FRESNO, Calif. (CN) - Ruling that "if nobody built it, and nobody came, it was never there," a federal judge denied Inyo County's claim to a little-traveled road in Death Valley, a road so remote the county could not prove where it is.
U.S. District Judge Anthony Ishii found that the county failed to prove the road was a public highway, and that its Board of Supervisors gained it in a federal land grant.
Inyo County sued in October 2006 to quiet title to rights of way on four sections of the road in Death Valley National Park.
The Department of the Interior, The National Park Service, and the superintendant of Death Valley National Park were named as defendants.
In 2007, the court allowed the California Wilderness Coalition, the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, and Friends of the Inyo to join as defendants.
Ishii dismissed the county's claims in a previous decision, except for a segment called Last Chance Road. Ishii said the county did not file in time to include the other three sections in its claim.
Death Valley is the hottest, driest and lowest National Park in the country. Its highest recorded temperature was 134 degrees in 2007. Average summer temperatures often reach 120, and average rainfall is less than 2 inches.
Despite its harsh climate, Death Valley is home to a welter of plant and animal life, including sagebrush, Joshua trees, kit foxes, bighorn sheep and cougars.
The park is popular with tourists, who explore its salt flats and badlands, slide down sand dunes, and hike in its mountains. Thousands of stargazers visit Death Valley's northwest corner each year to see a stunning view of the Milky Way in one of the nation's darkest places.
After adding Last Chance Road to the California Desert Conservation Area in 1976, Congress in 1994 tasked the National Park Service with protecting it.
Inyo County claims it has right of way on Last Chance Road under R.S. 2477, a 19th century federal law allowing "'construction of highways over public lands, not reserved for public uses.'"
"Plaintiff's claim of entitlement under R.S. 2477 stems from actions taken by the Inyo County Board of Supervisors on March 1, 1948, when they adopted Resolutions 48-8 and 48-9 which established identified [sic] certain roads as county roads," Ishii wrote.
But the county failed to identify specific roads in the two resolutions. It just referred to maps, which the present-day Board does not have.
Ishii wrote that though this was not a major concern, the county's inability to include the maps in its complaint casts doubt on whether the section of Last Chance Road at issue "was ever actually incorporated by an action of the Board of Supervisors into the County system of roads."
Other maps narrowed down a possible location for Last Chance Road, in the northwest portion of the Last Chance Mountain range near Last Chance Canyon, but remained inconclusive.
"Whether the parties agree that the Last Chance Road was properly adopted, described or demarcated, it appears that the map indicates at least a general location of the feature called Last Chance Road," Ishii wrote.
Ishii noted that county employees who say they did maintenance on the road could not remember where they did it.