Shooters and hunters (& old sofas) on BLM & National Forest public lands

The Department of the Interior has a tough job managing our lands because of the many different ways people want them to be used.

Are they a source of lumber?  Minerals?  Feed for cattle?  Hunting?  Off-road vehicles?  Shooting?  Hiking/camping/birding?  Preservation of animal species?  Vacationing?  

The answer of course is all of the above.

But today's lesson, dear student, is about the problems created by hunters and shooters.  

That problem can be summarized as these two groups of users are messy.  

Shooting is allowed on many public lands.  That's fine.  But for some reason shooters do not adhere to the pack it in pack it out philosophy that other users seem to respect.  They leave their shells and targets everywhere.  

These photos are from ONE SITE near where we camped recently.  It is not an outlier.  

Why do shooters think they can just leave their trash behind?  

Maybe there needs to be permits to shoot in public lands.  By getting the permits users have to agree to certain standards.  Money from the permits could also be used to pay civic groups to clean up messes.

Hunters are another problem.  As with shooters, we have no philosophical objection to the use of our public lands for this purpose.  However, from what we have been told, hunters start a lot of the forest fires.  Many also do not remove the carcasses as they are supposed to.

It seems the only answer to this problem is raise fees for hunting. Use the extra money to pay civic organizations to retrieve carcasses and clean up messes.  After hunters get the message, and do a better job of cleaning up after themselves, lower fees accordingly.

And, campfires should be considered a thing of the past, unless one is in an established campground. They are a lot of fun, and can make you feel like you are "really" camping, but the damage to our public areas from fires is astonishing.

Everybody's personal dump:

Now that I'm on a roll I might as well add one more group to this list--trashy people. Too many people just dump their junk in BLM lands.  We have seen huge piles of trash:

Even abandoned cars

But the biggest issue, oddly, is that people dump their old sofas.  Maybe they bring them out for a weekend party, throw up on them too many times, and just abandon them.  

But they are everywhere:

The only solution I can see is to end the dang sequester.  And then to hire more BLM officers to write more tickets.  The main source of income from our public lands is tourism.  Tourists are not intested in visiting town dumps.  They all have one at home if that's their thing.

Another possibility is to invest in more signs.  Signs work for some people.

And finally, how about taking a lead from the adopt a highway program.  Adopt-a-campsite.  Keep it clean and get a sign with your name on it.  Private citizens might like this, and businesses would like the basically free advertising.

There!  I can go have my glass of red wine now knowing how much better the world would be if I could just have my own way about many things,  

Keeping our clothes wefweshed

When we are two months in between showers and washing machines how do we keep our clothes (to quote Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles) "wefweshed?"

Using the sun, that's how.

Remember clotheslines?  I do.  When I was a child all homes had them, and I can still picture my mother hanging clothes on ours.  It was such fun to run beneath and around the sheets that were blowing in the wind. Now almost everyone uses dryers.

What we discovered, though, quite by accident, is that hanging out clothes in the sun does more than dry them.  It wefweshes them.  Rids the clothes of odors.  

Every day our camper looks like this. 

We put everything we wear into the sun, and as a result can wear clothes many more days than we can at home where we have a washer and a dryer.  This makes a huge difference because we try to limit our use of water to about a gallon and a half per day between the two of us--and 95% of that for drinking.

In other words, between the two of us we use approximately the equivalent of a single toilet flush by one person each day for all of our water needs.  Since we are in Southern California where there is a water shortage, we have difficulty finding water at times.  Keeping our usage low allows us to be out in wilderness areas for extended periods of time.  

Because of our two solar panels, we use the sun for all of our electrical needs, and now we find we can also use the sun to greatly expand our water capacity. 

Necessity is the mother of inwention.

Camp Young Desert Training Center

There were several WW-II Desert Training Centers in Southern California and Utah.  

Camp Young was the headquarters for all of them.  These others included Camp Coxcomb, Camp Iron Mountain, Camp Granite, Camp Rice, Camp Ibis, Camp Pilot Knob, Camp Esex, and Camp Clipper.

There were also four airfields associated with the Desert Camps:  Rice, Blythe, Desert Center, and Thermal.  

