The Liberty Gazette
December 26, 2023
Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely
Mike: In 1985, as a budding freight pilot, I flew a Piper Lance delivering checks and other bank mail. My route originated in Burbank with a layover in Blythe, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. I’d land at a few airports along the way, hopping from one to the next, where I’d pick up and drop off bags at locker vaults or with drivers who made local deliveries.
To reach Blythe, I flew through mountain passes and over the eastern Mojave Desert. I mostly approached Blythe from the northwest after departing Twentynine Palms and crossing Joshua Tree National Monument, which is now a National Park. This leg of my journey wasn’t very long, so I flew at a fairly low altitude.
On approach to Blythe one day, I noticed tracks etched into the sand below and assumed they’d come from motorcycles. Everyone I knew had seen the movie “On Any Sunday,” where Steve McQueen and others rode dirt bikes in off-road races, and the activity was all the rage. I saw that the trails and tracks were widespread and extensive, so the bikers must have been digging up the terrain for some time. Thereafter, each morning, I looked for those tracks and found more of them. Big circles, straight lines, and hundreds of donuts in the sand. They were everywhere.
One day, while on my layover, I went to the airport to take an FAA written test. The test examiner operated the flight school at Blythe. I mentioned how much damage those dirt bikers had done to the desert. The examiner seemed to glare at me. Then his facial features relaxed, and he explained. “They weren’t motorcycles,” he said. “Those tracks were made by tanks. Patton’s Army trained here during World War Two, and those scars are our history. And yes, we’re proud of them.” I felt embarrassed because of my initial assumptions. The desert’s dry air had preserved those indentations for more than forty years.
During WWII, a huge portion of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts in California and Arizona was designated the Desert Training Center (DTC). The weather and topography offered unique conditions for Patton to train his troops to face the German tank corps in Northern Africa and Sicily. After Patton left to fight in 1943, the DTC was renamed the California-Arizona Maneuvers Area. After the fall of Nazi Germany in 1944, the Army decommissioned the training area and returned the land to the Department of the Interior.
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Besides tank tracks, there are still ruins left in the desert from the twelve camps built within the boundaries of the DTC. The Bureau of Land Management maintains the area and its history. There is even a sky trail with nineteen points of interest strung along a route nearly 200 miles long, starting at the Patton Museum at Chiriaco Summit, about fifty miles west of Blythe.
From that day on, I looked for those tracks, the marks of our history, of winners in training, with respect.
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