Mojave National Preserve Part 2

So, we covered the south and the north parts of the preserve, then headed to the more central area and the eastern reaches. 

Hole-in-the-Wall area

We headed south from Cima to the center of the park and found a different landscape again. We drove the loop that takes you from the northern campground at 5600 ft to the southern campground at 4400 ft. This area was severely damaged by a wildfire in 2005 that destroyed many of the oldest and largest yucca trees in the park. As nature does, things are starting to regrow; you could definitely see the slow-growing desert landscape that was trying it’s best to recover from this fire. 

The most famous hike in Mojave is known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Rings Loop nature trail. It’s super short, just over a mile, but loops you past petroglyphs and is pretty easy going, until you reach the rings. Leaving the visitors center, you lose elevation, so you have to make it up somewhere to get back to where you started. They have installed 2 sections of seriously large rings to help you get up and through the canyon and back to the visitors center. We saw a couple walking with their dog and this dog was a nimble breed, but there was zero chance of him getting up these rings! This would be a super fun hike to take school age kids on, it’s not too long and they would get a kick out of having to climb up these rings. 

Mojave Road

The original Mojave Road follows the natural corridor, east-west, from the Colorado River to near Barstow, essentially bisecting Mojave Natural Preserve, as it is today. It was used by Native Americans as a travel & trade route and later by the US Army, using it for wagons, mail and travelers. The arrival of the railroad in the 1890’s briefly improved mining and ranching prospects for the area, but ultimately replaced the usefulness of the Mojave Road for these purposes and it is now used by hikers and 4WD’ers. 

Our truck is not a true 4WD short-based vehicle by any means, but we were assured by many that we could at least drive part of this road without difficulty. We were warned that parts were narrow and high and that was not an exaggeration. We had to pull our mirrors in and could not open our doors in several parts, so yeah, it’s narrow all right!

Out on this road we also found The Rock House, which was built & occupied from the 1920’s till the 1950’s by a WWI vet who was looking for clean desert air. It’s fairly mind blowing to imagine living out in that environment, in that time period, without all the mod-cons of today, but clearly it worked for him. He definitely ate his fair share of tinned goods; the rusting evidence which you cannot miss. 

It was at this property that I found what I’m considering to be the mother lode of spring cactus blooms, in terms of sheer intensity of colour. It was, what I found out later, a Mojave mound cactus, found only in Mojave. I am trying to imagine how much better it would have been if it had been in FULL bloom, however the vibrancy of these colours alone was worth it! There were walls juniper berries galore!

As we headed all the way to the eastern edge of the preserve on the Mojave Road (the newer version now), there are clearly parcels of land still privately owned, some more inhabited than others. The roadside oddities in the middle of the desert did not disappoint. I particularly enjoyed the locked gates with no other fencing around them and the warning sign with the severed human leg.