Mojave National Preserve Part 1

This place is big. Like, really big. Like 1.6 million acres big. We ended up spending almost 3 days here and got to see a lot of different parts of the park, but obviously not all of it. It has everything from sand dunes to volcanic calderas to the densest forest of Joshua Trees in the world to old mine sites. We visited 4 very different parts of the park: Kelso Dunes & Kelso Depot in the south, Cima in the north, Hole-in-the-Wall in the center and the Mojave Road to the east. For the sake of not boring you all to death with a super long blog, I’m going to do a Part 1 and Part 2 for Mojave....

Kelso Dunes

We came in one of the south entrances to the park and our first stop was Kelso Dunes. These dunes are big, 700ft tall and stretch for at least 10 miles in some areas. The sands these dunes are made of, under the right conditions, make a booming sound as it cascades down the hill. You guessed it, we were NOT there under the right conditions. There had been recent rain and it rained on our hike and to hear the booming, you need really dry conditions. 

Anyway, it was a fun 3 mile trip out to the top of the biggest dune and back. The view from the top was expansive, looking south to the Granite Mountains, east to the Providence Mountains and north to the Kelso Mountains. I was looking, but was unsuccessful at finding any evening primrose blooming, but there was a tonne of desert grass around.

We also had a lovely sunrise at our boondocking site, just near the Dunes. 

Kelso Depot

The Kelso visitors center & museum didn’t open till 10am and we got there at 9am. We settled into our new Costco camp chairs, made a cup of coffee and waited. It was worth the wait. The museum is built in what was the original train depot from 1924. There a substantial grade, for trains, running north from Kelso, so engines were housed here, to help get the trains up the grade. Thus, the depot housed crew that worked at the depot and on these engines. The depot was almost razed in the mid-80’s, but was salvaged and restored instead. Rooms that the staff lived in have been recreated and they have a tremendous collection of everything from the history of the Mojave Road to all the different mining that’s been done in the area.

Cima area

From Kelso headed north of Cima, which is nothing more than a remnant of a railroad crossing, to a boondocking spot. We tucked into our spot and headed out to investigate what was purported to be the densest joshua tree forest in the world, on the trail to Teutonia Peak. It did not disappoint. After being at Joshua Tree, with its crowds, this was joshua tree bliss. They were big and they were everywhere and we had them almost all to ourselves. Heading south back toward Cima, we even found joshua trees in bloom. Super cool!

We took a 4x4 road north from Cima in search of mine ruins and we hit the jackpot. We found the remnants of the Evening Star mine with a reasonable amount of ruins still intact, including, what we learned from my mining engineer father, is a headframe, to pull ore out of the mines. There was a lot of other bits and pieces around this site, including old mining shafts that were covered, but still felt precarious to be around, not knowing how unstable the ground was around them. This desert is mining engineer heaven. We wish you’d been with us, Dad, to help identify all the bits and pieces. 

Our drive through the desert on this day, ended up on I-15, paying $5/gallon for fuel. That’s life in the desert for you, not many options, so you take what you can get!