"Where in North America?" --- Section IV

[CalOldBlue]

Always wanted to go down that road; maybe next trip.

Zzyzx. AKA Cal State Desert Studies Center. AKA Soda Springs.

[Mark Sedenquist]

Curtis "Doc" Springer was essentially a squatter who spent a small fortune in the mid-1940's fixing up the abandoned army base known as Fort Soda Springs into the heath spa he named Zzyzx Mineral Springs. On this page, we have a photo of the original sign for his resort (long since gone now). The name of the actual road in the photo is the Blvd. of Dreams.... (I always liked that...)

If you stop by the Visitor Center for the Mojave Preserve at the Kelso Train Station -- they have some very cool audio clips from his radio program that he used to promote the wondrous healing properties of the water at Zzyzx.

Shortly after Doc got the place all fixed up, the Federal government started taking action to remove him from the place, (it was a sweetheart of a place to go and R&R) and the improvements looked pretty good to the local Federal employees.... After some questionable due process, he was evicted in 1974 and eventually convicted of some equally questionable food and drug law violations and spent several months in jail. After his release he moved to Las Vegas and died in 1986.

(Here's a photo I took during a aerial reconnaissance flight I commissioned in support of the "Road to Vegas" book project I was working on)

Mark

[Mark Sedenquist]

But there is something kinda of peculiar about this cow.... Have you seen this on your travels?

(photo by Megan Edwards)....
And I'll even throw in the first hint -- A visual clue that might help (and, no, that is not a working windmill....)

(Another photo by Megan Edwards)

[Eris]

Don’t like the look of that last cow – doesn’t look as though it produces much milk.

[Mark Sedenquist]

But there is a direct correlation between the first cow and the second cow...

Mark

[Mark Sedenquist]

This is, yet again, near another border crossing of a two western states and that cow is a source of some significant import to this town....

Mark

[Southwest Dave]

To stop you milking this any longer, it's on the 373 in Armagosa valley and is said to have been taken from the top of the Holy Cow Brewery in Las Vegas to it's new location, an out of town casino. I am not totally and udderly sure but that could be the Funeral mountains in the background?

Mmm, I am referring to the second photo, not sure about the first cow !

[Mark Sedenquist]

Yep, Southwest Dave, you are correct about the large bovine cow near the windmill. But the cow in the shed is extraordinarily large and I'm not really sure how and why it got that big. Perhaps it was crossbred with a charolais -- but I've never seen a hostein dairy cow this big before. It's larger than most horses....

Mark

[Eris]

Here is a large Friesian in the UK (called Hostein in USA) so they can be big animals.

The trouble is with some journalists they don’t know the difference between a girl and a boy. My grandfather was a dairy farmer so I know if you start putting your hands in the wrong place you can soon become unstuck. The so called cow in the newspaper picture is a boy not a girl - maybe not a complete boy but still boy steer.

And, although not completely clear, my guess is that the hostein in the pen is a boy steer and not a girl cow.

[CalOldBlue]

Well; I've got 30 years of photography scattered around my "office" as I try to sort and categorize.

Pending bringing some order from that chaos, here's a more current shot.

What is this, what movie was it in, and why?


Photo: Don Casey