Desert

Somewhere in the great Salton Basin, or the Laguna Salada or the delta of the Colorado River, lie the bones of an ancient ship stranded hundreds of years ago seen now and again by desert wanderers or by Indians. That is one of the most persistent legends of the far Southwest. There is every reason to believe that such a ship does or could exist.

Long before the Spanish, white men and Mormons used the Mojave Desert as a route into southern California, no other route was known to exist....The Spanish believed that since their ships had sailed up the Gulf of California into the Colorado River Basin which according to some, including the Spanish, that their ships were able to sail as far north as the Lake Havasu Area.

One reason many believed that the Spanish or white men never traveled the southern deserts to the oceans what is now known as the Imperial valley and thru Banning....That era of discovery came during the civil war when the railroads were looking for a another route to hook up with the fledgling Santa Fe Railroad that was building north from San Diego.

Is nothing new....Although most people associate Solar and wind power as rather modern day creations, that is not really true....Wind power, in the form of small wind mills has been used in the desert southwest for over 400 years.....It is today, that we see the new modern evolution of giant Wind machines capable of producing enough energy to power 100 homes for a year....But it takes hundreds of them to power a city or geographic area.

In the Banning pass on the way to Palm Springs and the Southern Deserts you will see what is effectively the 2nd and 3rd generation of giant wind machines.....The first ones built in the 1960's were small and rather ineffective....In fact most of the companies that built them went bankrupt.....It wasn't until government subsidies and modern technology combined to create the new generation of wind machines seen today that are able to supply the power needs of most of the Riverside County area of the Desert.

The true story of Willie Boy, as I heard from the Indians in my family

Well sort of....these were carrying guns.

My family started going down to the Salton sea back around 1967, after we had spent several years camping up at Lake Hemet....If you remember we used to get in free there because my Uncle Leroy was a member of the US Forestry Dept.....I guess he got transferred down to the Salton Sea, cause that's where we all ended up during the summers of 67, 68, and 1969....I recall 69, was my last year there....I had joined the Navy and I had met my future wife there....Funny how I was in the Navy longer than I was married....Oh well, another story all together that is for sure.

But joining the Navy is one way how I found out about the Navy facilities at the Salton Sea....And after a little investigating we found out some pretty interesting things about the Navy and there stay at the Sea.....Something else we noticed was that Bombers would come in and make dry runs over the little Chocolate Mts to the south of the sea and actually were the eastern barrier to the green fields of the Imperial Valley, where they grew and still grow tons of sugarbeets and cane sugar.....All of that outflow from the fields is one of the reasons the present day Salton Sea is in danger of becoming a dead zone.

Today, most people cross the desert on Interstate 40 all the way from Barstow to the Arizona border.....But I can remember a time, when i was much younger and my mom and dad made it a point to take a two week vacation every summer after school let, that these towns were thriving, and anything but dead.....But the coming of the freeways killed off many of the small towns that once dotted the landscape, where you could stop at a gas station, go next door for a burger fries and a malt and rest your hot weary bones.....Truckers made the small towns live.....But the building of the 40 freeway across the deserts took that traffic away as well, for ever sealing the fate of these reminders of the early life on the desert.....From Goffs near Needles, all the way to Ludlow, almost 100 miles, where the Route 66 picks back up with I-40, the desert is littered with relics from the past and little more.