Can the Mojave Survive?

In this scorched outback of wiry creosote and alkaline lake beds, the tracks of Gen. George S. Patton’s army are still imprinted in the sand half a century after the tanks left.

On the south side of Sheep Hole Pass, hundreds of empty shacks sag and creak in the wind, ghostly reminders of the Mojave’s eternal ability to dash the dreams it inspires.

Yet, planeloads of prospective investors, politicians, hydrologists and crop specialists fly in regularly to a dusty airstrip and gaze over this parched basin as if it were the promised land.

The object of their desire is a vast store of underground water big enough, some experts say, to nourish a new era of desert agriculture and manufacturing. One of the largest growers in the state hopes to transform the barren Cadiz Valley into a fertile green expanse of lemon trees and row crops. Already, 1,600 acres are in cultivation.

After more than 100 years of exploration and exploitation, the Mojave Desert remains a tantalizing emptiness, a final frontier almost the size of Switzerland where dreams of wealth and opportunity are again spurring a land rush, enticing investors from Wall Street to Taiwan.

The Mojave has long been a graveyard for high hopes. But the latest drive to colonize the High Desert is not deterred by past folly or by the warnings of naturalists who say that after so much disturbance the Mojave is losing its identity as a living desert.

The fate of native plants, declining animal populations and fragile fossil beds all hang in the balance, scientists and government officials say, as the most populous state draws a bead on its last great cache of vacant real estate.

The military, the state, expanding communities, pipeline companies and a new generation of landfills--for low-level nuclear waste, hazardous chemicals and trash from the Los Angeles Basin--all are part of the action, drawn by the prospect of cheap land and a friendly political climate.

From a car window, the Mojave doesn’t look that different than it did 50 years ago--an unprepossessing province of abandoned mining camps, isolated ranches, auto graveyards and weather-beaten small towns that peter out into trailer courts, dying palm trees and boarded-up motels.

But there are tangible signs of a metamorphosis.

Booming outlet malls along Interstate 15, a new industrial park outside the town of Mojave and plans for an upscale residential development on the Colorado River in Needles are evidence of a changing desert.

Outside Barstow, three groups of Asian investors are negotiating to buy 13,000 acres fronting I-15, promoting it as the site for a new town of 100,000 people.

“They talk about calling it ‘Pandatown,’ ” said a Barstow city planner, “because they think Americans are so taken with the animals they’d want to live in a place named after them.”

Some of the cheapest land in the state lies along the highways that crisscross the Mojave. As the economy continues to expand, more and more people lured by inexpensive land and open space are expected to make the desert their home.

According to the Southern California Council of Governments, the two fastest-growing desert corridors will nearly triple in size in 25 years. In the Victor Valley south of Barstow, today’s 230,000 residents could soar to nearly 670,000. And in the Antelope Valley, the population is expected to go from about 300,000 to more than 700,000.

The most dramatic changes in the desert are those that materialize out of nowhere, like the emerald oasis of citrus groves, grapevines and melon patches at the base of the Marble Mountains in the Cadiz Valley.

The Cadiz Land Co. says there is enough underground water to transform 10,000 acres surrounding this onetime railroad stop south of old Route 66. Around the fields would be a planned community and, more important, the offices of a water marketing business.

Looking ahead to a time when desert water could have the value of gold, Cadiz’s pitch to investors is that the aquifer can provide for 180,000 people annually. What isn’t used here would be sold to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and transported via a pipeline that Cadiz proposes to connect to the California Aqueduct 30 miles away.

“We’re at the bottom of a gradient here that catches the drainage from 1,300 square miles, an area the size of Rhode Island,” said Mark Liggett, a hydro-geologist and one of Cadiz’s founding partners. “There’s no way we’re going to exhaust that water supply.”

So far, the plans sound plausible enough to win the backing of prestigious banks and mutual funds, including Morgan Stanley, and Fidelity Investment Co. Cadiz officials say they have acquired 50 square miles surrounding the aquifer.

But Cadiz isn’t the only well-financed water prospector in the center of the Mojave.

The Catellus Development Corp., the largest private owner of desert real estate in California with 800,000 acres, has its own vision of a desert empire--built on the same source of underground water.

Catellus says there is enough water to generate “tens of millions of dollars per year” in agriculture and manufacturing and at least 1,000 new jobs.

Cadiz and Catellus insist that there is enough water to fulfill both their ambitions. But they could end up in competition. The aquifer collects runoff under the Fenner Valley where Catellus has major land holdings, and drains into a basin beneath the Cadiz Valley.

Who controls the water has yet to be clarified, but the bigger unanswered question is whether there is enough runoff--in a desert that averages five inches of rainfall a year--to replenish the aquifer. If the water table is lowered too far, the cost of pumping the water can become prohibitive. More important, plants that help keep the surrounding desert sands intact will die.

