Next stop on this desert road trip in October 2004 - the Desert View Tower and Boulder Park off Old Highway 80. Here's some of the signs and plaques in that area.
In case you can't read it from my crappy lo-res picture, here's the verbiage:
MOUNTAIN SPRINGS STATION SITE
"In 1862-70, about a mile north of here, Peter Larkin and Joe Stancliff used a stone house as a store from which ox teams pulled wagons up a 30% grade. The San Diego and Fort Yuma Turnpike Co. used the site as a toll road station until 1876. The crumbling house was replaced in 1917 by another still visible to its east. But road changes, beginning in 1878 and culminating in today's highway, have left the older stone house ruins inaccessible.
California Registered Historical Landmark No. 194
Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with Imperial Valley Pioneers and Squibob Chapter, E Clampus Vitus
April 27, 1991"
In case you can't read it from my crappy lo-res picture, here's the verbiage:
DESERT TOWER
"Bert Vaughn of Jacumba built the stone tower in 1922-23 to commemorate the pioneers and road and railroad builders who opened the area. In the 1930' s W.T. Ratcliffe carved the stone animal figures which lurk in the rocks surrounding the tower, creating a fantasy world of surprise and strange beauty. This remarkable sculptural assemblage is one of California's exceptional folk art environments.
California Registered Historical Landmark No. 939.
Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with Imperial Valley Pioneers and Squibob Chapter, E Clampus Vitus,
May 5, 1984"
