Water in the Antelope Valley

A Tour of Sprinklers, Waterfalls, Gullies, and Sewage Ponds (Part I)

To quote one of my own poems, "For a desert, there sure is a lot of water here."

Do many people recognize this view, below? It's looking southwest from Piute Ponds, the marsh on Edwards Air Force Base. This is kept full and thriving by treated outflow from the big sewage plant on Ave. D. If we think of the Antelope Valley not as flat (since it isn't), and instead more like a pool table with one leg propped up on a small phone book, we can picture why this marsh is here. Historically there was surface flow of water from the Palmdale foothills where the landfill is now, up past the Mall, down through the Valley, collecting in a natural marshland near Edwards. To keep the lake bed dry for aviation, now dykes and berms collect that runoff into the wetlands called Piute Ponds, and natural drainage is supplemented with input from treated sewage. Don't laugh: all of Apollo Park is filled this way too.

For most of us, water comes more often in a package like this backyard shot below, and given the homes many of us prefer to have, we no more live in a desert than do the people in Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, or, for that matter, Des Moines. We take long showers and keep green lawns. Ours very much is a water-rich lifestyle.

I am not saying it's wrong to have a green lawn (not least of which, because this happens to be my own backyard); it's just the "desert" aspect is kept pretty far at bay, moreso than some people like to admit. We take pride in being "desert rats," yet are we really?

This motel below is named after a bigger desert even than ours. The water feature installment seems not to be going well.

God bless Sierra Highway. Without it, wouldn't you feel a bit let down? It makes all the rest of our neighborhoods seem so much nicer in comparison.

Besides pools and motels, we even have a goodly amount of wet weather, if we take the year as a whole. Pretty soon we can start looking forward to the late-summer Monsoon. Here in the AV it's not as reliable or drenching at Tucson's, but at times, we do get some picture-perfect clouds.

Don't you just love the smell of it, when summer rain first starts falling?

Winter rain tends to be colder, harder, longer, and more likely to wreck the commute to L.A. with piled up car crashes. I probably should not have taken this picture while driving.

Summer or winter, the rain causes flooding, and doesn't that always seem like an odd contradiction in the desert? For a while, this car had a "for sale" sign waggishly added.

What about this intersection? A lot of water moved through very quickly.

Ultimately our drinking water comes from snow --- more on that in the Part 2 post --- and usually once a winter the snow comes to us, direct delivery, no intermediary steps involved. Some day we will wake up on Christmas morning to this view.

Even more rare than snow is fog. Whenever we get a foggy morning, I like to find roads that go straight up into and disappear, just for the novelty of it. Some deserts, including Chile's Atacama, have fog and no rain; the neblina-based plants learn to accrue moisture right from the fog droplets.

Water is good for marketing. We do name schools and streets after desert plants, but a secret part of us still covets marshes, fells, lakes, and sinkholes.

Water lives in our folklore too. Does anybody remember the legend of Lake Una? One nickname is "bottomless pond." There would be a lovely picture of it here, except the AVC Blog believes in following all signs, even one that says "Keep Out."

Find a good lake, there is bound to be a sign. Welcome to America, land of "No Trespassing" signs. This is Holiday Lake, on the west side of the Antelope Valley, home in spring to a significant population of an endangered bird, the Tri-colored Blackbird.

You want lakes? Welcome to the Antelope Valley, Land of Lakes. Some days Lake Palmdale looks very properly green. This marks the San Andreas Fault and would have collected water naturally, where springs intersect with folds of the bedrock. Dams as far back as 1900 have added capacity. These days is a combination of a private hunt / fishing club and a water-storage site.

Alas, poor Lake Elizabeth, also on the San Adreas --- this was NOT a green day for it. You know it's bad luck when your lakes start to burn down.

As mentioned above, Apollo Park does have a lake and it is kept full from your toilet. Flush away: it all ends of at Ave D, and from there, either Piute Ponds or Apollo Park. The geese like it too.

 Do quarries count? Here's the view from Littlerock. All the groundwater fills a hole that has become the aggregate for somebody's freeway or lovely concrete driveway. To be honest, there might have been a "no trespassing" sign that I conveniently didn't read too closely.

