At least 60 miles from the coast, where the San Bernardino Mountains shoot through clouds, a signpost painted on a weather-beaten water tower beckons like a desert oasis: Mentone Beach.The same two words adorn a gas station, a liquor store and a car repair shop on the main drag, Highway 38, promising cool water in a place where stepping outside feels like stepping into a blast furnace.Some locals titter when an out-of-towner begs for directions to the beach, and point not west to the Pacific but east toward the rocky shores of Mill Creek, which slithers out of the San Bernardino Mountains to the valley floor.There unfurls Inland Southern California's oceanless beach, which can vanish if the creek dries up in the summer, a shore that's less a strip of sand than a state of mind.Clamber down rocks from Highway 38 into clear, cool, ankle-deep water. The creek, as wide as two parking spots and bounded by rocks, not sand, ducks under a bridge scrawled with "I {heart} Larry." Kids laze on inner tubes their mom lugged from the car and stare through goggles at the national forest's fire-scarred ridges.

Is that a breeze?The beach in many ways bolsters this nearly 8,000-person town, with so little to distinguish it from other blips that decades ago some liquor store owners plastered the local gag on bumper stickers: "Where the Hell Is Mentone Beach!"The beach, with gray silt too loose to cobble together a sandcastle, is ensconced in a Redlands phone book map and on a Mentone post office mural, though the woman behind the counter said she'd never seen a letter addressed to Mentone Beach.The wink-and-nod subculture also separates unincorporated Mentone, still dotted with more orange trees than tract homes, from more metropolitan Redlands and thoseRun Flat Tires Nissan Altima, ahem, other beaches."Dogs For Sale Kokomo IndianaPeople at the beach think they're hot stuff and wouldn't know where the heck Mentone is," said Dave Hess, 58, guzzling bottled water at Mentone Beach Liquor, whose new owner is still flummoxed as to the beach's exact location.Where To Buy Hound And Gatos Cat Food

The Mentone Chamber of Commerce president, Alfred Chichester, had to drop "beach" from his firm's business cards after a client's secretary in Los Angeles County huffed that she couldn't find it along PCH."It sounds like a beach, you're expecting a beach, but it's really not a beach at all," said Phillip Lowell, 35, sipping a Coors Light while plopped on a rock alongside Mill Creek, the stream that parallels Highway 38.Lowell's wife, Renee, dug her toes into silt and rubbed SPF 15 onto her shoulders, as Lowell's neck and back ripened to tomato-red. He sucked an off-brand cigarette and watched his three sons shake the water from their hair."The ocean has too much pull, too much people -- you can't trust it enough," said Renee Lowell, 35, who thought the couple had last battled traffic to San Diego in 2003. Maybe.Mentone, named for a Mediterranean resort in southeast France, seemed destined for coastal status: Its founders noted that "the climate and vegetation were the same; only the sea was missing."

The hyperbole spread to postcards from town investors that showed boats bobbing on the Santa Ana River and ads for a resort, the since-closed Hotel Mentone, that boasted about a climate "cool in summer."The beach's origins appear to bubble from ponds that a water district had created near Highway 38, the back road to Big Bear, where beachgoers kicked back on boulders and emptied wine coolers and the rare Jet Ski kicked up waves.The water district drained the pools in 1979 after a "shooting incident," says the town history, a 20-page booklet that the local library sells for $3, but the creek wash already had been baptized Mentone Beach.Meanwhile, Gary Jacinto and his kin, who ran a liquor store, decided to flood the town with beach kitsch, figuring Mentone might as well be known for something, even if it was their slogan, "Known for Absolutely Nothing!"Residents picked up the punch line at the annual town parade, dolling up trucks with surfboards and gals in bathing suits. The parade got canned decades ago, but teenagers kept telling buddies to meet them at the beach.

Long ago, before the Inland Empire housing boom whisked in hundreds of thousands of new homeowners, beachgoers swung off Highway 38 and halted just before a street named Newport.There's no lifeguard stand, just someone's stone home, its fence crowned with boat propellers and its roof topped with Lady Liberty's head. In the yard stands a red-shirted Paul Bunyan, an almost 30-foot-tall monument to lawn art.When the lower leg of the creek evaporates in the summer sun, Mentone Beach becomes mobile. The beach crowds relocate upstream on a riverbank near the mountain hamlet Forest Falls."You can't take things in life too seriously, even the beach," explained Kim Grooms, 42, selling Lotto tickets at a Valero gas station whose blue awning welcomes drivers to, of course, Mentone Beach.Down the road, Jacinto, 52, the beach's top promoter, has since bought the Greenspot Market, which shills firewood and snow chains under Christmas lights, shotguns, beer bottles and sleds.Someday, he reasoned from behind the counter, booming Redlands would gobble the town, relegating Highway 38 to another city strip.

