Walked Mullhollands dream

Don't know if anyone out there has read Mark Reisner's seminal work on water in the West 'Cadillac Desert' but it's a good read, and goes quite in depth on the history of the development of LA in particular and William Mullholland, architect of the LA aquaduct...which has allowed the formerly sleepy collection oforange groves, to grow into the festering boil of urban sickness many of us know and loathe today. Anyway, a good follow on read to Reisner's book is sadly, not his anticipated followup work cut short by his passing, but a reach further back into Wallace Stegner's 'Beyond The One Hundreth Meridian'-an excellent treatise on The West.
Well, to cut to the chase, I walked as far as humanly possible on Mullhollands Dream--the actual above ground pipe robbing life giving water from its rightful, natural home, to the asphalt jungle. I thought it was pretty cool to have been able to do that--a big piece of our collective development, and specifically Western history here on the Left Coast. Those rivets sure hurt the feet though...figure I got three miles on it before abandoning it for the newer, in ground, concrete aquaduct....did another 25 on it...My knees were hammered after that night of walking on the manmade surface (I seem to recall reading somewhere that prepared/manmade surface has 3 times the impact that natural surface does..aka an actual trail not on rock.
The floor of the Mojave is bleak and the desert folks in this area are, while not bleak....interesting. I had an small barely running hatchback pull up along side me with 3 youngish dudes in it on this loose, sandy, and difficult road to walk let alone drive in vehicle that has long outlived its useful lifespan. Anyway, they pace me and ask me if I've seen any aliens--and not the illegal kind, he says just to make sure he is clear as he asks me through substance of some sort altered eyes. I responded that I didn't know, because if I had, they sure hadn't let me know they were aliens. He thought that was an acceptable answer, then they stalled their vehicle for the first of what would be many times, and though I offered to help push them out of the sand they were getting stuck in from pacing a hiker, they refused. I didn't wish to stop and interact more closely with them, so I'm glad in a way. They asked me about the Mayan--doomsday--calendar and related topics, and I gladly engaged in an agreeable fashion. Eventually, they took off, tired of the game, and I continued trudging along in the evening heat radiating from the desert floor.