Next, staying on that side of the Valley, see below. Littlerock Dam Lake looks a bit shoddy these days too. Drought and reservoirs don't match up. It took has endured a lot of fires. If it is possible for water to look ugly, that might be how to describe this view:

In good water years, the dam fills up so high that the water spills over the top.

 How small can a lake be before we call it a puddle? At least it catches the sunset nicely.

 
There's a secret part of Little Rock Creek I nearly don't want to share. Shot 1, "Secret Place." (Well, not secret to the taggers.)

Same place, different view. Shot 2. Call us a desert. Hah! We defy "desert." Do you like the artistic blur of falling water in this version of Secret Place Pond?

Up next? Palmdale Ditch . . . but first we need to let the Blog server catch its breath, given how many images have been uploaded into this stream. Part II of this subject will be where the water comes from and how we move it around.

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Photographs not credited to an outside source were taken by the blog curator, Charles Hood, Language Arts. He can be reached at chood@avc.edu. This blog does not represent the views of the Board of Trustees nor the District as a whole. To leave comments, you need to be logged into some kind of blogspot or gmail account, or so it seems. Sorry about that: it's just how the system is set up. Hood also can forward comments through email.

I Cut Off My Wife's Head (And Other Photographic Trends)

How to Become Trendy Without Even Meaning To

Last weekend my wife ran a race in Lone Pine, and while she was on the course, I did the important things, like paid the hotel bill and fed the dog sausage smuggled from the breakfast buffet. I intended to take my wife's picture at the end of the course and am well-prepared for this, since I own approximately 127 cameras --- none of which I had brought with me.

As the old joke goes, "What's the best model of camera?" Answer: "The one you have with you."

So I said, okay, dear, let me use your iPhone. The thing is, I am probably the last person in America who doesn't have an iPhone, and with the phone I do have, I don't take pictures. I don't even know how to turn on the camera feature that my phone does have (assuming it has a camera at all, which I am not sure about), and if I did take a picture, I wouldn't know how to send it to somebody. That's because I use phones for talking and cameras for making pictures: separate functions for separate tools. Even if Nikon offered a new model, the D-15,000 X, a camera that could send a fax, launch a weather balloon, and write haiku in four languages, I would not make use of all those features. Fuddy duddy that I am, I still would just use a phone to talk and a camera to take pictures.

That's fine, but ignorance has consequences. Later, when we got home, my wife said, "You dolt, you cut off my head!"

Hmm, well, nearly so. (Luckily, the next shot was better.)

But that made me think about the trend lately of headless bodies in fashion and editorial photography. National Geographic favors a "you are there" style now that loves to thrust the camera right into the middle of the action. That means bodies explode off the page in all directions, in a compositional style that makes me feel like I am in the middle of a rugby scrum. Look at this example from the current issue, May 2014, page 89.

It's hard to see in this blog format, but the implied action in the top shot is further reinforced by what's called a full-bleed layout. That means there's no white border: the image runs right up off the top of the page. These pictures were taken by Mike Hettwer, from an article called "The Ship-Breakers."

Here is another example, this time from a few issues ago. This is from National Geographic, June 2013, from an article about whalers in Norway.

The photo credit here goes to Marcus Bleasdale. Art classes still talk about the rule of thirds. In this style of photography, I guess that means "try to have at least a third of your subject jutting into the frame one way or another. Heads optional."

Fashion too now can dispense with a lot of the normal head-and-shoulders-ness of expected cropping. A magazine called PDN (Photo District News) runs award spreads of top images. Here is one they highlighted this week that first appeared in "The Cut," an online feature of New York magazine.

The caption on this is "scenes at Fashion Week"; photographer is Landon Nordeman. Here is another photo taken in New York, from a series titled "Skin on Parade in Central Park." This too was in New York magazine --- apparently, if you want to be in PDN, that's the place to start --- and the photographer was Christopher Anderson.

The caption notes that it was a day of 79-degree weather, which in New York must be so eagerly earned for after winter that if the thermometer reads anything north of 70, everybody flings off their clothes in joy. Should somebody tell them that here in the Antelope Valley it can be 80 degrees on Christmas morning?

With this photographic trend in mind, I pulled off the road in Acton to grab a shot of this billboard, shown below. It's by the train-themed restaurant, Vincent Hill Station, on the other side of the freeway from the Metrolink stop. Am I the only one who loves this? It just seems so refreshing.

