Muroc & Edwards: Where the Sky Cracked Open

Look east, out past Rosamond and the Joshua trees. Hidden beyond the low hills is Rogers Dry Lake, a 44-square-mile sheet of clay so flat that locals say it's "level as a billiard table." For thousands of years this was Indigenous country. The Kawaiisu, centered near Tehachapi, ranged east across the desert on gathering trips, while the Serrano, Kitanemuk and other Shoshonean peoples camped along the shifting shoreline of what was once a real lake. Archaeologists have logged over 450 prehistoric sites on this ground.

The modern name came from settlers. Around 1910 the Corum family homesteaded the lakebed and wanted a post office named for themselves. When the Post Office rejected "Corum" (too close to Coram, California), they simply reversed the letters: Muroc.

In 1933, Lt. Col. Henry "Hap" Arnold saw the dry lake as a giant ready-made runway and turned it into the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range. With 350 flyable days a year, it became the nation's secret proving ground. On October 14, 1947, Captain Chuck Yeager was air-dropped from a B-29 in the orange, bullet-shaped Bell X-1 he'd named "Glamorous Glennis" and became the first person to fly faster than sound, Mach 1.06, in the sky above this lakebed.

The base was renamed in 1949 for Captain Glen Edwards, a test pilot killed when the futuristic Northrop YB-49 flying wing broke apart near Muroc on June 5, 1948. NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center (formerly Dryden) sits on the same shore. And from 1981 to 2009, Space Shuttle orbiters glided silently down to land here, fifty-four operational missions plus the early Enterprise tests, double sonic booms announcing each homecoming over the Mojave.