December 2025

Brine Flies

Brine flies at Mono Lake are one of those old, workmanlike desert stories where something humble ends up being essential.

Mono Lake is extremely salty and alkaline, so almost nothing can live there. Brine flies (Ephydra hians) are the big exception. They spend most of their lives as larvae and pupae underwater, grazing on algae that coat the lake bottom and tufa formations. When they emerge as adults, they form the dark, moving bands you see along the shoreline and rocks.

Their trick is simple but effective. Adult flies have dense hairs and a waxy coating that traps air around their bodies, allowing them to walk underwater to lay eggs and feed without drowning. It looks strange, but it works, and it has worked for a very long time.

Ecologically, brine flies are the backbone of Mono Lake. They convert algae into protein, and in doing so, they feed millions of migratory birds. Eared grebes, phalaropes, gulls, and others depend on the flies during migration, sometimes doubling their body weight before moving on. If the flies disappeared, Mono Lake would be nearly silent.

Culturally, they mattered too. The Kutzadikaa Paiute, often called the Mono Lake Paiute, harvested brine fly pupae, dried them, and traded them as a high-protein food. Early Euro-American settlers mostly saw the flies as a nuisance, but the Paiute understood precisely what they were worth.

Today, brine flies are also an indicator species. When lake levels drop, and salinity rises too far, fly populations suffer. Keeping Mono Lake at a sustainable level is not just about scenery or tufa towers; it is about preserving this old, tightly balanced system that has been working more or less the same way since long before modern water diversions arrived.

-End-

The Use of AI in Developing the Mojave Desert and Digital Desert Projects

by Walter Feller

I treat AI as a tool, not a miracle or a menace. That outlook fits the older way of doing things, where a person picks up whatever instrument helps the job move forward and sets it aside when it gets in the way. I do not lean on it for authority. I lean on it for labor.

This photo has nothing to do with this article.

The project has three clear traits.

Uses AI to sort, organize, and store large bodies of knowledge.
This echoes the long tradition of keeping field notes, clipping newspaper files, building card catalogs, and arranging maps and texts in cross-referenced bundles. The scale has grown, but the intent remains the same: make a vast desert of information readable. AI handles the heavy lifting that once took long nights with a pencil and a pile of notes. The desk is still a mess.
I keep authorship and judgment in my own hands.
AI can draft, stitch together relationships, and help grind through syntactic chores. But the voice, the research discipline, and the final word remain mine. This follows the older belief that a craftsman knows his trade better than any machine. The tool may speed up the work, but it does not replace the worker.
I use AI to expose errors, not to hide them.
I ask if the output is correct. That is the same question historians, surveyors, and editors have always wondered about their sources. AI becomes one more reference check, one more way to test the grain of a story or the shape of a fact. This fits the long-standing practice of comparing accounts, spotting contradictions, and tightening a narrative until it rings true.

In short, my use of AI follows the same plain pattern found across older desert work: learn the landscape, use the tools at hand, question everything, and keep the story straight. AI is simply a new implement added to the kit, no more mysterious than a typewriter was when it first arrived on a ranch desk.

I have treated AI as a tool, not a miracle, and not a menace. That outlook fits the older way of doing things, where a person picks up whatever instrument helps the job move forward and sets it aside when it gets in the way. I do not lean on it for authority. I lean on it for labor.

Disclaimer: Some portions of this project were developed with assistance from AI tools to help reconstruct historical contexts and fill informational gaps. All materials have been reviewed and fact-checked to ensure accuracy and reliability, though complete precision cannot be guaranteed. The aim is to provide dependable starting points and distinctive perspectives for further study, exploration, and research.

These materials are historical in nature and intended for educational use only; they are not designed as travel guides or planning resources.
Copyright – Walter Feller. 1995-2025. All rights reserved.

Cotner’s Corner

Former site of the Waffle Iron Cafe & Others

Cotner’s Corner sits at the crossroads of Bear Valley Road and Central, a place that has changed faces many times but has always carried the memory of the people who tried to make something out there on the desert edge. Long before the traffic lights and chain stores, the corner was little more than a wide, dusty intersection with a handful of buildings and a few stubborn families who were willing to take a chance on the high desert.

The Cotner name shows up there in the years after World War II, when Apple Valley was still a mix of homesteads, open land, and a few small commercial stops that served ranchers, travelers, and early homeowners. John A. Cotner appears to have been one of those early owners who saw the value in that corner. He bought the land, ran the little market or service station there, and for a time, the place was known by his name. In small desert towns, you didn’t need a fancy sign or a subdivision plan. If a man owned the corner, the corner carried his name.

Locals remembered it that way: “Cotner’s Corner.” No explanation needed. If you lived out there, you knew where it was. You might gas up, grab a soda, or use it as a point of reference when giving directions out across the vast, empty valley.

By the early 1960s, ownership was shifting. Families changed hands, businesses came and went. In 1965, June and Tom Archer bought the corner from Cotner, putting their own stamp on the place with June’s Little Market. But even after the sale, the older name held on in local memory. People still called it Cotner’s Corner because that was how the community had marked it in its early years.

Over time, the buildings aged. The gas station gave way to other businesses, the most beloved being the Waffle Iron Cafe. This simple converted Texaco station served breakfast and coffee to generations of Apple Valley residents. The corner kept evolving, but the old stories stayed underneath.

Who was Cotner? He seems to have been like many early high-desert figures: a working man who owned a slice of land at a key corner, built what he could, and took part in shaping a small desert community long before incorporation or big developers showed up. He wasn’t famous, and the records about him are thin, but the name stuck because in places like Apple Valley, the people who first set up shop mattered. They gave the desert its first points of orientation, the earliest nodes around which the town eventually grew.

Today, the buildings are gone, and the corner looks modern, but the old name survives in stories, memories, and the scraps of history that still surface when people talk about how the valley used to be before it filled in. Cotner’s Corner belongs to that early period when a single family, a single building, or a single name could anchor a whole stretch of desert.