When I took the picture a few days ago my sample ballot had not come, and I wondered if the billboard were a hoax. Near as I can tell, this is a shot of a real person, Navraj Singh, who is a 2014 Republican candidate seeking election to the U.S. House to represent the 25th Congressional District of California. He has run before (2012 and maybe 2008?), perhaps in other districts, and if he has a website up yet, I didn't find it. 

The photographer who took this is named John Milios and he assures me the "REAL" in the design is not irony. Here's what his email said: "The man on this billboard is a very kind, loving and caring man who came to this country with no money and built an empire.  He wants everyone to have the same opportunity he was afforded.  When elected, he has pledged to donate 100% of his salary to servicemen injured in Iraq."

John Milios also told me, "I spent years as a fashion/celebrity photographer where my subjects were staged as per corporate directive, thereby exposing only a small fraction of my talents.

By shooting REAL PEOPLE, it gives me the freedom to be creative and think outside the box."

I can admire that sensibility. Will it work in this case? Will it get the candidate elected? That I am less certain about, since I am not sure we can show any person in a turban and not have to address issues of ignorance and bias. As a society, America has been strangely slow in becoming able to distinguish between other religious traditions, be they Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, or any other faith. Personally, I think turbans are fabulous, and wish men wore them more often. Here is a photo I took in Rajasthan one winter morning. Pink never looked this good.

As for what all this means for the rest of us, I am sure we've all had that experience where you take a picture and it doesn't come out because one person has his or her eyes closed. There are bad hair days (we've all had them) and redeye from flash and expressions that make an otherwise sober person look drunk as a skunk.

Headless trends, carry on! What a relief not to need to get the face centered and smiling. 

A year ago, I had been trying to do a triggered-by-remote self-portrait in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (home of Burning Man), and hadn't gotten the framing figured out at all. You can see the remote trigger in my hand, or you could, if it was in the picture better. Even my truck isn't centered well. I thought this should have been a reject shot, but instead, now I can add it to my portfolio to show National Geographic. 

Until they call, I have made a vow to my wife: "Next race you run, I promise to have my camera. In fact, just to make sure, I will bring four. Just don't ask me to use that fiendishly complicated iPhone again."

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Photographs not credited to an outside source were taken by the blog curator, Charles Hood, Language Arts. He can be reached at chood@avc.edu. This blog does not represent the views of the Board of Trustees nor the District as a whole. To leave comments, you need to be logged into some kind of blogspot or gmail account, or so it seems. Sorry about that: it's just how the system is set up. Hood also can forward comments through email.

California City vs. AVC: Fancy Schemes and Never-built Dreams

an update on the third-largest city in California

There was a Willet this week in Cal City, that often-forgotten AVC feeder community way up on the 14 there past Mojave, Boron, and Edwards Air Force Base.

What's a Willet?

It's a seaside bird, at least it is for us here in Southern California. If you've been to the beach any month except maybe high summer (when it's too crowded to see any birds), you have come across these. They are basically the largest sandpipers on the beach, seen dozing on one leg in small flocks or maybe running along the water's edge, grabbing sand dabs. They're a New World species, and the Pilgrims called them humilities, since their blazing black and white wing pattern they kept hidden while on earth --- in appropriate Calvinist humility --- and they only showed their brightest patterns when in flight, which is to say, on their way to God.

Here is a picture from the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America.

This is a species one expects along any undisturbed stretch of midwinter beach. It is not a species one expect to see in the Mojave Desert.

But then California City is indeed a place of surprises.

By territorial claim, it's always listed as the third-largest city in California, something I will take on faith since I have never double checked. If you look on a map today, it seems indeed to have been a dream that was partially fulfilled. Here's a page from a DeLorme road atlas. On paper, it looks like a real city.

As a plan, California City was one of those "turn the desert into paradise" mad dreams that the early 1960s were so full of, as is documented by this old issue of Life magazine.

Then as now, the desert was a problem for the mainstream American culture. It was never good enough by itself. It always had to be conquered (or at least improved). Few people even now look out and say, "This place looks like a desert," and means it in a happy, approving way. We have to alter it, tame it, make it "productive." Hmm, well, maybe we do and maybe we don't, but that doesn't stop people from trying. Here is a picture of Hesperia and Cal City at their groundbreakings, from the same issue of Life.

