Archive: Deserts

Owen was shot and killed answering a home burglary call in Lancaster.

Bad day yesterday for stereotypes about the Mojave Desert cities being a hotbed of unsavory news.

Climate change, the drought and development pressure are all taking a toll on the symbolic succulents that grow only in the Mojave Desert.

The original Los Angeles media and politics blogger is featured in today's Column One in the LA Times.

A five-part series in the Desert Sun will look at the history of Mafia influence, including the taint on Frank Sinatra and kids who grew up romanticizing the scene.

Hikers found the remains of the missing Fox distribution executive in the rural high desert near Palmdale last month, according to officials. He disappeared May 1, 2012.

One pilot was killed and another injured when Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed in the desert north of the company's base at the Mojave Air and Space Port.

The high on Tuesday is only expected to be 102 -- 12 degrees more than right now. Could be worse, I guess.

Out near Blythe in the lower desert, the abandoned industrial settlement of Midland has been empty for nearly half a century.

The New York Times' Fashion and Style section deems it an actual trend and pegs the coverage to Leo DiCaprio buying the old Dinah Shore estate.

I was in the desert for a couple of days and stopped in Sunday at the Sunnylands Center and Gardens in Rancho Mirage. That is the free, open to the public side of the Sunnylands estate of Walter and Leonore Annenberg.

The magnitude 5.1 earthquake at 9:09 p.m. was centered near the border of Los Angeles and Orange counties, 21 miles southeast of the downtown Los Angeles Civic Center. There was a 3.6 foreshock and two aftershocks in the same ballpark.

A takeout by the Desert Sun in Palm Springs finds that since 2007, 33 Marines have died in crashes on roads near the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms. The death toll is higher than that incurred by Twentynine Palms Marines in the Middle East, the paper says.

Leonard Knight spent almost 30 years building a colorful mountain of adobe covered with donated paint in the Imperial Valley desert near Salton Sea. Knight and Salvation Mountain were featured in the film "Into the Wild."

Los Angeles photographer Sungjin Ahn has captured some marvelous images of Joshua trees against the desert and the sky and put them into a lovely Vimeo time lapse.

The key words here are rotting balls of fish flesh and corpse wax. Bon appetit.

The Wheel Inn truck stop beside Interstate 10 has abruptly closed. The giant dinosaurs remain, though their future might be uncertain.

Marty McMorrow is an independent author who took a different tack to market his memoir of life in the 1960s and beyond. He bought space on a billboard along Interstate 10 outside Blythe.

Palm Springs newspaper does the work to answer many questions about Michael Boatwright, aka Johan Ek. He's a 61-year-old Navy vet and wanderer.

Kevin Martin, the blogging weatherman who took his mother (and her car) to Death Valley on Sunday, said he found temperatures a few degrees higher than the official reading of 129 degrees recognized by the National Weather Service. His thermometer read 135.5 degrees at Badwater Basin, the low point of North America. But there's no official NWS station there.

A Corona meteorologist and blogger is heading into Death Valley National Park for this weekend's heat siege, betting on the come that the temperature will set a new world record. The old record is 134 degrees.

A two-year civil rights investigation into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department concludes that deputies violated the Constitution and federal laws in the treatment of blacks and other residents of public housing in the Antelope Valley.

Coachella music festival promoter Goldenvoice has been trying since April to repatriate hundreds of wallets, cellphones, car keys and other items with the fans who left them behind in the desert. They really work hard to find the owners.

More than 1,200 homes are considered threatened. Fifteen have been damaged, including six that were destroyed. The fire command said at midnight that 22,242 acres have burned and there was 20% containment.

Emily Green, the water journalist and gardening writer who blogs at Chance of Rain, took some pictures this week at the defunct “Rock-a-Hoola Waterpark“ at Newberry Springs in the eastern Mojave. The derelict park, which used groundwater from the Mojave Aquifer, has also operated as Lake Dolores and the Discovery Waterpark.

An earthquake measured at 4.7 rocked the area around Anza-Borrego State Park this morning, accompanied by a whole bunch of lesser magnitude quakes in the vicinity of Anza and Ocotillo Wells.

