Nipton: Prospect town

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, June 8, 2001 | 5:21 a.m.

NIPTON, CALIF. -- Linda Darrow, up since 4 a.m. reading a Chinese mystery novel, is making her way across a two-lane state road to put out the U.S. flag and open the Nipton Trading Post.

It's 7:15 a.m. on a Sunday in the belly of the swept, almost featureless Ivanpah Valley. It's still cool, about 60 degrees. You might hear the dry scuff of Darrow's sneakers if it wasn't for the wheels of a northbound freight train knocking past another that has stopped on the southbound tracks.

In Nipton, Calif., a town of 27 residents at Darrow's last count, things don't get started until the general store opens. Such as breakfast, for instance, which locals buy piecemeal in unlikely combinations that usually skip the cereal and more often include a can of soda or bottle of beer. Buying California Lotto tickets is often part of the breakfast routine for the motorcyclists who pass through.

Darrow won't open for another 45 minutes, until 8 a.m. or so. She's a slowpoke, she says, and she'll use the time to make coffee and smoke a cigarette. "Recently" for her refers to the cable television hookup she broke down and bought four years ago to get a better view of the Dallas Cowboys' Emmitt Smith.

Nipton, Calif., about 22 miles west of Searchlight and 65 miles from Las Vegas along the Joshua Tree Highway and just a few miles past the Nevada line, has never managed to get up and gallop or to support too many people. At the far eastern border of San Bernardino County -- one of the nation's largest at 32,000 square miles -- Nipton is 129 miles from the nearest postal service.

When "Mike the mailman" arrives from Twentynine Palms, Calif., he places a handful of mail in a yellow plastic box next to the cash register.

As with many small western towns, Nipton has been defined less by its own dreams than by the dreams of neighboring towns with more people, more money and more political resources. It has been, and remains, a stop between places, whether for ranchers and miners as far back as the 1850s; for shipping cattle by railroad in the 1920s and 1930s; or for Nevadans crossing the state line for California lottery tickets, as they have since the 1990s.

But prospects are looking good these days for the small border railroad town. The population -- 27 residents, counted mostly by first name and according to whom they live with -- is up from last year when a nearby rare earth mine closed and the population dropped below 20. On days when the historic hotel's five rooms are booked, along with two eco-friendly tent cabins, the population edges closer to 45.

Nipton may have gotten a slight break last week when a Nevada state lottery bill, which perhaps would have cut down on the town's daily visitors, died in the Nevada Legislature.

Similar bills in the 1960s and 1980s quietly and abruptly died in the face of opposition from the gambling industry, but this year gambling lobbyists entered an official position of no position. It seemed as though they couldn't have cared less. But a Senate subcommittee declined to vote on the measure, and its sponsor, Assemblywoman Kathy McClain, D-Las Vegas, said she is considering taking a petition to the voters.

"There's other ways to skin a cat," she said.

The prospect of a Nevada lottery in the pipeline doesn't much worry Gerry Freeman. He and his wife have run Nipton's day-to-day operations since 1985, when he bought the unincorporated township "on a crapshoot."

Freeman, a thoughtful ex-miner from Los Angeles who speaks quietly, tasting his words before offering them up, said a Nevada state lottery would have only "a smallish impact" on his town.

"In the California Lotto, until you get jackpots of $30 million, $40 million or $50 million, nobody pays attention," Freeman said. "And in Arizona, a state closer in size to Nevada, typically you're lucky there if you have $1 million jackpots. The last time I looked they were down to tepid levels, in the $200,000 range, and noone's blood was really stirred."

Freeman said a Nevada lottery would probably result in more small jackpots. Even so, Freeman said people who play the lottery aren't daunted by a day of driving. Oftentimes, they travel from Nipton on through Searchlight and down to Bullhead City, Ariz., where they buy more tickets, he said. They would probably add stops for Nevada tickets, he said.

In the early 1990s, when the California lottery hit $100 million, as many as 10,000 people came through the front door of the general store in a day, the majority of them from Nevada. They bought as many as 100,000 tickets. Dan Rather and other big-time newsmen showed up on those days.

On average, the store sold closer to 70,000 tickets a week, keeping 6 cents per ticket.

Freeman estimates that Primm, on Interstate 15, already drains 95 percent of what once was a lucrative California Lotto business for Freeman in the mid-1990s. By opening a lottery ticket sales office just over the Nevada border, Primm has been able to capture much of the Las Vegas market Nipton originally commanded.

Today, with much of the business absorbed by Primm, the store sells 500 to 1,000 tickets a day, mostly to a core group of people from Boulder City and Cal-Nev-Ari.

But these days, Freeman is talking more about being "a gateway" than as a strategic stop for Nevadans looking for Lotto tickets.

Freeman wants to make Nipton a destination of its own, where environmentally minded tourists stop before heading out into the 1.6-million-acre Mohave National Preserve, much of which is open wilderness area. The preserve, created by a federal act in 1994, is the third largest park in the continental United States.

"I came out to the desert because I wanted to be my own pioneer. That was my intrigue," Freeman said. "And this thing we're trying to do in Nipton draws from the same dream. It's an opportunity to break fresh ground. I don't think there's an eco-tourist destination in the continental U.S."