Desert Training Center Camps in Arizona were Camp Huder, Camp Horn, Camp Bouse, and Camp Laguna.  

There were also a number of Quartermaster Supply Depots and Railroad sidings.

The area was chosen because it resembled North Africa, there were good rail lines, and the California Aqueduct was closeby which provided the large amount of water that was needed.

After the war effort moved  out of North Africa, the Desert Training Centers were closed.  Quartermaster troops cleaned up the areas, and removed tents, structures, and debris.  

After that, they lay as they were, allowing time, scavengers, and the needs for new interstates, gas lines, power lines, etc. to destroy what was left.

In 1985, the Bureau of Land Management did a comprehensive assessment of the state of these Desert Training Centers.  

The report can be summarized as follows:

These Training Centers were in horrible shape. 

What the 1985 report stated:

 

That was 30 years ago.  It is in even worse shape now.  

The report provided several recommendations for halting the deterioration.  To our eyes, none of these recommendations were followed, and the only action taken was that monuments were placed on the highways near them.  

We have spent several days at Camp Young, alternating hikes into Joshua Tree National Park with hikes into the former camp area.

We had three maps of this camp.  We used them to try to find the original roads.  We were reasonably successful, thanks to our GPS device.  

One of the interesting features of the roads in this camp is that many were asphalt.  The asphalt was not of high quality, but was enough for the time.  There was no asphalt on any of the roads of the other three camps were have explored.  The asphalt was probably used because it was the headquarters area for all of the camps, so the roads got a lot of use.

As the 1985 report indicates, since WWII an interstate was built right through the camp, as well as a power line installed (and a road to service it) and a gas line.

The General Patton museum is close by, but interestingly isn’t even on the land for the original camp.  Some private citizen donated the land for it.  

It was difficult to find the original roads, and many could not be identified.  As the 1985 report indicates, the rock formations have been destroyed by the construction in the area and by the rains that have washed them out.

One has the inescapable conclusion that nobody cared about this camp, and that almost nobody cares now.

Here are the roads we found. We had to work hard at times to identify them.  We were pleased we could still, with effort, identify as much as we did.

The week we were at this place was like the approximately three weeks we spent near or at the other three Desert Training Centers—nobody but us in the camps.  

As was our policy for the other camps, when we found something we photographed it and then returned it to its original place, a bit more hidden.  A couple of the artifacts were ones that we would loved to have taken home, but didn’t.  In 10 years they will be gone forever.

Is it right to just leave them or is it more respectful to take them home and preserve them?  I think it’s wrong to let them deteriorate completely, as they most assuredly will, but that is not for us to say.  We have to trust the process, I think, as foolish as that appears to us.  The artifacts don’t belong to us,   So we have left them.

Old fountain pen jar

1940s Pepsi bottle

What looks to be an old battery:

The flagpole area:

Do you have Prince Albert in a can?  

Old street markers.  The paint is almost gone, but we could barely make them out.

An old freezer. Some people view our public lands as their private dump

Rock lined walls, etc.

Over the years people have taken the rocks and built firepits.

The monument.  It can't be on the road because the road is an interstate.  Instead, it is on an access road.  Nobody would ever see it.

Vicky finds a rocket motor in the desert....for real!

Hiking in the desert Vicky came across this:

There were serial numbers in it, so after our hike we looked it up.  It is from the 50's, a Rocket Motor used for some defense purpose.  All we could find were technical reports.  None were for sale on eBay.

Under it was a tube that was buried deep in the sand.  We didn't fool much with it because it looked suspicious. It was too heavy to budge.

We have reported it to Park authorities, in case it is a type of undischarged ordnance.  No word from them one way or the other as of yet.  

Anybody need this rocket motor to round out their collection?  😊

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Coxcomb Desert Training Center: Liberating Buchenwald

The third of General Patton’s Desert Training Centers that we have explored.  This one is outside the Coxcomb Mountains, hence the name.

We have spent over three weeks in three of the Desert Training Centers AND HAVE SEEN NO OTHER VISITORS.