Some 500 members of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines from Camp Pendleton took part in live weapons training this week at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center near Twentynine Palms.

Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o came close to winning the Heisman Trophy with an inspiring backstory about his Stanford girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, dying tragically of leukemia. Deadspin says she never existed, but instead was the creation of a former Lancaster area prep football player who used the Facebook photo of a South Bay woman to perpetrate a massive Internet and media hoax.

The Riverside County death certificate for Huell Howser says that the television host and producer died early on the morning of January 7 from metastatic prostate cancer. Howser was cremated and his remains scattered off the coast of Los Angeles County on Jan. 9.

Photos: Yuccas thrive in the foothills on the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains. If there's one plant more iconic of the Mojave, it could be the tumbleweed.

Photos: The California Aqueduct near Littlerock, moving Northern California water across the Mojave Desert on Wednesday afternoon.

Young (OK, very young) versions of the former KNBC 4 stalwarts and a feature story on the Mojave Desert landmark.

For a long time the keepers of the weather stats believed the hottest temperature recorded on Earth to be 136 degrees at El Azizia, Libya, exactly 90 years ago today — September 13, 1922. Doubts were raised, studies were done, and now scientists say the distinction belongs to Death Valley.

Southern California's air quality agency has spoken: the rotten egg smell that wafted over much of the region starting Sunday has been traced to the distant desert lake.

Late in the day, the South Coast Air Quality Management District posted an update in which it acknowledged the possibility that dead fish at the Salton Sea are the source of the rotten-egg smell reported all day Monday. The update noted, however, that "it is highly unusual for odors to remain strong up to 150 miles from their source."

So many residents across the inland parts of the Los Angeles Basin began complaining about a bad, sulfur-like smell this morning — even clogging 911 phone lines — that officials were forced to look into it. Read the memo from an AQMD scientist briefing his board members.

So far on Monday there have been just four earthquakes measuring magnitude 3 or higher in the Imperial Valley, and none larger than 3.8. That's a lot easier for residents to take than Sunday's swarm, which included two quakes over 5.0 and another late last night that came in at a 4.9.

Another in the periodic earthquake swarms that visit California's lowest-lying populated area has been bothering the Brawley area all day. With two more over 4.0 in the past hour, there have now been 11 quakes of magnitude 4 or more on Sunday and dozens of lesser strength. The two biggest measured 5.5 and 5.3, enough to cause scattered damage.
 
Sunday night: 7.4 quake off El Salvador with tsumani warning

Martínez, the writing professor at Loyola Marymount University, lived for a time beside the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico, searching for truth and meaning and the guidance to break his drug habit. A review of his new book, plus an excerpt of a new mystery by Miles Corwin.

The National Weather Service says the combination of hot temperatures (over 100 in many areas) and higher than usual humidity for the summer "will create a prolonged period of well above normal and possibly dangerous heat." Some of the desert temperatures could take your breath away.

LA Observed contributor Deanne Stillman's latest book is a page turner. Desert Reckoning: A Town Sheriff, a Mojave Hermit, and the Biggest Manhunt in Modern California History takes off from the 2003 killing of Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy Stephen Sorensen, by a hermit named Donald Kueck, to peel back some of the mystery and secrets about life in the Mojave Desert north of us. She reads this afternoon at Skylight Books.

The plan cooked up by politically connected investors to deliver water from a remote corner of the Mojave to thirsty Southern California cities refuses to die after more than two decades. How the LA Times can do a new story on Cadiz without mentioning Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or Arnold Schwarzenegger (and barely mentioning their pal who is at the center of things, Keith Brackpool) is a mystery. Note: No time for the Morning Buzz today.

With politicians in Riverside and San Bernardino counties clamoring for an explanation, the local Caltrans chief has re-assigned the engineer on the Interstate 10 repaving project that closed several lanes of the freeway at the height of Sunday's westbound rush.

Sunday's Caltrans-induced traffic jam on Interstate 10 coming back in from Palm Springs was so bad that at least one group of music industry types headed to the Grammy Awards flew into Santa Monica Airport.

