Protecting Pioneertown Mountains
David Myers
President
The Wildlands Conservancy
The Sawtooth Mountains at Pioneertown Mountains Preserve. Photo by Jack Thompson.
Pioneertown was named after a row of wood façade-fronted buildings on “Mane Street,” built in 1946 for filming western movies. When the Pioneertown film corporation defaulted on a loan, 10,000 acres of spectacular rock formations, volcanic mesas, pinyon pine-forested mountains and Joshua tree-covered flats, were foreclosed on by the owners of two Los Angeles car dealerships. The heart of this 10,000 acres was Pipes Canyon, a rare water-blessed canyon on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Today it’s hard to imagine Pipes Creek before the days of climate-caused drought, when the stream flowed to the mouth of the canyon into a large aquamarine pond, known to the locals as Yucca Beach, where scores of people swam in the blissful water each day until the end of summer.
When the land was left vacated by the car dealers, Yucca Beach became a party center for drug use, and the two-mile Pipes Canyon stream was a destination for hundreds of ATV’s that raced in the creek, destroying the streamside vegetation. Automatic weapons echoed throughout the canyon all day long. When someone shot the steel outhouse at Pipes Canyon Campground until it looked like a lettuce strainer, the Forest Service abandoned the campground. A dedicated game warden tried to stop the free-for-all of poachers, and the poachers mocked him by staking a doe’s head to a post.
When the absentee car dealers put the 10,000 acres up for sale, it was optioned by two conservationist brothers, who recruited like-minded conservationists by placing land ads in the L.A. Times which ended “to conservation-minded buyers only.” This new group of idealistic landowners dreamed big, and they wanted to share this landscape, which rivals Joshua Tree National Park, with the public. They built a rock wall to secure Pipes Canyon and individually took turns patrolling the canyon.
These landowners fell under the spell of Pioneertown’s enchanted scenery and felt that the wilderness they restored should never again be violated—not even with their own planned houses which they designed to be invisibly absorbed into the landscape. Together they founded The Wildlands Conservancy (TWC), and a couple of these landowners became its generous benefactors. Pipes Canyon was TWC’s first preserve, until the preserve was expanded in every direction and renamed Pioneertown Mountains Preserve. Today the 24,000-acre Pipes Canyon Wilderness is the largest nonprofit-owned wilderness in West. At the entrance to Pipes Canyon is a trailhead, a picnic area, a ranger station with a public restroom, and The Wildlands Conservancy’s friendly staff to assist you, the inheritors of this dream.