Susan Sorrells spent time in Liberia with the Peace Corps, worked for California Sen. Thomas Kuchel in Washington, D.C., and lived for four months in the Soviet Union during the Cold War while considering a career as a diplomat. She ultimately returned to California to claim her birthright, the entire town of Shoshone — a small, once-bustling mining town, whose cluster of historic buildings flanks two sides of a highway that slices through the Mojave on the way to Death Valley. Sorrells is using the town to advance a new kind of ecotourism.