Caltrans work narrowed the westbound lanes of Interstate 10 in Banning Pass on Sunday afternoon and evening, creating a monster backup.

A new study from the Center for Health Reporting at USC says flatly that when the Big One hits Southern California, "hospitals won't be ready."

The girls' father is "one of history’s biggest and most sought-after drug lords," Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Much of the city of San Diego is still dark, but some areas — including the south end of Orange County and the desert cities of the Coachella Valley — are gradually getting power back.

Without power or air conditioning, it could be a long night in the lower deserts. Here are the current temperatures.

With essentially all power off across the region served by San Diego Gas & Electric, the biggest problem faced by the SDPD right now is rush-hour traffic without stop lights.

With the space shuttle gliding into retirement, Deanne Stillman has a nice piece at Truthdig on the local origins of the U.S. space program.

Five planes designed by Mojave aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan hang in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Nice feature in Smithsonian Air & Space on the private and amateur rocket teams figuring out space flight of the future way out in the Mojave Desert.

The downtown real estate broker-poet missing since Friday in Joshua Tree National Park was found today and flown to a hospital, according to a family friend cited by Blogdowntown and...

Search teams in Joshua Tree National Park shut down trails to preserve any tracks that may have been left by hiker Ed Rosenthal, and by nightfall had picked up "clear indications of Rosenthal's presence" several miles south of the original search zone.

Ed Rosenthal is the subject of an active search after his car was found over the weekend at the Black Rock campground in Joshua Tree National Park.

Centered down below Palm Springs like the recent swarm, but certainly felt in Los Angeles. 4:53 was the official time. * Downgrade: Originally a 5.9, within 15 minutes of the...

There's been a 4.6 aftershock this hour in the desert 16 miles southeast of Ocotillo, Calif., making at least ten earthquakes of magnitude 4 or higher today mdash;including a pair of 5.1's. It's all playing out as expected after Sunday's 7.2, Lucy Jones of USGS explains.

Ann Japenga's new website wallows in the art, history and landscape of the California desert, "an online magazine and gathering place for desert rats, collectors, historians, artists and anyone who loves the early painters of the desert...where landscape, history and art come together under the brow of Mount San Jacinto."

Bad weather in Florida may take precedence over our own dodgy weather, possibly forcing the space shuttle Endeavor to land at Edwards Air Force Base late tonight. NASA officials have yet to decide.

Model Home," the first novel by Eric Puchner, is set during the Reagan presidency and tells the story of a family — Camille, Warren and their three kids — who move from Wisconsin to Southern California so Warren can get into the real estate game. Bad move.

In case you haven't heard, that explosive boom that rattled windows and more than a few nerves yesterday afternoon was Discovery, the space shuttle, landing at Edwards Air Force Base....

We've all seen the enormous white thunderheads build up on summer afternoons out beyond the San Gabriel Mountains, over the Mojave Desert. Photographer Gene Blevins chases the storm cells; check...

The art of the local editorial cartoon is alive and well at LA Observed, compliments of Steve Greenberg. Find him here most days. Mark Lacter has the news item...

Where eastbound Interstate 10 hits the desert at Cabazon, a few miles shy of the Palm Springs turnoff, this sign proclaims some of the locals' unhappiness with Los Angeles and...

Here's the best thing I read all day. The New York Times has a marvelous Travel section story with Ry Cooder visiting spots in the Mojave Desert, accompanied by an...

Native Intelligence contributor Deanne Stillman has the cover of the new Los Angeles CityBeat with a nice piece on the Mojave Desert portion of L.A. County. Photos by Mark LaMonica...

Christy Porter was a photojournalist in Kentucky when the little paper where she worked did hard investigations of local sacred cows like the university basketball program. She moved to L.A....

It's going to be windy in a big way this weekend. The National Weather Service this morning posted an upgraded high wind warning for the whole area through Monday, with...

Highway crews and flagmen working on the widening of California 138 across the Mojave Desert have taken so much physical abuse from motorists that the stretch between Lancaster and Victorville...