Tourists headed for the mountains, however, would still snap up smokes and beef jerky and quiz the cashier: Mentone Beach?The market's T-shirts swear it's "20 Miles From Water, 2 Feet From Hell," but that's tough to pinpoint on a Thomas Bros. grid.BISMARCK – Grand Forks resident Georgia Smith has seen Donald Trump twice in person in recent months, proudly showing off the cell phone picture she took with him in Phoenix in December.But that didn’t stop the 56-year-old event planner from showing up at 5 a.m. to be first in line for Trump’s 1 p.m. address Thursday, May 26, at the Bismarck Event Center.“I wanted to be right up close, like I was at all the other ones,” Smith said, sporting a Trump button and a black ring emblazoned with “Trump 2016 for America.”In Bismarck, Trump says he's ready to ‘get out of the way’ of oil industryTrump officially secures GOP delegate goal on heels of ND appearanceLive stream: Donald Trump's speech in BismarckMore Donald Trump coverageUnder sunny skies, a line of more than 500 people stretched a city block up the hill on 5th Street South before the doors opened shortly after 10 a.m.Many

, like Smith, were diehard Trump supporters.“I believe that he’s really going to do something, actually make a difference,” said Smith, who is married with two adult sons. She added, “He doesn’t try to make everybody happy. I really believe he’s going to do what he says.”Behind her, 53-year-old Mark Graupe of Dickinson sipped a Diet Mountain Dew, at his feet a picture of Trump giving the thumbs-up in his “Make America Great Again” cap.Donald Trump taps ND Rep. Cramer to be energy adviser'Game on,' Sanders says of taking on Trump in Clinton-less debate“I’m just here trying to get his autograph,” said Graupe, a college basketball coach whose mission is to collect a signed book, baseball and photo from every president.So far, he’s been successful back to President Harry Truman, though he’s missing a John F. Kennedy-signed book, he said, noting he already has a Hillary Clinton-signed baseball.“I’m an independent,” he said. “I’m going to wait, wait and listen.”

Retired stay-at-home mom Shari Griffin said her sister-in-law saved her a spot at the front of the line outside the Event Center, which is hosting the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference. More than 7,000 people are expected for Trump’s speech. “I think it’s great for the state for (Trump) to come,” said Griffin, whose husband was a superintendent for oil and gas firm Hess. “I really support the oil industry.”About a dozen protesters stood across the street, with four armed police officers between them and the line. Protest organizer Austin Klein hoisted an American flag with one arm and a sign saying “Oil money is tainted with North Dakotans blood” in the other.“There’s some very nice people who have come and talked to me, and there’s some very weird people. It’s about what I expected,” said Klein. The official protest was slated to start at 10:30 a.m.Marty Beard, a 47-year-old self-described “professional protagonist” whose facial hair lives up to his last name, and his 19-year-old nephew, Jake Beard of Menoken, staged a two-man counter-protest, unfurling yellow and white “Don’t Tread on Me” banners.

Marty Beard said he was offered four tickets to Trump’s speech but chose instead to protest the protesters.“He’s not a politician,” he said of Trump, “and hopefully he doesn’t change and become one.”Minot political activist Charles Tuttle peddled Trump T-shirts and bobble-head dolls near the Event Center entrance, having just returned from Trump’s speech in Anaheim, Calif., where police arrested 16 protesters, The Orange County Register reported. By 9:30 a.m., Tuttle said he’s already sold 50 dolls at $20 apiece.“The Trump business is good,” he said.Becky Holen and five friends from northwestern North Dakota piled into a Chevy Tahoe at 6 a.m. to make the drive to Bismarck. Five of them donned red t-shirts Holen had ordered for the event, with Trump’s face silk-screened on the back between the words “TRUMP IT UP.”“This is the first thing like this we’ve ever been to,” said Holen, a retired road construction worker. “So it should be entertaining if nothing else.”“