Southwest Stories
with Steve Brown

About Steve Brown

Ah, where to begin?  Before he was born, Steve's relationship with the desert was already firmly in place.  His mother, a top performing Realtor in southern California, back in the 1950s when women Realtors weren't allowed to handle the contract part of sales because their female minds just weren't up to the task (ahem), heard one day about the Bureau of Land Management holding a raffle for land out in the desert.  If you won the raffle, you could have five acres of desert land for $100 and a $25 filing fee.

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Needless to say, Steve's mother (who was soon to be asked to be a manager for Forest E. Olson), entered and won the raffle, paid the $125, and came home to tell his father the good news.  Steve's dad objected, saying desert land was "worthless" (something Steve liked to remind him later wasn't true), but the deal was done and the Brown family had itself five acres of land in the hi-desert, north of Pioneertown somewhere off of Gamma Gulch Road.  To keep the land (this was the catch), you had to build a 400 square-foot cabin, so his parents built the cabin and an outhouse, and proceeded to have wonderful desert adventures with Steve's soon-to-be uncles and aunts.  Steve's mother, Barbara, was disappointed on one Jeep trip up the back road to Big Bear when they encountered a mountain lion with an extensive Hollywood career that was up for adoption.  His father won that round, and baby-to-be Steve was deprived of having a cougar for a house pet.  (The last cougar Steve saw in the wild, out in the desert near Joshua Tree National Park, he chased after it calling, "Here kitty, kitty!" trying to get a good picture of it up in the rocks.)

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Unfortunately, at a very young age, Steve was stricken with spinal meningitis, which was 97.5% fatal, with almost all survivors suffering some form of brain damage.  This remains Steve's fall-back excuse until today - that he's doing good, considering.  The side effect of his two weeks in the hospital, other than the scar on his ankle from his ripping the IV out because he wanted to go home, was a large medical bill for his parents.  The Browns were forced to sell their desert property to pay for those bills, but his parents enjoyed the desert, so both the hi-desert (Joshua Tree National Park area) and the Southwest, became frequent destinations for family road trips and camping expeditions.

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From an early age, Steve was taken with both the sweeping vistas and natural beauty of the desert, and the rich, colorful culture(s) of the Southwest.  Montezuma's Castle, the Grand Canyon, Albuquerque, Pioneertown, and so many long road trips across the region became the foundation for his love of travel and his belief that travel is the best education one can experience.

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In 1974, Steve took a last camping trip to the hi-desert with his father.  They drove past Desert Christ Park, headed up past Pioneertown, and up the dirt road to a campground in Pipe's Canyon near the onyx mine.  They were surprised to find the campground packed with campers and noisy (neither the campground nor the road remains, but you can hike up Pipe's Canyon in the Pioneertown Mountains Preserve, and you can still find the onyx mine).

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Steve and his dad went up Gamma Gulch way instead, out past the area of the family's old homestead cabin.  They found an isolated area near what the family always referred to as "Big Rock Canyon," now the vicinity of Garth Bowles' Boulder Gardens.  Darkness was now coming, so they got a small fire going and cooked dinner behind the pickup truck.

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Not long after dinner was underway, strange lights began doing very eccentric maneuvers in the night sky, zooming in circles around a mountain, eventually wobbling, rising, and then diving behind the mountain with great flashes.  The next morning, after having breakfast at Giant Rock's cafe, Steve went down under the rock and met a grumpy old man.  Excited about the previous night's light show, Steve began to tell him about it, but the old man scowled and told him he didn't see anything.  That man was George Van Tassel, the man behind the Integratron and the Giant Rock UFO conventions, among other things.

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That camping trip proved to be the last visit for Steve to the desert for 20 years.  But his Aunt Vickie and Uncle Bill, with their two children, had moved back to Yucca Valley (Vickie had been from Yucca Valley), and Steve returned to attend the wedding of one of his cousins at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.  In 2000, after the rains of the Northwest got to be a bit too much, Steve and his wife flew down to Palm Springs to spend a week in the desert sun visiting family and soaking up rays.  They bought a house on a couple of acres of mostly untouched desert land, quit their jobs in Washington, and have lived in the desert ever since.

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Steve served as news editor for a Gannett weekly newspaper and then purchased The Sun Runner magazine, an independent desert magazine.  He published the magazine, Joshua Tree National Park area visitor guides and maps, a local cultural newspaper, and produced a weekly entertainment calendar FM radio show, led desert tours, served as president of the California Deserts Visitors Association, promoted desert travel at the largest travel show in the country, and created Southwest Stories, which has seen two seasons broadcast across southern California on KVCR PBS TV. 

Steve has a passion for the desert, it's history, cultures, nature, people, and sacred places.  He loves it when he runs into someone out in the desert and they're there because they watched the show, or read one of his stories.  He intends to involve the audience for Season 3 - Southwest Stories - in desert tours and getaways, live events, and performances with musicians around the region.

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If he doesn't answer his phone, it's probably because he's out of cell range, hiking the backcountry of the Mojave with his wife, or he's out exploring with their cat Juliett, an elusive Mojave Sand Leopard.  Steve functions as the writer, co-host, and executive producer for Southwest Stories as the show goes into Season 3.