About Desert

I live in the Wonder Valley area east of 29 Palms, California, adjacent to the recently-created Joshua Tree National Park: an area of rugged scenic beauty, brutal summer heat (regularly 110º-120ºF at my house), hot-water wells (mine makes water at 117ºF, no kidding!), occasional earthquakes (the epicenter of the July 1999 7.1 Hector Mine earthquake was about 30 miles from my house, and the aftershock sequence from the 'quake continues; you can see it on the map you get when you click that link) ... and numerous abandoned dwellings.

In the 1800s the Gummint passed the Homestead Act to encourage settlement of the Great West. Basically, that Act and subsequent legislation permitted a person to file a claim on certain designated pieces of government-owned land (in this area, five acres, but different in other areas), "prove" the claim by erecting a structure and living there for a period of time, and then make the land one's own by paying a small fee after having satisfied those basic requirements. The Wonder Valley area--and, in fact, the entire Morongo Basin (Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, 29 Palms and environs)--is littered (litterally) with hundreds of abandoned "homestead cabins," small shacks of barely the minimum size required by the Homestead Act (I think 12x12 feet?), whose would-be owners deserted them for whatever reason--I would guess that isolation and the weather were high on the list. There is a continuing local effort to get rid of the worst of these hulks because they Attract Undesirables (read: squatters), and because they have the nasty habit of catching fire for one reason or another: the dry air here dessicates wood (and everything else) and these things burn almost explosively. The core of my house was once a homestead cabin, which has been added on to in stages over the years. The Homestead Act was phased out a few years ago--in fact, this area is now designated as a desert reserve, protected by Federal law, so although more than half of Wonder valley is Government-owned, no Government land is available under any circumstances. (That's great, as far as I'm concerned--it means some jerk can't put up a condo complex on the ten-acre parcel to the south of my house....)

I have added four shots to this page and the old scans have been redone (June 1999); I have a lot more desert shots that I promise I'll get on here soon. I don't normally take Pretty Pictures; these may qualify as exceptions.

Catalog Number: 223-23a Rock formation in Joshua Tree National Park, February 1992.

Catalog Number: 370-21 The remains of a burned-out structure in Joshua Tree, CA, 26 March 1993-within a few steps of the foundation in the second-next photo. This is not a "homestead cabin" in the classical sense, since this building's walls are of adobe covered with plaster--far more substantial construction than most cabins, which were usually jerry-built to conform to the Act's requirements in as minimal a fashion as possible. It would therefore appear that whoever built this place intended to live here for a long time, and did--until the fire. --That is not a picture on the wall, incidentally....

Catalog Number: 370-27 Exterior view of the structure in the previous photo.

Catalog Number: 370-18 Structure foundation in Joshua Tree, CA, 26 March 1993. Was anything ever built on this foundation? I'm not sure; it may have been the beginning of a structure, or what's left of one that burned ... I incline toward the former because it seems to me that something of front steps would have survived a fire, and because the whole thing looks pretty rudimentary in the first place. This also would not have been a "homestead cabin" in the usual sense, since cabins generally have either a concrete slab or dirt floor and this structure would obviously have had a crawl space under the floor.

Catalog Number: 370-23 Photo taken 26 March 1993, just a few steps from the three previous photos. It is an interesting exercise in "learning how to see" to stand with a camera in one spot and take as many different pictures as you can of what is around you ... you will discover far more things worthy of looking at than you at first thought possible.

Catalog Number: 320-33A Scene at a structure fire in Joshua Tree, CA, 29 September 1992. There was no wind that day (unusual for this area!); I spotted the smoke plume from five miles away and headed there with the idea in mind of getting something that might be acceptable to the local paper, but by the time I managed to find the place (the road patterns out here are very irregular) the fire department had knocked the fire down and in this photo they're in the midst of getting to the remaining hot spots in the smoldering remains. It turned out that the local paper (a) didn't want the shots and (b) wouldn't pay anyhow, but what the hell--I got a great photo.

Catalog Number: 255d-7 Homestead cabin (lower right corner), Wonder Valley, 2 April 1992. --It is not that I don't like working in color. It is, rather, that color is expensive, that I don't have the facilities here to do color work, and that the (usually hot) water supply here makes it difficult to work in color even if I could afford it. But I have made some color shots and this is one of them. (Note that prints of this shot are more expensive because they must be printed by a commercial lab.)