An offer of "nature in the raw, no artifice and no cities, no ersatz everything," is a draw that Freeman says will neither threaten nor be threatened by the casino or lottery industries.

In his new venture, Freeman says most of his customers would likely travel from Europe.

For Americans, eco-tourism has more often meant an international flight to an exotic locale, for so-called nature-based tourism that emphasizes a respect for the surroundings and a willingness to carry out what you bring in. In 2000, the growing industry generated about $100 billion in global revenues. Travel industry groups estimate the ecological side of business is growing by 20 to 30 percent annually.

Freeman's younger brother Mike, 63, who gave up a successful L.A. law practice two years ago to open the only restaurant in town -- The Cantina -- is doing much of the initial planning for the eco-friendly outpost.

For now, they rent two prototypes based in part on design elements first extolled by architect Frank Lloyd Wright -- tent cabins with wood stoves, electric lamps, outdoor detached showers and an outdoor whirlpool spa. But future tent cabins, Mike said, though more upscale, will use only solar power and have composting toilets. Grey water will be recycled.

"Part of the mission is to have a large experience with recycled products and solar power to show that it isn't that terribly inconvenient to live on some amount of alternative energy," Mike Freeman said.

The former trial lawyer, who also worked as a computer programmer in the 1960s and after that as an executive in the auto rental business, says the accompanying experience of hiking in the desert should speak for itself.

Mike Freeman's improved health is his own best evidence. Since trading in his private plane for a small two-wheel drive truck before arriving in Nipton in July 1999, he has shed 20 pounds without dieting, lost a bad case of heartburn and has stopped taking pills for high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high blood sugar.

"Out here, I don't have to look at hundreds of billboards every day selling me every conceivable thing in the world," he said. "Out here, there's a lot to do, but none of it has to be done right away."

But even as the Freemans gear up for their foray into eco-tourism, they acknowledge that much of their success will depend on forces beyond their control.

They fear plans for a new international airport in Jean, a two-casino town in the northern part of the Ivanpah Valley, could make the desert around Nipton less attractive for tourism. The new airport could result in low-flying planes over the national preserve, making the national park service less likely to concentrate new efforts on the preserve and less likely to coordinate with efforts such as the Freemans'.

Even such a seemingly straightforward effort to get a sign on Interstate 15 pointing drivers to Nipton as an entry into the preserve could prove more difficult if the visitors to the desert drop off.

Another potential development that could boost the Freemans' plans is a proposed Amtrak passenger line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The success of the proposed service line depends in part on the Union Pacific railroad's willingness to commit funding to improve several miles of tracks through the preserve. The train ride would likely be billed as a "gambler's special" -- $60 for a roundtrip ticket.

The Freemans would also have to negotiate a stop out front of the trading post. Freight trains already stop occasionally when the train crew needs a soda, bag of chips or just want to stretch their legs.

"We're like a ship bobbing on the sea, and we're looking for wind and a haven," Gerry Freeman said.

Still, carving a haven from the desolate valley won't depend entirely on plans to build Nipton into a tourist destination.

Gerry Freeman, who displaced one hobo and an assayist when he bought Nipton in the early 1980s, also wants to build a community of people within his 80-acre township. He and his wife, Roxanne, a schoolteacher and the main buyer for the general store, see the affordable rents and the undisturbed landscape as a good place for craftsmen and artists to set up shop.

"My interest lies in people who come through the door and express an interest in becoming part of the town," Gerry Freeman said. "I'm looking for our town through the front door of the store."

Darrow, who works the front counter of the store, is one of those people. She moved to Nipton from Kokoweef, where she lived for nine years among a sparse collection of mobile homes and primitive homes in the hills above the Ivanpah Valley on the California side.

Until 1994, she lived with her husband and two kids with a generator for electricity. They hauled water in and drove five miles downhill each day to drop the kids, Sunshine and Micron, at the school bus stop.

Darrow calls Nipton city-living -- there is indoor plumbing -- but she still has to work for the amenities most people take for granted.

There is no newspaper delivery, so Darrow often has to depend on papers left behind by guests in the hotel. Will Shortz's Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle is a favorite.

Chrissie, the hotel housekeeper, is another person who also may put down roots in Nipton. She often rides her four-wheeler into the desert. She carries a metal detector with her.

And Rene, a retired hotel line cook, has opened a woodshop across from the store where he cranks out birdhouses, wine racks and decorative boxes. He says it is something he has waited his entire life to do. Though materials are more expensive and difficult to find out in the desert, Rene says the low rent balances costs. His label is the only one in town that can boast "made in Nipton."

"There are people drawn to Alpine settings. That's one kind," Gerry Freeman said. "Or people that are water people. They go to the ocean for something special that it does for them. Center stage here is what is special about the desert. What people find in the desert that draws them to it."

That desert magic still draws many Las Vegans the extra 30 miles to buy lottery tickets.

Nettie Martinez, 35, who travels the extra miles with her husband once or twice a week to spend $25 on lottery tickets, says she likes the scenic qualities of the ride and the comfort of being able to stop at the store and talk. "Not just this 'Hi, bye' type of thing," such as in Primm, Martinez said.

Besides, Martinez said, the lottery store in Primm has yet to have a big winner. Nipton had a $200,000 winner as recently as 1995.

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