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Desert Treasures of the East Mojave
STORY By A.D. Hopkins * PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK ANDREWS
You can still see the ruins of Fort Piute, walls of crudely dressed volcanic stone on a slight rise, overlooking the Mojave Road and beyond it, the only creek that runs all year round in this part of the Mojave Desert. The U.S. Army built this fort in the 1860s so no enemy, under the watchful eyes of infantry riflemen, could deny the life-saving water to travelers or their livestock. I paced off the dimensions of the fort and found it amazingly small; the biggest room measured only about 15 feet square.
Perhaps the builders realized the desert would one day reclaim fort, road, and landscape. For, with some help from environmentalist legislators and the National Park Service, it effectively has done so. The Mojave Road to Fort Piute is suitable only for high-clearance vehicles, and a few feet farther up Piute Creek, a lush growth of cottonwood trees and tules block the way entirely.
The fort and its surroundings are treasures marking the eastern end of the Mojave National Preserve, a 1.6-million-acre region that sprawls from California's eastern state line 50 miles to Baker, California, and from Interstate 15 south some 40 miles to Interstate 40. One of the United States' largest parklands, it is also one of the newest, created in 1994 when the California Desert Protection Act transferred jurisdiction from the federal Bureau of Land Management to the National Park Service. The park service estimates 412,000 people pass through in a year. In a place as big as some states, each has plenty of elbowroom. ...
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The March/April 2003 Issue is out. Find it at Las Vegas bookstores today.
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