The Cross In A Box On A Rock Goes To The Supreme Court

Here's Darcy climbing on the rocks across the road from the parking lot for the Teutonia Peak trail, one of the few official, maintained trails in Mojave National Preserve. The rocks and the parking lot are right on the side of Cima Road and the rocks -- and the box on top of them -- are clearly visible from the road in both directions and from the trail itself. The box covers up a cross that has been the center of a legal debate for a decade or more. The cross is claimed as a veterans' memorial by regional veterans' groups, but has been challenged as violating the separation of church and state because it is on public land, Mojave National Preserve to be exact.
A judge ordered the cross covered with the box while its fate is decided in court.

Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments about the Mojave cross. The article continues the myth that this is in a "remote" part of the preserve, which is far from the truth. It is 10 or 11 miles from the intersection with Interstate 15, on a paved road. Considering how few paved roads there are in the preserve and how much of the preserve requires miles of driving on dirt roads, this is hardly a remote part of the park. Mojave National Preserve is 1.6 million acres of land, with only three paved roads entering from the northern side. The cross is about 30 feet from one of three ways people can enter the park from a major interstate.

I have some sympathy for veterans who have visited the cross as a memorial over the decades and I could get behind a compromise solution that allowed some other kind of memorial (a flat plaque, for example) to be placed in the same spot. Without the cross. I've driven past the rocks when someone had (illegally) removed/destroyed the box. It's out of place in the middle of a national park property, especially because so much of the land around it is federally designated wilderness. It is a jarring sight and it is very visible from a distance, with or without the box.

I do hope that the Supreme Court decides that the cross be removed, both because I think it shouldn't be there and because of the larger question of religious symbols on public lands.

If you have the stomach for it, there's a video on YouTube about the cross from the "other side" of the argument. It's blatant propaganda as far as I'm concerned because it works very hard to make it seem like you have to drive across miles of salt flats and dirt roads to get to the cross (so how could anyone be offended by it?!), which couldn't be farther from the truth. It also carefully avoids mentioning Mojave National Preserve, describing the land only as "federal" public lands.

Let me just add that Michael is not going to see this post before it goes up on the blog. As an employee of the preserve, he has to be more careful with his opinion than I do with mine. My opinion does not represent Michael or any other employee of Mojave National Preserve.

Teutonia Peak

Rocks. To climb.

Rocks. To sit under and snack.

Yes, if there are rocks, Darcy and Michael will climb them. Always. We took a morning hike on the Teutonia Peak trail a couple weeks ago. Part of the motivation was a recent mountain lion sighting about half-way up the peak. It's a rocky, wonderful habitat for mountain lions and it's exciting that one has been seen up there. Not by us, of course. We saw some wildflowers and some cacti thinking about producing some flowers. We had a good time scrambling around rocks and hiking.

And when we got home, we were back with our own carpet of teeny tiny flowers. They really are visible in the picture. Or, they were before I uploaded it to Blogger. You can get a bigger picture by clicking on it and then you're looking for itty bitty purple blooms. They're everywhere, but not actually native. They were introduced a few hundred years ago by those dang traveling Europeans.

And, just in case you missed the wonderful news today -- the EPA has suspended almost all mountain-top mining permits while they study the damage the practice does to the surroudning environment and watersheds!! Our new president might not be doing everything absolutely right, but he's doing some good, good things. Also suspended today? The Bush rules allowing concealed guns in national parks.

Obama's Day of Service: Toddler-Style

President-Elect Obama, as most of you no doubt know, called for a day of service today, and Darcy and I answered the call! Friends of ours through our Meetup group announced that they were going to help clean up some dunes near the Las Vegas airport, so we decided to join them. Darcy and Freyja helped a lot -- by carrying small trash bags for a hundred feet or so and losing most of the small pieces of trash they put in them. Good work, toddlers! The rest of the time, they played in the sand or, in Darcy's case, followed dogs.

After all that work, they were tuckered out, so they took a well-earned rest in the shade of a creosote bush. It was a pretty warm day and due to an exploding juice box that left a sticky lake in my backpack, we weren't carrying water with us.

Their rest was interupted by the arrival of these three dogs -- the same dogs Darcy had been following earlier in the adventure. Darcy wanted to pet them and invite licks, but Freyja wasn't quite so sure. Along with our two big and two small bags of trash, the group collected a few truck-loads! As we left, the organizer of the clean-up told us that they're in the process of turning that little dunes area into a nature reserve/center, so this was a good first step.

While the turnout (over twenty people came out to just this one of several service projects in Las Vegas) was encouraging, we also saw signs of the bad economy. We left a pile of "trash" that was pretty clearly someone's home, complete with a blowup mattress and cooler. We refrained from collecting the empty bottles and such that were scattered under the same thorn bush to avoid an invasion of what little privacy someone living in a park has. I can't imagine that Las Vegas is a very friendly place to be homeless. Probably the soon-to-be-nature-center would have preferred that we remove that, but it didn't feel in keeping with the spirit of Obama's inauguration or Dr. King's holiday.