact that the woodlands are surrounded by homes and that the shouts of children playing at the nearby school are audible during the day, there is still a wide-open feel to the area.

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In many places, the rooftops of neighboring developments are obscured by vegetation. The view of the Tehachapi Mountains to the northwest and the San Gabriel foothills to the south lends the impression of isolation in a pristine desert setting.

“It’s so nice,” said Pilar Alcivar, parks director, anticipating the day when the site will be returned to its natural condition. “You don’t even feel like you’re in the city.”

But that feeling of oneness with nature lasts only as long as you don’t look to the ground, where reminders of humanity abound.

“One of the things we can’t control right now is garbage dumping,” said Norton, standing over a moldering roll of yellow-orange shag carpet. “It’s secluded, so people are doing things that aren’t very nice.”

Even a squatter who uses the woodlands as a temporary residence has complaints about the junk.

Cameron MacLauchlin, who grew up in nearby Quartz Hill, recently spent a freezing night in the woodlands site and wandered out of the brush to ask Norton whether the land he’d been sleeping on was public or private property. Once MacLauchlin determined he wasn’t going to be run off the land, he was vociferous in his attack.

“I’d like to put up a sign that says, ‘If you happen to be the person who put this garbage here, I am totally contemptuous of your lack of regard for the environment,”’ said the raggedy MacLauchlin, who sells some of the refuse he finds, including skis, golf bags and aluminum cans.

Operating with a $2.4-million budget--money from grants and voter-approved taxes for park improvements--Norton plans to buy 40 more acres, fence the woodlands in, and construct an information center and trail system for visitors. The city has already acquired 50 acres.

Installing a fence around the area is crucial, he said, pointing out that off-road vehicles and dumpers have easy access to the woodlands from K-8 street. Near the planned entrance to the park, someone has cut through a strip of steel fence with a blowtorch, a sign that some locals value their shortcuts more than Joshua trees.

Near a web of tire tracks along a pockmarked dirt path, three five-gallon drums of oil had recently been dumped on the ground near a hubcap, a child’s sandal and a crusty blanket. Berms delineated an informal motocross circuit.

Norton said he will probably need $500,000 more to complete the project, which will include cleaning out both trash and non-native plant species, like the Russian thistle, commonly called the tumbleweed and seen rolling through streets.

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Acquisition of land for the desert woodlands project has been complicated by the numerous land owners on the site. City planner Brian Ludicke said decades of rampant land speculation have created a crazy quilt of small subdivided lots, many owned by people who live out of state or in foreign countries.

The recently acquired five acres known as the “Pohle Property” is being purchased for $210,000, and the city has its eye on an adjacent five-acre lot on which to build a parking lot.

Before city officials settled on the current site, they came under fire in 1992 for acquiring parcels of land for another Joshua tree preserve site. At the time, they paid higher than market prices without first having the land appraised. Now, the fate of those controversial lots is uncertain.

“Some people want to sell that land, others want to preserve it,” said Norton.

And while the city slowly presses ahead in its effort to purchase and rehabilitate the prime desert woodlands, the community anticipates a place where the next generation can see how their hometown looked before it was covered with red-roofed housing tracts and stucco shopping malls.

Joan Kinnon, a fifth-grade teacher at Sunnydale Elementary School, looks forward to the transformation so she can take her students to the reserve for field trips.

“We try to get the kids to appreciate where they live,” said Kinnon. “Joshua trees are kind of ho hum to them because they see them all the time . . . but if you actually had some information there . . . I think it would be real educational.”