February 12, 2016 will mark the 10-year anniversary of the designation of Mojave Trails National Monument. At the heart of that national monument lies a valley most Californians have never heard of, let alone visited: the Cadiz Valley.
I love this “postcard” of the Mojave Desert with its wide-open expanses, sand dunes, seeps and springs, lava flows, and cinder cones – all surrounded by multicolored mountains. While words can’t do it justice, to help you experience it, below I share my thoughts and feelings about the Cadiz Valley and why I’m committed to conserving and protecting this region from a decades-old scheme: the Cadiz water mining project. I’m hopeful that it’ll inspire you to visit and stand up to protect this special region too.
Bonanza Spring, Linda Castro
If someone HAS heard about the Cadiz Valley, I’d first guess that they were one of the many wildflower fans who’ve flocked to the region in the spring to see amazing “super blooms” of color. However, outside of those times, and thankfully (in my opinion), the quiet, sparsely populated Cadiz Valley provides perfect rejuvenation for those of us seeking solitude to soothe our weary souls bombarded with 24-hour news, internet “clickbait,” and the general hustle and bustle of modern life.
Amboy Crater with spring wildflowers, Linda Castro
The best way to enter the Cadiz Valley is by taking Amboy Road out of the city of Twentynine Palms (traveling north on Amboy Road). I recommend pulling off Amboy Road shortly after you pass the sign that says Sheep Hole Pass, just as the road begins to drop in elevation.** From this vantage point, you can see almost the entire Cadiz Valley. The view is breathtaking, especially at sunrise and sunset. I hope you’ll take some time to just soak in the view (and BREATHE) before you head down the road.
Each time that I travel from the Sheep Hole Pass viewpoint to the tiny town of Amboy, I feel a sense of peace and contentment come over me. I start to feel at ease and at one with the desert that surrounds me. I contemplate how this place moves me and changes me each time that I visit. “Contemplate” is the perfect word for this place – the Cadiz Valley offers an ideal place for “contemplative tourism”.
One of the most frequent things that I contemplate while in the Cadiz Valley, especially as I drive along historic Route 66, is what it must’ve been like for the “Okies” and others who used that historic route to flee the 1930s Great Plains dust bowl for California. Heavy travel by dustbowl emigrants led Grapes of Wrath author, John Steinbeck, to label it the Mother Road. In fact, the stretch of Route 66 in the Cadiz Valley (between Amboy and Fenner) is the longest undeveloped stretch in the United States! Can you imagine that the very same landscapes that we all see today were gazed upon by those weary travelers almost a century ago? They had come all that way, but still saw ahead of them the vast desert landscape that they would need to travel through. Did they wonder if they’d ever get to the “promised land” of the Central Valley?
When I see the ruins of the old gas stations and motels along Route 66 that became obsolete with the construction of Interstate 40 in the early 1970s, I can’t help but think of travelers stopping there to fill up their Model A pickups filled with their life’s belongings or getting a good night’s sleep before heading off the next morning.
I also often wonder what it might have been like to have been a soldier who came to the region as part of the U.S. Army’s Desert Training Center, which trained more than 1 million soldiers for battle in the North African deserts at the beginning of World War II. I often think that these places that I perceive as beautiful and full of life, might have seemed frightening and inhospitable to the young men who were sent there to train, with sweltering hot days and frigid nights and with species that the soldiers had likely never encountered (and likely never shared a tent with!) such as rattlesnakes, scorpions, and tarantulas.
However, my spirits are raised, and I can’t help but smile when I think about how many soldiers who made it back home from battle in WWII expressed their gratitude for having been given the opportunity to train at the Desert Training Center – that it had provided an excellent training ground for their WWII battle. For those who didn’t make it back home, either because they died during training exercises before being sent overseas or because they were killed in the line of duty, I wonder how many of their spirits still linger in the Cadiz Valley. Many people report seeing ghosts in the Cadiz Valley, especially along historic Route 66. Even if their spirits have moved on, the area still holds tank tracks that were pressed into the fragile desert soils and artifacts and sites that were significant to that important time of our country’s and California’s history.
If I’m lucky enough to be able to be in the Cadiz Valley overnight, I can spend hours looking up at the sky filled with sparkling stars, the complexity of the Milky Way, and the utter vastness of the universe. Due to its remoteness, some of the darkest night skies in California can be found here. (Places in the Cadiz Valley range from 2.7 to 2.9 on the Bortle Scale, which measures light pollution levels, ranging from Class 1 [pitch black] to Class 9 [heavily light-polluted]). An incredible 3,000 to 5,000 stars are visible from locations throughout the Cadiz Valley. On the one hand, this vastness makes me feel incredibly small and insignificant, but on the other hand, it encompasses me and makes me feel more connected to those stars and universe. I consider sleeping under the stars rather than in a tent, but because I’ve seen a lot of scorpions out there, I always end up sleeping in something that I can zip up!
Cadiz Dunes at sunset, Linda Castro
The Cadiz Valley is also home to imperiled species. It provides important habitat for desert bighorn sheep, desert tortoise, Mojave fringe-toed lizard, burrowing owl, prairie falcon, Emory’s crucifixion-thorn, and Harwood’s eriastrum. All of these species and more rely on the mostly undeveloped landscapes and scattered seeps and springs, including Bonanza Spring, the largest spring in the southeastern Mojave Desert, that provide water necessary for their survival. Already struggling due to climate change, development of their habitat, and road building that fragments their habitat, these species can ill-afford for these life-giving seeps and springs to dry up.
Mojave fringe-toed lizard in the Cadiz Dunes, Linda Castro
The Cadiz Valley also holds cultural importance to Chemehuevi, Mojave, Serrano, Cahuilla, Southern Paiute and other Indigenous Peoples who have lived in this desert region for millennia. The region is a sacred landscape punctuated by landmarks esteemed by their tribal cultures, most notably, by the Salt Song Trail of the Chemehuevi and southern Paiute tribes. While it is not my place to tell their stories, spending quiet, thoughtful time in the Cadiz Valley is one way that I feel that I can honor and pay respect to the original stewards of these lands that include scarce springs and riparian areas that provide refuge for a wide variety of plants and animals.
Unfortunately, a company by the name of Cadiz, Inc. wants to drive a stake into the heart of Mojave Trails National Monument, by once again threatening the Cadiz Valley with a zombie water mining scheme. Cadiz Inc. proposes to extract Pleistocene-era groundwater from private lands in the heart of the Monument. The company wants to remove groundwater from an aquifer underneath Mojave Trails National Monument and the Mojave National Preserve to the north in amounts that would far exceed the natural recharge estimates of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and independent investigators.
For more than 30 years, Cadiz, Inc. has been attempting to get permits to extract an average of 50,000 Acre Feet (more than 1.6 billion gallons) of groundwater annually for 50 years. They continue to overstate and misrepresent the recharge rate or even attempt to completely bypass environmental review processes. If approved, this proposed project is likely to have disastrous impacts on Bonanza Spring and other important surface waters and water-dependent ecosystems in the Monument.
It’s very likely that we’re going to see Cadiz, Inc. once again take action to move its destructive scheme forward. We’ll keep you informed of their actions, especially when you can weigh in. We hope that you’ll join our continuing efforts to oppose this devastating project and to protect this extraordinary part of California’s desert and history. In the meantime, consider visiting some places in the region such as Amboy Crater!
** The best and safest place to pull off Amboy Road is where Amboy Road skirts the boundary of the Sheephole Valley Wilderness. There’s a relatively large sandy area to pull out and away from the road. However, if you don’t have a capable vehicle, be careful that you don’t get stuck in the soft sand.
