The two reviews posted in 2015 are critiquing a short that was never intended to stand on its own, and I suspect those viewers saw the fuzzy, bad copy on YouTube. I saw the original full project of four shorts that were all shot by film students who were brought by the producer Carl Foreman to the "McKenna's Gold" location and asked to each pick some aspect of the production and its location that they found interesting, and make a short film about that. I recall one of the films being about the horse wranglers, another about the producer - and then there was Lucas's impressionistic take on the desert location. The project was intended to he virwed as a whole, and as a whole it worked rather nicely. I saw it back in 1969 or 1970, broadcast on the PBS station for Los Angeles, and it stuck with me all these years.
