The Mystery of Creepy Dolls
Sometimes you find some mighty strange things in the desert. Dolls, for instance. Abandoned, ragged, caked with grime. The creepier, all the better…
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Bluff Lake Reserve: A Road Less Taken
Bluff Lake is a reservoir located just 3.8 miles from Big Bear Lake, California. Located at 7,600 feet, Bluff Lake Reserve has towering pines, a 20-acre lake and meadow, and majestic outcrops of quartz monzonite.
Once a stopover resort for pack burro trains and stages bringing tourists to Big Bear in the late 1800s, it is home to several species of rare plants and is a thriving animal habitat…
Slowjamastan: No Crocs Shall Pass
Where does one go when the heart suddenly decides it craves foreign adventure and uncharted lands? In our minds, we’ve always been seasoned globetrotters — the kind of people who sip tiny coffees in distant plazas and nod knowingly at train schedules we can’t read. In reality, we have never stepped foot outside the United…
My Achy Breaky Hart
During the Panic of 1907, a financial crash that began with a severe drop on the New York Stock Exchange, James Hart and the brothers Bert and Clark Hitt, discovered pockets of rich gold ore in rhyolite on a steep slope in the Castle Mountains, approximately 4 miles south of the 23-miles long Barnwell &…
How Bill Keys Was Freed by the Court of Last Resort
In the midst of the Roaring Twenties, a stout young man was an attorney by trade in Ventura, California. Although Erle Stanley Gardner immersed himself in juris prudence, he needed what millennials nowadays call a “side hustle” to make ends meet. Writing fiction suited the gent’s keen wit, colorful oration and flair for the dramatic,…
Amboy: Where the Past Melts the Present
Times have changed since my first trip through Amboy at about 90 miles an hour. It was 1970 and I was 16, traveling with friends to camp out at Hole in the Wall rustic site in the Providence Mountains…
Camp Rock Spring: Fortified Paradise
The Mojave Road. It still stirs the imagination like few other places in this amazing desert. Before the railroad came along in the years after the Civil War, the Mojave Road was the preferred, and often dangerous, route from all points east, to the Southern California coast. Rock Spring was an important stop along the trail. So much so that the U.S. Army designated it an official military post…
Cabot Yerxa: Miracle Man of Desert Hot Springs
It is a given that when researching information about a particular topic, one discovery often leads to another. Such is the case when we recently wrote about the T Cross K Ranch in Mission Creek Preserve, just down the road from Desert Hot Springs, California. Cabot Yerxa’s name kept popping up in old newspapers. An…
Weaver’s Needle: The Perils of Pauline
Rambling down old Highway 62, near the Coxcomb Mountains, tends to churns up images from the past. Not in a psychological or psychedelic way, of course. Just the history of this great land, and the people who came before us. About where this road is today was the route taken by a little known mountain…
Desert Christ Park: Home of the Unwanted Christ
The desert has often played an important role in religions, spiritual enlightenment and artists seeking the esoteric. A half-mile past the turnoff to Pioneertown Road in Yucca Valley, 40 larger-than-life biblical statues from the mid-century rise from the rocky sandscape to offer a peaceful place for contemplation and renewal. It all started when Reverend Eddie…