CA-62: Rice Army Airfield -- remembering wars

This may look boring, but it has historic importance.

Quite a bit east of Twentynine Palms, on CA 62, is the former town of Rice. There are no remains of the actual town of Rice but there are remains of an airfield. Looking up the Rice airfield on the web revealed three interesting facts. One was that the airfield had been one of about a dozen airfields that had been used in the desert during WW II and then abandoned. A second was that the airfield was much larger than one would guess just based on the immediately visible evidence. The third was the reminder of how permanent is construction in the desert. Even though very much of the airfield was apparently unpaved, quite a bit of the unpaved structure remains visible -- particularly in the satellite view (see map). From the ground, the remainder of some of the buildings are visible and a large aircraft parking area on the north end. But if you compare other markings on the ground to recent satellite photos of the site, you can clearly still tell the location of various taxiways even though the airport was decommissioned at least 50 years before these pictures were taken. This picture is of the only visible paved area of the airport, a large pad with tie-down rings, on the north end. In the satellite photo, this is the white pad on the north end.

Despite the featureless quality of these pictures, it is important to step back in time and reflect on what it was like to be here in the vast and empty desert, learning to fly and preparing for combat missions (and possible death) in WW II.

This would have been the late afternoon view of many who were training for war.

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In January, 2013, plans were announced to convert the former airfield to a solar energy plant