There's what should be the real California motto at work: Dream large, since if you build it, maybe they will come. The initial developers laid the town boundaries out huge, a sort of New Carthage or New Rome. They wanted something like all of Irvine and Mission Viejo combined, or all of Tarzana, Encino, Sherman Oaks, and Lake Balboa.

It did not work out that way.

Cal City is known mostly for the houses that did not get built. The map's tidy boundaries and filled-in color not withstanding, Here's a very typical intersection today --- there are many dozens more just like it.

Some streets never even got this much. This view below of a road to nowhere is well within the "city limits" of California City, not far from the town center (aka McDonald's).

California City was going to be grander and stranger even than Palm Springs, at least on paper. It was going to be water-themed, among other features. Here the central Lake can be seen, as laid out in 1962.

You can do this if electricity is cheap (so it costs little to run pumps) and if the aquifer is close to the surface still and all that Pleistocene-era fossil water has not yet been drawn down.

As a child, I came out here in the mid-sixties, just on a day trip from Los Angeles. One came out Sierra Highway back then; the 14 Freeway had not been built yet. In my memory it took days and days; it's possible we even overnighted in Barstow or Palmdale. My parents had come out to visit family friends, as I think the husband had gotten a job doing something with cement. The kids seemed to like it okay but my memory is of utter desolation. I distinctly remember the mom of the family complaining about trying to keep the sand from blowing inside the house. She described it building up in small drifts, in the corners. It may even have been as a joke, or I may have misheard the grownups completely. I had a childish and horrified vision of their entire house being buried in wind-blown sand overnight, and them waking up in the morning, utterly lost under a dune, with the weight of it all so heavy they couldn't push open the door.

Too many late night sci-fi thrillers on our black and white tv gave me that I guess. Even today, though, parts of the Cal City area still fit that nightmare.

It was really windy when I took this shot: I got a mouthful of sand, as did, I am sure, the innards of my fancy Nikon. This is on the Cantil side of town. Here's another pair of shots.

This shot (above) should have been an embedded video clip (not a still photo) in order to show the sand scooting across the highway in the 30 mph wind. The sign was vibrating in the wind and the wind even had a whooshy, howling sort of sound to it. This next shot below tries to do a forward-and-backward-at-same-time effect.

Please, if you're on the Board of Directors for the Chamber of Commerce, don't email me: I am reporting this with affection, not disrespect. First of all, after that initial childhood visit with my family, I did come back, and often so, because the birdwatching is quite interesting. I even debated buying a house in California City.

Second: I married into it, in that my wife grew up there. Here is Abbey with her brother Raymond.

My wife's folks still live in Cal City, so you can trust that I am very respectful about this place. At the same time, the dreams were so large and grand initially, it's hard not to smile, at least a little bit. A book titled Never Built Los Angeles looks at the museums, freeways, monorail systems, and housing tracts that were proposed but never completed. I just got it at Barnes & Noble in Lancaster, using a birthday gift card from history teacher Matthew Jaffe. Thanks, Dr. Jaffe!

According to this book's text, the planned civic center would have rivaled the Getty Museum. My scans have a lot of "blow back" of reflected light, but I hope you can make out some details anyway. Here is the from-above view and, below, the "inside-looking-out" view.

Here's the other picture.

What the book says is this. The project was titled "California City Civic Center," and was designed by Konrad Wachsmann. His "technologically elaborate design for the civic center would have used high-tension cables strung between massive abutments to form a 192-foot-long floating roof. The 1.5 inch cables, each tensioned at 105,000 pounds, were secured by steel anchorages, able to resist a thrust of 1 million pounds. According to Wachsmann's calculations, the cables could resist winds of 100 miles an hour."

I know what you're thinking: that the winds really do get up into that range out there. The design isn't strong enough. "100 mph" sounds exotic and safe, but isn't adequate. I found a source on the Internet that claimed gusts to 90 in nearby Mojave, and I myself have been there when the wind was doing 60 (as verified by the National Weather Service). Well, never mind all that, let's get on with our fantasy tour.