This has happened elsewhere. Near the Mojave River in the Victor Valley, growing communities that drained their wells now import state water. In the Antelope Valley, fallow fields, dead Joshua trees, tumbleweed and dust storms are the legacy of over-optimistic water projections.

The Metropolitan Water District, the Mojave Water Agency and some San Bernardino County officials have yet to be convinced that there is enough water here.

“It’s a bit of gamble,” said San Bernardino County planning manager Randy Scott.

But people love to bet on longshots in the desert, from uranium booms to flying saucer landings.

The Changing Desert

The Mojave stretches from Death Valley National Park almost to Palm Springs, and from Palmdale and Lancaster east to Nevada. It’s a high desert of dry lakes, sloping bajadas, sand dunes, lava flows, cinder cones and empty basins divided by low, snaggletoothed mountains.

Explorers cursed its terrain and unforgiving weather--infernos and snow in the same year. It gets less moisture than the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, and it is more sparsely vegetated. Patton’s soldiers called it “the place that God forgot.”

Yet, the Mojave is special among the Earth’s deserts. It reaches from below sea level to 11,000-foot Telescope Peak, and is home to 2,600 types of plants, birds, reptiles and mammals.

More than 100 species are considered to be in varying degrees of peril, with the desert tortoise and some others in precipitous decline. Some scientists fear that the desert itself is becoming an unhealthy place for species that had thrived in it for centuries.

“Every year, you see more signs of change out here,” said Matt Brooks, a botanist at UC Riverside. The spring colors are a little less vivid. The world of cactuses, flowering shrubs, yuccas, ocotillos and Joshua trees is shrinking.

“In many parts of the desert, we are witnessing a ‘type conversion’ to a nonnative landscape,” Brooks said. “The desert is beginning to look like a grassland.”

While researchers aren’t yet certain of all its effects, many believe that the nonnative growth provides less nutrition and shelter for wildlife while posing a new hazard.

The old desert didn’t burn much. The new one does.

“Twenty years ago, we had no real fire problem out there,” said Dick Franklin, the Bureau of Land Management’s top fire official in the Mojave.

But in the wake of man-made disturbances to the fragile topsoil, a carpet of highly flammable grasses is replacing the old mosaic of shrubs. With that change has come “a horrendous increase in fires in some places,” Franklin said, estimating that more than a quarter of a million acres have burned in the past decade.

Livestock operations across 2 million acres may have done the most to kick up the soil and disturb native growth. But there are plenty of other contributors, including mining, new construction, military exercises and off-road vehicle recreation.

Government geologists estimate that one mile of underground pipeline construction typically kills about 60,000 plants. Oil and gas pipelines extend across 500 miles of desert, with more on the way.

Geologists refer to such denuded places as “wind fetches,” where giant dust plumes rise high enough to show up in satellite photographs. Alkaline dust swirling off the bed of Owens Lake, which was dried up to slake the thirst of a burgeoning Los Angeles, has traveled hundreds of miles.

Plant life isn’t the only casualty of man-made erosion.

Unique geological records are being erased in places such as Jawbone Canyon and Dove Springs in the western Mojave where off-road vehicles are allowed to run riot on federal land amid one of the richest fossil deposits in California.

Bordering Red Rock Canyon State Park north of the town of Mojave, Jawbone and Dove Springs are part of a 400,000-acre network of “free-play” zones. There are thousands more miles of dirt roads and trails open to dirt bikes and sport utility vehicles, but only the free-play areas allow them to tear up canyons and hillsides at will.

Jawbone and Dove Springs contain some of the largest bone fragments of animals, including ancient elephants and bear-size dogs, that migrated from Asia millions of years ago.

“There is virtually nowhere else in California where we can get such a good picture of the migration between Asia and North America,” said David Whistler, curator of paleontology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

He and other experts estimate that about 20% of the fossil beds have been destroyed. Yet he has come to terms with the off-roaders.

“I stay out of their way, and, most of the time, they stay out of mine. It’s good that people have a place in the desert to come and enjoy themselves. I just wish it weren’t here.”

Frontier Opportunism

Part playground and part proving ground, the Mojave has always been a place where you could try out a dirt bike or a homemade rocket without disturbing the neighbors.

“You could cut loose or get lost or do something you might not do anywhere else without worrying a whole lot about the consequences,” said Henri Bisson, who supervises the Bureau of Land Management’s Mojave operations.

Chuck Yeager, the famous Air Force test pilot, broke the sound barrier over the Mojave in 1947. Space shuttles land at Edwards Air Force Base, and experimental aircraft from the X-15 to the stealth bomber have maneuvered in the sky here.

The Mojave’s long, straight roads are popular as makeshift landing strips for small planes delivering drugs or servicing remote methamphetamine labs. During the 1980s, San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies turned up nearly 100 bodies, all murder victims, according to David Darlington’s recent book “The Mojave.”

A training ground for numerous paramilitary groups, Darlington writes: “The rough consensus among cops and [park] rangers is that four of every five people in the desert are armed.”

