Overview

I got the idea of B-West from the B-Westerns I watched back in the 1940s in Brinkley, Arkansas. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, all of them and more. B-Westerns were a subset of B-Movies, those shorter, budget films made to accompany A-Movies in a double feature. By the time I was old enough to spend Saturdays at the "show house," as it was locally sometimes called by kids my age, both films in the double-header were westerns. B-Westerns were not A-Westerns, the Durango Kid was not Gary Cooper, and the B-West is not Yosemite or Grand Canyon or Yellowstone, not San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Phoenix or Denver.

Joshua Tree National Park and the town of Yucca Valley in the Morongo Basin are the B-West, not less than a 2 out of 5, not more than a 4. Jeannette and I just got back from 5 nights in Joshua Tree's Black Rock campground. In the Visitor Center near the West Entrance Station I picked up a copy of Field Guide to California published by the National Audubon Society, thumbed through the pages quickly, and decided on the spot to do a blogspot with the title Field Guide to the B-West.B-West contains Overviews from different elevations, from way high up in the sky, like this one, down to mountains and hills, like from the mid-level ranges that surround the Morongo Basin. It also consists of Sights and Sightings, organized by categories: towns, stores, and cafes; parks, birds, rocks and flowers; events, doings, and happenings; fights, with good guys & gals and bad guys & gals, over issues, like water and energy.