"Ten roof panels, made of fiberglass and filled with urethane foam, would be stitched together using a neoprene expansion joint, forming a roof skin that was incredibly light yet strong. Wachsmann wrote that 'the insertion of essentially unlimited variations of enclosed spaces' was possible under the open, plastic roof. Public and private spaces could be built, expanded, and rearranged as the city saw fit."

Ah, such is the stuff dreams are made of, indeed. In contrast, here is the City Hall as it actually exists today. It features that stucco-tile-storefront look, a look vaguely quoting Mission Revival but diluted nearly beyond recognition. At least the parking lot has been newly repaved, and the grass, more or less, is greening up nicely.

Before we mock them, it pays to remember that the Lancaster Campus of AVC dates from the same time. Indeed, oral tradition holds that when it was laid out here at 30th and K, locals all scratched their heads. "Watcha building it all the way out there, fur?? Ain't no roads even go all the way out thar."

And even though main campus has turned out fine, we still have our own private fantasy dream, the undeveloped parcel adjacent to the San Andreas Fault that is supposed to be the Palmdale Campus. Here's the actual site:

Will this be a college campus ever?

I have my doubts, and the seismic issue is just one of many to deal with.

Meanwhile, despite the empty roads I showed above, California City did build its central park. Some of the Cal City lake complex is still there, hence the rare ocean bird, that Willet, that showed up this week. Here are photos I took with my wife just a few days ago.

On a recent visit, and unlike previous trips, even the waterfall on the park's central hill was "on," or at least (like George Harrison's guitar), weeping gently. It is hard to get a shot of it, due to the many sections of the park that are fenced off due to disrepair, that arching pedestrian bridge included. The waterfall is the smeary green bit, in the middle of the frame below. Birds like to drink from it, and if you listen hard, it generates a soothing trickling sound.

Alas, some of the park has not done well at all. I remember the Lake Shore Inn, where my wife's family once worked. $4000-per-person birdwatching tours used to stay there. Times change, and it resembles a sort of Detroit kind of situation now, or parts of besieged Syria. Other than as a hideout for illicit raves, it remains in a grim state indeed.

 I have to agree with an elderly resident, out to walk her dog. She saw my fancy camera when I was here recently, and she assumed I was from the AV Press or some very august and powerful investigative organization at that level. (60 Minutes? The NSA?) She hoped the images could be linked to a forceful editorial, demanding that the eyesore be taken down.

Consider this blog to be on your side on this, madam. Speaking for myself and not the AVC Board of Trustees, I hereby call on Cal City to DO SOMETHING with this site. It faces the lake: even just a gravel parking lot and a few benches would be fine.

You can't fault the initial City Fathers from trying, though. Shakespeare's own Globe theatre should never have thrived --- and indeed, without Shakespeare himself and the language-drunk, sexualized, anything-goes delirium that was Elizabethan England, it later failed as well. True, it burned down, was rebuilt, and initially did okay, but in the end, it too failed, just like the Lake Shore Inn.

There's a common roadside plant of our rural roads here in the high desert, the sacred datura or jimsonweed. Here shown below is one that I saw in California City, on the road to the airport. Another word for them is angel trumpet, and yet another, moonflower. This is a toxic, highly poisonous plant that Native Americans at times used for hallucinogenic trances. DO NOT TRY IT. It is lethally poisonous: don't mess about with this, even a little bit. It can be fatally toxic, even in minute doses. Shamans knew what they were doing; you do not. But I mention it since it seems to be an appropriate plant for us, given our history of dreaming big and wanting to connect Palmdale to LAX by 300 mph bullet trains, wanting to deliver mail by dirigible, hoping to turn California City into the Venice of the High Desert, or any of the other wild dreams that have been proposed, partially built, and later abandoned.

God bless plucky and beat-up California City, perhaps the most accurately named township in all of the Golden State.

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Photographs not credited to an outside source were taken by the blog curator, Charles Hood, Language Arts. He can be reached at chood@avc.edu. This blog does not represent the views of the Board of Trustees nor the District as a whole. To leave comments, you need to be logged into some kind of blogspot or gmail account, or so it seems. Sorry about that: it's just how the system is set up. Hood also can forward comments through email.

