China Lake: Secret Missiles and Ancient Art

Off to your east lies a 1.1-million-acre stretch of locked desert: Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. US-395 runs right along its western edge. The Navy took over this remote basin in November 1943, drawn by what one document called near-perfect flying weather and unlimited visibility. Caltech physicist Charles Lauritsen and Navy commander Sherman Burroughs picked the spot to test rockets far from prying eyes, naming it the Naval Ordnance Test Station.

The base became the Navy's premier weapons laboratory, holding roughly 85 percent of all the land the service uses for armament research. Its most famous child is the Sidewinder, the heat-seeking air-to-air missile that reshaped aerial combat. It was largely the brainchild of physicist Bill McLean, whose underfunded team did much of their early work in their own garages and reportedly tested the seeker head by bolting it outside a car window and chasing infrared sources down the road. The first successful intercept came on January 9, 1954. Zuni rockets, Shrike, Walleye, HARM, and JDAM followed.

But the range guards something far older. In the Coso Range to the north sits the Coso Rock Art District, the largest concentration of petroglyphs in North America. Estimates run from 50,000 documented images to well over 100,000, pecked into dark basalt over thousands of years; some may be 10,000 years old or more. Bighorn sheep dominate, alongside masked human figures and abstract patterns. Scholars debate their meaning, from hunting magic to archaeologist David Whitley's argument that shamans carved them during visionary trance. These are the work of the ancestors of today's Numic-speaking Paiute and Shoshone peoples, who hold the canyons sacred. Ironically, the military lockdown has preserved the art beautifully. The Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest has historically run limited guided tours into Little Petroglyph Canyon, though base access comes and goes.