This year, as I started my 70th trip around the sun (it is more important to finish and celebrate the end of that trip, but it was a good excuse to get away), we opted for four days in Joshua Tree. For those that read this blog often, you know that JTNP is a very special place for me. When we were sailing, almost any day we were on the water, I would say ” I could do this all day, every day”. Joshua Tree has taken the oceans place for me.
We organized an Airbnb located in the town of Joshua Tree CA and only about 10 minutes from the park entrance. A very nice 2-bedroom place that had views to the north; was very nicely appointed and served as a great base of operations.
Home base!
Kiara joined us on the evening of the 4th and spent a couple of days with us.
We had five goals during this trip, 2 historical tasks, 3 geologic tasks plus the usual goals of food, drink, rest, relaxation and conversation. The historical tasks included a visit/tour to Keys Ranch and locating and visiting Johnny Lang’s grave (no relation to Ruth). The three geologic stops included field trips to see an aplite dike, the roof pendant at Ryan Mountain and a visit to a more accessible pile of the Pinto Gneiss which is the roof pendant at Ryan Mountain. The rest of the activities we were just going to go with the flow.
We arrived a little early for check-in to the place, so we started the visit with food and drink at the Joshua Tree Saloon. They had our favorite local beers from Coachella Valley Brewing Company plus very tasty food at very reasonable pricing and a large parking area.
We had a reservation to get a guided tour of Key’s Ranch on Thursday morning. The Park Service restricts visitors to this area to guided tours to preserve the historical nature of the location as without a doubt, morons would surely vandalize and sack the area.
Bill Keys was a guy who made everyone else in the world look lazy (and still does to this day). He was the original poster child in the late 1800’s and through the first half of the 20th century, for sustainability. Bill was born in Nebraska as George Barth in about 1879 or so. He changed his name to Bill Key (nobody knows why) when he signed up with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Later in life, the postman was complaining that there were two guys with very similar last names in the area that is now Joshua Tree NP so Bill added an “S” to his last name to help distinguish himself. In 1910, Bill became the caretaker of the Desert Queen Mine, setting up home at the current location which was the mine mill. About five years later, the mine owner passed on with never having paid Bill for his service. Bill filed against the estate of the owner and was awarded the mine and mill. He then filed a homesteading claim for another 160 adjacent acres and was awarded that.
In 1918, Bill went to the big city of Los Angeles and met, married and then lured Frances May Lawton out to the homestead. She was every bit as creative and focused as Bill in building a life at the Ranch. They had seven children, buried three and raised four. Bill mined, ran stamp mills for other miners, farmed, raised cattle, built five dams out of the local stone and little else, improved upon existing dams, built roads (including one still bearing his name), explored the desert extensively, and started the first elementary school in Joshua Tree with Frances initially serving as teacher. Eventually as more students began stopping in from around the area, they hired a teacher. It became the Desert Queen Elementary School run by the County. Meanwhile, Frances also tended to the garden, managed the household (yearning for refrigeration) and canned sometimes 400 quarts of food yearly, tended to the generator, which they only used sparingly, managed the kids assigning common chores like getting water from the well, feeding chickens and such. She eventually started the first small store in the area and rented out cabins and even beds under the stars for visitors to the area.
Bill and Frances were masters at using and reusing everything. As an example, most folks don’t realize that there is no good source of wood in the Joshua Tree area. Joshua trees are not really trees and the burn very poorly giving off little heat. They are now protected, or at least they were as of yesterday. Therefore, any wood that the Keys had was brought in from as far away as Banning and Beaumont, CA. They saved and reused everything. When the desert training center south of the park at Chiriaco Summit, CA was closed after WW II, Bill took many trips there and salvaged stoves, beds, vehicles and equipment. Some of the photos below include stuff from those forays.
Some may remember from an earlier post that Bill had a little run-in with the law when Worth Bagley, a somewhat eccentric neighbor, went a little crazy and ambushed Bill just off of the ranch (there is an NP marker on the Barker Dam trail where this incident occurred). Bill returned fire and killed Worth dead. The rock below was at the location of the altercation until it was clear that morons were going to deface it. The Park Service rescued the rock and marked the spot with something more indestructible…(really; more indestructible than a rock???)
A court, with prejudices and proclivities very similar to today’s highest court in the land, sent Bill to San Quentin for murder and at age 69 after 5-years in the pokey, he was released and eventually pardoned due to public pressure particularly from Erle Stanley Gardner. He returned to the ranch and picked up where he left off saying that he had a lot of time to read and work out improvements on the place while he was incarcerated. In 1950 Frances, the kids and Bill finished upgrading Barker Dam and then settled in at the Ranch making a living from the increasing number of visitors to the Joshua Tree area. All of the Keys children left their parents’ desert paradise and went on to long successful lives. In 1963, Frances died, and six years later, on June 28th, 1969, Bill Keys at the ripe old age of 90-ish joined her. Along with mom and dad, three of the kids who passed at very young ages are buried in a small cemetery, located on a hill above the drainage on the south side of the ranch area. The Park Service eventually took over all of the Keys Ranch except for the cemetery which is still owned and maintained by the descendants of Frances and Bill.
Our tour was led by a gentleman named Thomas Crochetiere a local historian, park volunteer and writer who has produced several books on the history of the area concentrating on Bill Keys. Needless to say, he knew his stuff, was very entertaining and very informative.
Photos of Keys Ranch
The afternoon was assigned to visiting the Indian Cove Area, a part of the park that we had not visited in the past. Yet another fine edited NP map below showing the location of Keys Ranch, Barker Dam and our route to Indian Cove.
Indian Cove was very Joshua Treeish with rocks, trees, cholla and of course Joshua Trees. Most of all, on December 5th, it was relatively deserted. There were a few diehards in the campground. They had the primo spots. We did a short hike on the Indian Cove Nature Trail; a .75 mile walk with signs describing vegetation and geology. The views were spectacular and overall, I would rate the scenery and the natural surroundings as excellent. It was a very low-key walk.
However, not low enough key to forgo a congratulatory beer at the end of an exciting day. The sun goes down pretty early on the north side of the park in early December. We drove over to the picnic area, found a likely looking rock and sat back to enjoy a cerveza.
