Bouse Museum as you drive up to it from Highway 72.
While staying so close to Bouse, I decided to take the opportunity to explore the village a bit. I must play tourist at least once while I’m down in the desert! There is a long history of mining and some interesting WWII history in the Bouse area. I also took advantage of the motorcycle to meet up with some friends at a bar in the middle of nowhere. History, with food and drink to wash it all down!
Mini tank, me and Carolyn for scale.
I visited the Bouse Museum, which is quite good for such a small village. There are indoor and outdoor displays, covering the two major influences on the area: mining and WWII. The museum building follows this structure, having one room that covers primarily mining themes, and one room that covers WWII history for the area. The miniature tank just begs for some people photos – how do you tell the scale otherwise?
I do have some of these rocks in my collection
Yes, it’s only a two room museum, but it is free. You can spend quite a bit of time even with two rooms – they are packed with interesting bits of history. I took note of the rock collection, seeing that I did have a fair number of the more interesting rocks in my possession from my previous rock collection expeditions. As with a lot of towns in the west, Bouse had a boom period when it was bigger than it is now. There is a two story hotel foundation remaining beside the museum as evidence of better days.
The military room, including a display of the super secret light weapon
Bouse has an interesting little side note in WWII history. The military had the bright idea that tanks could be fitted with super blinding arc lamps. Shine the beam at the enemy to blind them, giving you the momentary advantage to pounce! The camp for the development of this secret weapon was about 15 miles away from Bouse out in the middle of the desert. There isn’t much for towns out here; Bouse was the closest at 15 miles as the crow flies.
Arc light. The black tips have a bright arc of electricity pass between them
The military build a whole camp in the middle of nowhere, complete with tanks for training maneuvers using the potential weapon. The museum has a display of the light fixture that was developed. You can drive some gravel roads out 20 miles to the former camp, which is mostly foundations and rock piles remaining these days. The military kept permanent structures to a minimum out there to mimic real desert combat conditions for the troops. So why have you not heard about this chapter of WWII history before? The military decided that the disadvantage of a bright beam of light advertising your tank outweighed the potential offensive potential and canned the whole thing after about a year. Not every innovation attempted during WWII resulted in some great combat advantage or new beneficial technology. This light is but one of many dead ends from WWII.
Sandy the tank. I’m not the only one that can do puns.
There is more history in the area, but it is spread out a bit. You can drive or walk 100 meters from the museum back to Highway 72 and hang a right for the rest area display. Or you can go left to the tanks and monuments. Those two are also about 100 meters apart, so you’ll get a bit of exercise if you walk to all three.
As the camp was a tank training ground, Bouse has a few historical examples of tanks. You’ll pass Monument Row on Highway 72 to get to the tanks from the museum.
The donkey monument is obvious
The monuments beside the tanks tell the stories of the military groups that were in the area. Most of them are versions of ‘we trained here, then fought in these places in WWII’ but there are a few quirky ones, like the monument to the mascot donkey of the camp. To think, almost all of these people who lived in the war are gone now. I remember when you could talk to any older military fellow and get his WWII story. Now we can only read and watch recordings of them recounting their tales.
Rest area mining locomotive
On the other side of the road that goes to the museum, up the 72, you’ll see the Bouse Rest Area. It’s a little different from your standard rest area, in that there is a good display of old mining equipment, mostly focused on railroad gear. It’s an eclectic collection of old gear mostly unexplained unfortunately. But the displays are still interesting, even if you don’t know what everything was.
Lots of traffic, lots of dust
My other adventure involved an extended ride on the Grom motorcycle to visit a bar out in the middle of the desert. This isn’t exactly some secret destination only the locals know about, the Nellie E Saloon, aka Desert Bar has over 900 reviews as of this writing on its googles pin. But it is still an adventure to go there, especially on a mini-moto! Being a popular weekend destination (only open then) I expected some traffic on the road. Despite heading up right at opening, the road was still busy enough that I had to pick a gap between car groups. The road is bad washboard and dusty, but navigable by pretty much anything other than really low clearance vehicles.
Definitely not moving ever again
Your first clue that you are getting close is the old car buried in the wash just as you come in sight of the bar complex. It is composed of several buildings, only one of which is the original bar that serves alcohol. The other stands are for ordering food. The prices are high, but what do you expect for something that only runs on weekends and is down a rough gravel road? The food is good though. I tried someone else’s fries and they were excellent. My pulled pork sami was top notch.
Desert Bar as seen from the hill above
The actual bar part of the place.
I can only complain that for canned beer, all they had was standard domestic. They could at least have a couple of choices of local brewery cans, which I’d pay extra for. Speaking of pay, you only can pay with cash here. In this day and age, they could get on a card system if they wanted to but old tyme payment methods is part of the charm out here.
Entrance Arch metal statues
Firetruck used for water hauling
The area is decorated with interesting bits of metal art, like the metal horse and carriage, as well as old bits of once useful metal, like the old fire truck once used to haul water into the area. You can definitely have a meal with drinks, and wander about exploring a bit. There is also live music you can dance to if that is your thing. All in all, I had a great time there, meeting up with Carolyn and friends.
Bouse camping continued at another site. This time I was close to some cool looking hills that were full of holes. Join me there next time!