Recently, desert wilderness areas have been magnets for raves--huge unlicensed gatherings promoted over the Internet, where music and drugs under a desert moon can create a party mood that occasionally lasts for days, according to the BLM.

“You see people with guns. You worry about gangs. But even if nobody gets hurt or ODs, they trash natural places where we shouldn’t have crowds of people,” Bisson said.

With many of its canyons littered with spent shells, and its hills posted with crude signs staking out seat-of-the-pants mining operations, the Mojave retains an air of frontier opportunism.

And why not? For those willing to take chances, desert enterprise has been known to pay spectacular dividends.

By 1970, mining in the California desert constituted a billion-dollar business. At various times, the region has met most of the world’s demand for boron compounds and rare earth minerals used in industrial processes, as well as most of the nation’s sand and gravel.

One assessment by the federal government estimates that there is still a trillion dollars of untapped mineral wealth in the desert.

Part of the allure has been the relaxed, relatively rule-free environment in which to do business--whether it is dumping waste, staging war games or manufacturing hazardous chemicals.

A Palm Desert waste company proposes to build the world’s largest landfill on the site of an abandoned iron mine at Eagle Mountain, next to Joshua Tree National Park. The project, which would be visible from the park, is one of four proposed mega-dumps.

The state is pushing for a nuclear waste dump in Ward Valley, an uninhabited basin 20 miles west of Needles. San Bernardino County officials would like to locate a 2,000-acre landfill on a dry lake bed a few miles west of Cadiz. That dump would take 21,000 tons of trash every day by train from several Southern California counties. A toxic waste dump is also planned near Ludlow.

Just south of Death Valley National Park, the Army wants to expand its holdings to conduct bigger desert war games. Fort Irwin National Training Center is looking at annexing more than 200,000 acres surrounding the Silurian Valley--an area of dunes, dry lakes, tortoise habitat and popular Jeep trails. Fort Irwin is one of four huge Mojave military reservations that occupy millions of acres.

Meanwhile, officials in several communities are aggressively recruiting heavy industries eager to escape red tape.

In the town of Mojave, cement kilns, paint manufacturing, gold mining, tire recycling and an oil transfer station that moves tons of crude oil from pipelines to rail cars are among the newer enterprises.

“We pride ourselves in not having the kind of bureaucracy you might find in Long Beach,” said William Deaver, president of the Mojave Town Council. “We have been able to get at least one company . . . up and running in six months. They were amazed.”

Local environmental groups have a different take on Mojave’s booster mentality. They charge that industries emitting toxic chemicals and hazardous waste are routinely allowed in violation of environmental laws.

“We’re in the clutches of a no-holds-barred, growth-at-any-cost movement out here, and if something isn’t done about it, it’s going to turn the desert up here into a giant sacrifice area,” said Jane Williams, an environmental activist in nearby Rosamond.

Williams was part of a coalition of activists that sought for a decade to establish a national park here. The 1.4-million-acre East Mojave Reserve was created in 1994, but Congress made concessions to activities not typically seen in national parks.

The National Park Service, which oversees the preserve, must respect the rights of a handful of ranchers, 2,000 mining claims and landowners with more than 80,000 acres of holdings in the preserve.

In the western Mojave where the population is surging, the Bureau of Land Management has provoked the anger of several communities with a plan to exact “mitigation” fees, up to $1,500 per acre, for wildlife habitat lost to development.

“The BLM is a predatory agency that is exceptionally tough on the landowner,” said Rod Thompson, a real estate businessman and Chamber of Commerce official in tiny Helendale.

Even in places it controls, the BLM is being urged to relax certain regulations.

Afton Canyon is an example. A lush, winding corridor through the Cady Mountains, it is one of only a few places in the Mojave where water flows to the surface. The canyon is a traditional haunt of desert bighorn sheep.

But it also has been a magnet for cattle and people, especially off-road riders who are drawn to adjacent hills and side canyons by the scenery and the ornamental rocks.

With people came exotic vegetation. Here, the worst invader is the water-devouring tamarisk, which soaked up the surface moisture and formed an impenetrable thicket in the canyon.

Five years ago, the BLM launched an expensive cleanup. The agency persuaded ranchers to restrict their cattle, put much of the area out of bounds to off-roaders and spent $200,000 on a tamarisk eradication program. Two miles of canyon were restored, with seven to go.

Like the Mojave itself, Afton Canyon is a legacy of multiple use, the century-old laissez-faire philosophy that desert lands can and should accommodate a broad spectrum of uses.

It is a philosophy that dies hard.

“If you want people to respect the desert, you have to make it easy for them to come out here,” said Dana Bell, a representative of the American Motorcyclist Assn. chairwoman of the BLM’s desert advisory council.

“This is the America that people treasure,” Bell said, speaking at an outdoor council meeting in Afton Canyon recently. “This is the Old West. And the more you lock people out of it, the less they’re going to care about preserving it.”