End Pavement

From the LA Times, a story in miniature of what the State of California hopes to do for the entire Salton Sea — and done by one determined woman.

“Part of Salton Sea’s desolate shore made into a lush oasis”

[Debi] Livesay is no scientist. She’s a former journalist with a gift for big ideas, a talent for securing grants and total self confidence.

As the Salton Sea dwindles, pesticide-laced sediments have blown over the reservation, exposing thousands of tribal members and other nearby residents to toxic chemicals. In 2001, Livesay, the tribe’s head of water resources, was charged with finding a solution.

“We can’t afford to have the Salton Sea dry out or people couldn’t live here anymore,” she said. “It would be 200 times bigger than Owens Lake. All you need is an inch of water to keep the dust settled. So I said, ‘Let’s make a wetland.’”

It wasn’t easy by any means, and despite the great success there are still challenges, especially from illegal hunters who prowl the outskirts of the new wetlands, killing birds indiscriminately and leaving their bodies. Not to mention the dumping that has been going on for decades, leaving the Torres Martinez reservation “one of the most polluted in the West.”

Even so, as the toxic cleanup continues, Livesay is navigating the jurisdictional issues to get poachers arrested…and amazing things are happening out there in the desert.

She cut the engine.

“Wait until you go around the corner,” she said. “You have never seen anything like it.”

A few feet away, birds were thick as mosquitoes. They floated in dark, choppy water and buzzed about like feathery missiles.

“You have birds here that shouldn’t be here, birds from Canada all the way down to Central America,” she said. “People come from all over the world to see this sight. There is no other place like it. And that’s why we have to preserve it.”

Back in April last year, I posted about the Malibu Creek State Park trails where you can visit the old locations of M*A*S*H — Sightseeing is painless: The M*A*S*H Hike.

In this LA Times story today, “‘MASH’ camp comes alive”, the news comes that state officials want to re-create the sets as an attraction, since so many visitors come to see them for that reason and come away disappointed.

Of course, it wasn’t just M*A*S*H that was filmed at the park,

The park’s 6,000-plus acres have been the backdrop for thousands of movie and TV scenes since 1927, when it became the Scottish Highlands for a silent movie called “Annie Laurie” that starred Lillian Gish.

It doubled for Wales in 1941’s best-picture Oscar winner, “How Green Was My Valley” and was Shangri-La in 1937’s “Lost Horizon.”

It was the backdrop for a primate-run world in “Planet of the Apes” in 1968 and where “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” were chased over a cliff by a pursuing posse in 1969.

But it is “MASH” that matters most to park visitors, who come from all over the world to see for themselves the Korean wartime world inhabited by Hawkeye, Hot Lips, BJ, Trapper John and the others who filled out the landmark black comedy’s on-camera Army surgical team.

They’re even considering special overnight camping arrangements with possible screenings of the show — projected onto a bed sheet, naturally.

Whatever one thinks of the idea, it certainly seems a unique enough reason to go for a stroll in the great outdoors.