Approximately 5 miles east of 29 Palms, Calif. looking west.
My good friend, who hosts an annual Spring party in this piece of desert, gives me a break from the city with his invitation to come out to his 5 acre spread, year after year. I think its up to 25 years of these gatherings in an area known as Wonder Valley where aging homestead shacks are either abandoned, seasonally occupied, or resided in by the most hearty desert rats year round.
Most of these houses were built in the 1950's to qualify for free land under a homesteading act. The structure had to be built within a given time, and meet certain building standards. Most houses were put up to the minimum allowable standard, and rarely or never visited again. It can be difficult to know the exact status of these homesteads at times. Does someone come out to inhabit their house once or twice a year? If not regularly occupied, the shacks gradually concede to vandals and the harsh conditions of the desert.
The sky this late April afternoon in 2010, with it's evolving clouds, began with a row of random clouds that eventually joined into one contiguous veil above the horizon. I was a student of the aerial desert that day.
Jim Staub 2012
