Ridgecrest: Rockets, Petroglyphs, and a Restless Earth

Look east across the Indian Wells Valley and you're looking at one of California's stranger origin stories. The town out there began around 1912 as a tiny farming and dairy settlement called Crumville, named for the Crum brothers, James and Robert, who ran dairy cattle in this dust. For decades it was almost nothing. Then World War II rewrote the map.

In November 1943 the Navy and Caltech needed somewhere vast, dry, and empty to test the rockets and aviation ordnance pouring out of wartime labs. They found it here, founding the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, named, fittingly, for Chinese prospectors who had once worked borax from the dry lakebed at a place locals called the Little Chinese Borax Works. The base became the cradle of American naval weapons: beginning in the late 1940s its engineers developed the Sidewinder (named in 1950), the most widely used air-to-air missile in history. Today China Lake is the Navy's single largest landholding. Crumville renamed itself Ridgecrest in 1941 and incorporated in 1963.

Long before any of this, the Coso Range just north of town held one of the densest concentrations of rock art on the continent, more than 100,000 petroglyphs, many of them bighorn sheep, pecked into dark basalt over thousands of years. Archaeologists tie them to ancestral Numic peoples, the Shoshone and Paiute, and read the sheep not as a hunting tally but as figures from origin stories and the work of rain shamans. The canyons are now a National Historic Landmark, protected inside the closed base.

The valley is also seismically alive. On July 4 and 5, 2019, two earthquakes, a magnitude 6.4 foreshock and a 7.1 mainshock, tore the ground northeast of here, the strongest in Southern California in two decades. Ridgecrest lost power and saw gas fires; nearby Trona was hit harder, with homes knocked off foundations. The fault ruptures are still visible from the air.