All three of the Desert Training Centers we have visited have nice monuments on the main road describing them.  But how many people stop at those “Historical Markers Ahead" places?  We rarely do.  We wouldn’t even know about these places if the Iron Mountain Desert Training Center wasn’t mentioned on one of the BLM maps Vicky purchased for our trip.  And we got to wondering what it was.

So far, our recommendation is that if you want to visit one of the Desert Training Centers, Coxcomb is a better one to visit than Camp Iron Mountain, although Camp Iron Mountain is the one where most effort was made to preserve it (a fence around the entire place).  The reason we would recommend Coxcomb is that the road into it is very good, whereas the road into Iron Mountain camp is dreadful—even with our 4WD we almost didn’t make it.  Don't try it with anything other than 4WD.  And once you get there, there isn't anywhere to park. 

Coxcomb Camp is relatively easy to visit, and any vehicle can be used to access it.  This is the monument along the highway.

You take the well packed dirt road north at the monument, and then turn left at the only remaining maintained road.  You then drive on another well packed dirt road for about two miles through the camp seeing one of the most interesting and beautiful remaining structures (a stone alter).  When you are through the camp, you then turn left onto another well maintained road and drive back to the main highway.  

Like in Camp Granite, the former roads are identifiable by berms that were built.  In Camp Coxcomb, these berms often had rocks placed on top of them.  There were also the usual rock-lined sidewalks that we have seen in the other Desert Training Centers.

By following the berms, we were able to locate the original headquarters area, complete with (what we made up to be) the former location of the flagpole.  

There is a fenced off area where the topo map of the camp used to be.  Sadly, like at Iron Mountain Camp, weather has totally obliterated the actual map, so the fenced off area looks no different from any other area.  

In one spot we found a huge amount of old wood.  From what we could tell, this was on “Kitchen Road.”  It reminded us of the place we found near the Camp Granite area that we could not identify.

So in the spirit of making things up as we go along, we decided that, because they were so similar, that the place with wood strewn all about near Camp Granite was, like this place in Camp Coxcomb, the kitchen and mess hall.  Along with a large amount of old wood was what appeared to be a lot of chimneys.  

We further made up the fact that the kitchen area(s) were placed away from the living quarters so that the flies that the kitchen area attracted could be contained to that area.  This is why the wood structures near Granite Camp were outside the actual camp area.  

We are good at making stuff up.  

But a lot of the fun we are having is in trying to reconstruct the places given the few clues we have.

As we did when we camped near Camp Granite, we alternated hikes into the hills with hikes around the camp.  We found a number of artifacts that would look great in our home, and after photographing them, returned them to their original place (actually, we hid them better than we found them so other people would have the fun of finding them but people wanting to steal them would have a more difficult time doing that).  

The men who trained here, the Sixth Armored Division, liberated Buchenwald Concentration Camp on April 11, 1945.  The ones still alive, that is, after fighting against the second greatest war machine in history (next to the US forces).  

Liberated a concentration camp?  And this is where they trained to be able to do that?  We are walking on the same roads they walked on?  Looking at the same mountains?  

And on a seldom used highway where all that you can see from it is a small pull-off with a small monument.  Nobody stops.  They, like us too often, in too much of a hurry to get to their destination.  

We almost feel like we want to go out to that highway, start flagging people down, and saying “You really need to come see this.”

You think you have done something with your life, and then you read what the guys who trained here did, and you can feel awfully small.

They defeated the powerful German army.

And liberated Buchenwald.

Some photos and artifacts from Camp Coxcomb:

The beautiful alter.  Please, Bureau of Land Management, put a fence around it so no one can tag it with spray paint.  It's only a matter of time. 

Some guy or guys built this.  Many examples were in the camp, but this one was wonderfully preserved.

Here is another one, built by some guy or guys from Yuma, Arizona.  Still in great shape.

A soldier shaved with this:

Coils of wire:

Old Root Beer bottle:

Owens medicine bottle:

One day we took a hike far into the Coxcomb mountains.  What we found was really interesting--several rock barriers.  Were they part of the training exercises?  We can think of no other purpose for them:

Our quiet, isolated, and beautiful campsite in the Desert Training Center: