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January 14, 2005
Coming to the end of the Old Spanish Trail
By PHILLIP GOMEZ
There's more to just marking the Old Spanish Trail in the Bureau of Land Management's improvement plans for the Tecopa area. The agency's anticipation of public demands for recreational opportunities points to how travel and commerce have changed since the heyday of the blood, sweat and tears shed on the Old Spanish Trail. There's still, at least, the sweat. But increased leisure time and the desire to recreate away from home by automobile have radically altered the typical traveler on the Old Spanish Trail today. The land management agency plans to put in 70 miles of hiking, biking and horseback riding trails in Tecopa's surrounding desert. "That's a real ambitious plan we're looking at," said Brad Mastin, outdoor recreation planner with the BLM. Plans include paving the old Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad grade for seven miles through the Amargosa River Valley, from Shoshone to Tecopa. Known as a "rails to trails" project, the conversion to "hard-wheeled recreation" is part of the BLM's improvement plan for the Amargosa's Area of Critical Environmental Concern. "Everything on wheels, from roller-blades to baby buggies, can use the trail," Mastin said. The project has to be completed by next December. Mastin expects to get $50,000 in state grant money this year to widen and improve the Amargosa River Trail from the China Ranch date farm to Tecopa, five-and-a-half miles of river canyon trail. He already has some 20 interpretive signs ready to be installed to help the visiting public understand the area's history and geology. Volunteer graduate students researched and wrote the text. The American Hiking Society, expected to arrive next month for two weeks of supervised volunteer trail work, have boosted the BLM's manpower for keeping up with trail work. Also scheduled for this year is cultural preservation and upgrading of the 1903 Taft Building, a dilapidated ruin of a stone building found along the trail. The building needs a permanent roof to protect the historic log-and-branch roof currently serving that purpose. Dating back to railroad days, the structure served as an assay office and saloon. When renovated, the BLM plans to allow visitors inside where interpretive signs will explain its function. Anticipating the consequences on the ground, the BLM's strategy has been to stay ahead of the recreational demand curve, which is to say - growth: Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Pahrump's people explosion inevitably will in coming years bring damaging impacts this way. Los Angeles County, with more than 3 million households, is the main source of the recreational pressure. Plans for widening Interstate 15 in California will make the west-gate access easier and faster. Other demographic factors come into play: • Americans are taking shorter vacations closer to home. Death Valley and the area south to Tecopa Hot Springs and the Dumont Dunes are within a day's drive of the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles. And with the widening of I-15 through Las Vegas to three lanes, what's being called Los Angeles East - Nevada's largest city with 1.7 million residents - traffic from the east side will significantly increase. • Death Valley National Park's second busiest month of the year is August, said Mastin, when 83 percent of visitors are foreigners present to experience the natural wonder - and intense heat. "Two huge influxes of people occur," he said, "in the winter, Americans, and in late summer, foreigners. "There are no quaint little spots left in America," Mastin said. "That's because the paved roads through little towns on backcountry roads all connect to the driveways of 294 million Americans." And a good many look to public lands to recreate on. That's a lot of toilet paper. "It's called 'hardening the sites,'" explained Mastin. "It's a recreational term of the Park Service, the Forest Service and the BLM. That means you put in your trailheads, vault toilets, traffic signs - the physical infrastructures - to minimize the impacts on sensitive desert resources." Resource degradation became noticeable as far back as 1973 when some canyons had to be closed to motorized access, he says. "We're still in a response mode. What we do now is increase the level of management." Despite differences in land management philosophies, the BLM along with its sister agencies have a primary responsibility to protect the land, sensitive species and cultural resources - from people. And yet people wanting to recreate need to be provided the space and opportunities for doing that. Death Valley sends visitors desiring to use off-road motorized vehicles to Dumont sand dunes, a BLM area south of the park. Mastin said the Amargosa River near Tecopa has been declared "eligible" for federal designation as a wild and scenic river. In the Mojave Desert a scenic river may seem more a mirage, an anomaly that doesn't belong there. "We had to look hard to find one," Mastin said with wit as arid as the huge Mojave outback the BLM's Barstow office manages. More seriously, he said, "The next step is to be designated as such. It would be the first California desert area so designated." Congress passed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in 1968 with eight rivers included in the system. Since then, 155 rivers have been added, and 138-plus have been authorized for study, the Amargosa among them. The Inyo County Board of Supervisors went on record in unanimous support of the designation in November, Mastin said. The Kings Canyon Mountain Wilderness Area adjoins the BLM land over which our small trail-grooming party hikes. The Amargosa River trail crosses into "the wilderness," though you would never know it, leading up toward the falls. At the falls of the Amargosa we run into the 23 Sierra Club hikers from Las Vegas. At ease, Mastin talks with a small group of the hikers, informing them of recent BLM policies, joking and sharing inside information, deftly answering environmental concerns and otherwise adroitly keeping an important constituency in his agency's corner. We pass a spot on the river where flash floods from a slot canyon last summer washed out a heavy-timbered footbridge over the Amargosa, heaving and tossing it upside down into the willows like a toy. While "scenic" may be debatable, no one can deny the wildness of the Amargosa. Heading back to the China Ranch trailhead, Mastin went on about BLM's plans for the area: a 15-mile biking trail from China Ranch through "the Grand Canyon of the Amargosa;" still nebulous plans for "adventure trail hiking" on the area's "lesser traveled trails" and, for the more seriously challenged hiker, "scramble trails" - the newest Internet thing in outdoor recreation, he said. As we pull up in the parking lot, I'm exhausted. But it's more from the exertion of trailing behind Mastin's unpackaging of the BLM's multiform plans for the area. However far we've hiked today, its undulating path is nothing compared to the agency's plotted course ahead. The Old Spanish Trail, once a route to get somewhere else, has become a destination unto itself. The BLM's "Hardening the sites" may be just a new way of expressing the sage advice of old: "Forewarned is forearmed." |