Fun Things to Do in the Middle of the Night

(at least when there is an eclipse---as there soon will be)

We have a total eclipse of the moon coming up, and here in the Antelope Valley, we have great skies for just such an event.

I am always a big fan of spectacular experiences, especially when they are free. Mark your calendars because we have a big, fun, spectacular, free sky show due to come our way next week.

Courtesy of Griffith Observatory (and more about them in just a moment), here is the schedule for what we can expect.

If you have binoculars or any kind of beat up telescope, that's even better. But just with one's own eyes, this will be overhead, and this time of year, odds are, it will be a clear night. For the best effect, go a few minutes out of town, away from the brightest lights. If you're in your own backyard, be sure to turn off the house lights (or close the blinds) and turn off the porchlights. Give yourself a few minutes so your eyes adapt, but soon you'll be able to see just fine. Most people way over-illuminate their nighttimes; as primates, we evolved to see fairly well in the dark, if we can just give ourselves a chance to try it out.

As you can see from the chart, the best action is around midnight. Unlike during a solar eclipse, no filters are needed: it's safe to look at the uneclipsed or the eclipsed moon all you wish.

There is a lot of debate about the exact mechanics of how eclipses happen.

Here is a diagram from a book called Discovering the Universe by Neil Comins and William Kaufmann.

Looking closely you can see the process is basically like this: the sun is a very round, ripe lemon; the Heavenly Father / Mother shines a flashlight down, causing the dragon to swallow its tail. When enough people beat pots and pans in their front yards, the dragon gets scared and runs off, knocking over the flashlight. The eclipse is then over.

For an alternate perspective---oh geez, everybody has to get out an opinion---you can go down to Griffith Observatory that night and use the telescopes there. They will no doubt have some fairy tale about the shadow of the earth and all of that: well, it's a free country and you may believe whatever you wish. From their website, here is more information:

Griffith Observatory Hosts Public Viewing of Lunar Ecipse

April 14-15, 2014 / 7:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.

Admission is Free 

Activities

•     Building, roof, and Zeiss telescope OPEN
•     Lawn telescopes, binoculars, and naked eye viewing from lawn, sidewalks, and terraces
•     Shows in the Samuel Oschin Planetarium (7:45 p.m., 8:45 p.m., 10:15 p.m., 11:15 p.m.)
•     Café at the End of the Universe and Stellar Emporium OPEN (starting at 7:00 p.m.)
•     LiveStream of the eclipse live from the Zeiss dome on Griffith Observatory's LiveStream page.
•     Special presentation about the Moon with Griffith Observatory Curator, Dr. Laura Danly, and Griffith Observatory Astronomical Observer, Anthony Cook. Joint program with the Los Angeles Astronomical Society.

What if there's a snow storm or a sudden flurry of dragon poop? See their website for more contingency plans, but trust me, they've thought of everything. One prediction I can make is that it will be crowded; you can see more details about which access roads will be open on their web page, but be prepared to have to park a bit of the way down the hill and walk up to the summit. Given the possibility of a marine layer in Los Angeles proper (and the huge amount of light pollution), if you have binoculars and a lawn chair, this might be a fine event just to watch from home. It's too soon yet to know what the weather will be like: both L.A. and Palmdale show a 10% chance of rain on Monday.

The eclipse will be visible across almost the entire continental United States, most of Canada and Central America and parts of South America.  You could always go out to Death Valley --- if we are statistically more likely to be clear than L.A., think how much better Death Valley's odds are compared to ours.

We may be in a drought year water-wise but not for eclipses: if you sleep through your alarm for this one, you have another shot this coming October.

To repeat what Alan MacRobert said in the Los Angeles Times, "Whether you have a small telescope, a pair of binoculars or even just your naked eye --- you'll be seeing part of the geometry of the cosmos happening right in front of your eyes."

I do agree with him on that, but of course we have another vantage point to imagine. At some point in the future, humans will be watching a different series of eclipses . . . from the surface of the moon.

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The AVC Blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts, and he can be reached at chood@avc.edu. This blog does not represent the views of the Board of Trustees or the District as a whole. To leave comments, you need to be logged into some kind of blogspot or gmail account, or so it seems. Sorry about that: it's just how the system is set up. Hood also can forward comments through email.