This morning the road took me into the Mohave National Preserve over the Cima granite dome, through the worlds largest forest of Joshua trees, to the restored 1920,s Railroad Depot at Kelso, the Kelso 600 foot sand dunes, through lava fields and old volcanoes to Baker, California.
The Preserve encompasses 1.6 million acres of weird and ever-changing desert terrain. It is a land of endless open-space, of quiet and solitude, of mountain ranges to 11,000 feet and dry lake beds to 282 feet below sea level and rivers that vanish. It is a land of rocks-sedimentary, conglomerate, volcanic-all mixed up of great diversity and colors of pink, green, yellow, brown, black and white over a time-line going back a billion years. Also a land of gold, silver, copper, borax with mining operations now abandoned. It is a land of fortunes made and lost.
Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley National Park was our home for 3 days. The Ranch once served the nearby borax mine that made famous the 20 mule team slogan still popular today. The borax mine only operated from 1884 to 1888.
Perhaps one of the strangest thing in this National Park of strange and natural wonders is the man made Scottys Castle. In an oasis fueled by an incredible artesian water supply at the bottom of the narrow grapevine canyon of volcanic rock and mud flows, Chicago millionaire Albert Johnson funded the building of a Spainish Villa from the inspiration of friend Walter Scott, a grub stake gold prospector with a genius for media attention.
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