The three hour drive from Stovepipe Wells to Mojave National Preserve is all desert except for where it crosses I-15 at the town of Baker. The hotel receptionist at Stovepipe Wells told me that Baker would have groceries and other necessities - "everything you need" is how he put it - but I found the crowded and oddly menacing interstate roadstop had only fast food, motels, and gas station quick-marts selling maybe the barest of white bread and milk among the shelves of junk food. Worse, while my Mojave National Preserve map said its Visitors Center was in Baker, not only couldn’t I find it, I couldn’t find anyone who knew what I was talking about. Finally one clerk knew: the Visitors Center had been relocated to Kelso, 45-minutes into the park. This, I later learned, had happened three years earlier, too long ago I guess for the institutional memory of Baker to have retained.
The nearest real groceries were in Barstow, 60 miles down the freeway, and it was too late in the day for me to drive there and back before heading into the park to find a place to camp. I had food for maybe a day. I‘d have to go get a campsite and worry about food the next morning.
The new park visitors center is an attractive, recently refurbished train station. The Depot, as it was known, was in operation from 1924 until the mid-1980s. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in August 2001. Passenger service lasted until 1997, three years after the National Preserve was established, and freight trains still use the tracks. Right inside the station is an old style lunch counter, also redone quite nicely but obviously not in service. I asked the rangers when lunch was served and they enacted a ritual laugh. Apparently this was one overdue project. The lunch counter did in fact open for service in April 2009, just four months later. It would close again in October 2013.
I told the rangers of my anxieties in Baker and they seem surprised; Baker wasn‘t menacing to them. But one ranger pointed out that it was late Sunday afternoon and I had caught the weekend crowd returning from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. A good portion of the people may not have had much sleep for a night or two, so perhaps that’s what I found disturbing about them.
The rangers directed me to a free camping area another 20 minutes into the park, in the shadows of Kelso Dunes, one of the preserve‘s major attractions. The dunes are nearly 700 feet high, cover 45-square miles, and took 45,000 years to build. They’re famed for being ‘singing’ dunes, and yes I heard what they mean by that, though it sounded to me a bit more like a low engine hum. The evening delivered a spectacular stormy sunset, light like I’d never seen before, clouds like I’d never seen before, no rain. I was there all alone with as fine a campsite view as I’ve had.
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| Kelso Dunes |
The morning was pale yellow, with the sun barely breaking through a light overcast. Kind of desolate, really. A coyote strolled by as I ate my breakfast. First thing on my agenda, unfortunately, was supplies. In Baker I had been an hour from Barstow but now I was closer to two hours away, just as close to Las Vegas, which the ranger told me would be the more pleasant drive. So I was off to Henderson just outside Las Vegas - 100 miles each way - on Monday, just to get food. With two hours of NPR and some beautiful sunsets on the drive back, it wasn’t all that painful.
Mojave National Preserve is 1.6 million acres - smaller only than Death Valley and Yellowstone outside of Alaska (almost anything one can say about the National Park system requires that caveat). It was added to the system in the big 1994 Desert Act that promoted Death Valley and Joshua Tree from National Monuments to National Parks. National Preserve is a somewhat unique status for the National Park Service. Seasonal hunting, cattle grazing, and working pre-existing mines are all allowed, not to mention freight trains. The area seemed pretty well-worn; not too much of it would conjure up the word “pristine”.
Monday night dropped below freezing, and the next morning was sunny and bright and beautiful but still pretty damn cold. I set off mid-morning to Hole-in-the-Wall, trailhead for one of only 7 maintained trails within the National Preserve. It was very windy there, and quite cold in that wind, even under sunny skies, weather I didn’t find conducive to open-desert hiking. Luckily though, the highlight of the hike came in the first 0.2 miles, a 215-drop down Banshee Canyon, a narrow shoot through a 15-million year old lava flow riddled with cavities and eroded into exotic shapes. The drop is so steep and tight the park has bolted steel rings into the rock for use as handholds. The possible presence of rattlesnakes added further frisson to the fun but precarious descent.
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| Self-portrait in lava flow |
Still, the whole thing is only 0.2 miles. At the bottom the trail exits another tenth of a mile through a flatter dark canyon and then emerges into a wide-open desert valley. It was less windy down there but I still didn’t feel like hiking so I poked around what I later learned were buckhorn, silver cholla, and Mojave Yucca before pulling myself back up Banshee Canyon. The Visitors Center was closed so I strolled the Hole-in-the-Wall nature trail, where some excellent plant identification signs were undermined by the fact that in mid-winter most of the bushes were bare of foliage and looked like variations on the same clump of sticks.
Then I headed over to Mitchell Caverns in the Providence Mountains State Recreation Area, an in-holding within Mojave National Preserve, for a $5.00 cavern tour. I’d avoided cave tours my whole trip (whole life, for that matter), but for some reason I decided this would be the one I'd try. They had a nice little headquarters, and the tour through the limestone caverns was fine, but I did learn that I’m right to follow my instinct and avoid caverns, as I got claustrophobic and nauseous.
I got back to my campsite around sunset and found an RV parked not exactly at my site but not exactly not in my site either. I talked to the owner and he was happy where he was and didn’t much care if I was where I was, so I had a neighbor. Then he invited me for a glass of wine with him and his wife at 7:00PM. It was already 6:40 and I wasn’t too happy about that prospect, but it was hard to refuse given we were the only people for miles. He said he wanted to “pick my brain”, so I figured it wouldn’t take too long.
He was British and his wife was German and they were touring the US by RV. Mostly what they wanted to know was how to camp more cheaply than they had been camping. They also wanted to know what was the deal with Americans. I wasn’t much help on either. They told me that President Bush had authorized bringing weapons into National Parks, ending the requirement that they be disassembled. I had heard nothing about that, and the next day I asked the ranger at the Visitors Center and she knew nothing about it either. She called her supervisor and neither did he. I concluded the couple had gotten it wrong, but later I learned they had not. Bush did sign such a law, but it got knocked out in court. It would be President Obama who would sign the law allowing guns back in to National Parks.
The next day I hiked another of the seven maintained trails, a two mile jaunt to the top of Teutonia Peak, a 5755’ pile of rocks hardly worthy of the name peak. It is surrounded by the largest and densest forest of Joshua Trees in the world; I’d have thought such a forest would be in nearby Joshua Tree National Park. According to the my hiking book these trees “are a different, more spindly variety” than those found in Joshua Tree NP. Like most ignoramuses, I only knew Joshua Trees from U2. I was expecting something more mystical looking, but I found them rather comical. This area was badly damaged by wildfire in August 2020. According to the preserve's website as many as 1.3 million Joshua trees were killed in the fire, or about 25% of the contiguous forest.
Finally, later that afternoon, I hiked up onto the Kelso Dunes, and that was far and away the highlight of my visit. I didn’t go to the highest point but I was up pretty high. Great views, great light, no one else around. Had a great time.
Mojave summary? I barely scratched the surface. The Preserve certainly lacks the powerful beauty of Death Valley. Not really the best of seasons to be here. If it were spring I could report maybe on the great flowers. If it were summer I could report that maybe an endangered desert tortoise had taken shelter under my car from the 100 degree heat. December? Beautiful days, cold but not terrible nights. Empty roads, that’s for sure. A good time to hike around and explore. But to really dig deep in MNP you’d need a 4WD high clearance. You could really get yourself away from things with one of those.
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