When I was a kid, Johnson Stewart ran a sort of strip-mining operation near McLellan and Alma School road. I kept my horse at DeWitt Stables back then (a farm where the U-Totem is now) and I remember many times fearing that my horse would get spooked by some birds or the buzzing of those powerlines that stretched through the desert and, in a frenzy of fear, gallop us both into the mining abyss. I don't know what they actually *mined* -- maybe just gravel for concrete? But they had all these huge industrial structures for sorting gravel and dunes of sorted sands and I think that is why I can now look at those famous photographs made by Bernd and Hilla Becher with a sense of nostalgia.
There was also a small pond near one of the sorters and I remember that a friend and I tied a rock to a string and lowered it endlessly into that pool. The water was black and seemingly infinitely deep, like that hole Mel Waters talks about on Art Bell's show, and I always thought something prehistoric and reptilian was living in that pool, fed in B-movie style by some secret environmentally-questionable sludge from the Johnson Stewart operation. Of course I have no proof of this.