Dome Fire chars 16,000 acres in Mojave National Preserve

The Dome fire burns near Cima Road in the Mojave National Preserve on August 16,2020. The blaze had charred 16,000 acres by Sunday evening.

By Jose Quintero Staff Writer

By Matthew Cabe Staff Writer

A fire burning in the area of Cima Dome in the Mojave National Preserve charred close to 16,000 acres by late Sunday afternoon after starting Saturday, according to fire officials.

San Bernardino County Fire tweeted shortly before 4:30 p.m. Sunday that their firefighters were assisting Mojave National Preserve crews and the National Park Service Fire and Aviation on the Dome Fire, which was first reported at 3:22 p.m. Saturday, according to NBC4′s fire map.

County Fire’s tweet came with dramatic photos of the blaze burning near Cima and Kelso Cima roads. The agency reported one medic engine, one brush engine, two brush patrols and one chief officer on scene.

Few flowers, but Joshua trees blooming

Joshua Tree blossoms. (James Cornett,
Special to The Desert Sun)

Written by James Cornett
Special to The Desert Sun

It is one of our worst springs and one of our best.

If you are looking for wildflowers this spring you’re in trouble. We are in the second year of a two-year winter drought and wildflowers are very few and very far between. Around my house this is one of the worst springs ever for wildflowers.

On the other hand this is one of the best years for Joshua trees in bloom. This past week, while traveling between my Joshua tree study sites scattered across the Mojave Desert, Joshua trees everywhere were blooming in profusion. From Joshua Tree National Park to Red Rock Canyon State Park in the western Mojave Desert and from Walker Pass just east of Lake Isabella to Utah and Arizona, Joshua trees were in bloom. On Cima Dome, in the Mojave National Preserve, it is the best Joshua tree bloom in 25 years.

How can this be? We’re in the second year of drought yet Joshua trees seem oblivious to the current conditions. When water is in short supply most desert plants become dormant, either by remaining as seed or dropping their leaves. Producing anything, particularly flowers, is out of the question in times of drought. Yet Joshua trees are having a banner year with some large trees producing more than two dozen inflorescences in less than two months.

At first I thought that areas where there were a profusion of Joshua trees in bloom might possibly reflect the occurrence of an intense but localized shower. The extra water that became available to the Joshua trees stimulated them to bloom the following spring. But this year Joshua trees are blooming everywhere. The bloom is so pervasive that it almost seems like they have communicated this year’s blooming plan to all Joshuas in the Southwest.

The next step in our Joshua tree research will be to see if there is any correlation, even a negative one, between broad rainfall patterns and Joshua tree blooming. The data is being tabulated. For now just enjoy the blooming trees.

I started off this column by talking about our disappointing wildflower season. However, this past week I encountered three areas where there are sufficient patches of blossoms to warrant getting your camera out. Be prepared for a drive. The first is along Highway 190 as it descends down into Death Valley National Park. I saw hundreds of notch-leafed phacelia, dozens of the white-flowered parachute plants and numerous rock nettles. The highway between Death Valley and Pahrump, Nevada, has many miles of dense concentrations of desert sunflowers.

Closer to home are the brown-eyed primroses, lupines and several other species in fair abundance along North Amboy Road as it descends to the town of Amboy.

For all of these locations there will be good blooming for about one more week.

James Cornett is a desert ecologist living in Palm Springs.

Aging gracefully: Desert plants live long past century mark

Joshua tree.

By Jimmy Biggerstaff
Hi-Desert Star

A saber-toothed tiger might have stepped on it. A mastodon shaking its behemoth body might have splashed water onto its leaves. And it still grows today.

The creosote clonal ring in Johnson Valley known as King Clone was one of the stars of the show when natural-history writer Chris Clark showed a slideshow of trees and plants that range from very old to ancient.

A full hall of desert aficionados assembled at the Black Rock Visitor Center Feb. 16 to hear Clark’s lecture on old growth.

Clark described the creosote’s clonal ring as “A single, living thing that has fallen into pieces.” Estimating the plant grows outward from the original plant’s germination point at one foot per 300 years, experts say King Clone sprouted 11,400 years ago.

This creosote may be the monarch of ancient life, but the desert is bursting with aged marvels, Clark told the audience.

He showed slides of buckwheat clumps that can live for 700 years. Iodine brush — more than 1,000 years. Clarke projected a photo of a particularly large and robust pencil cholla estimated to have sprouted up to 1,500 years ago.

Clark discussed some of the ways scientists determine a plant’s age and how slowly it grows. During a study in the Mojave Preserve’s Clark Mountain, botanists meticulously cataloged every plant in a plot of land, then returned 15 years later to observe changes.

By this method, they estimated life spans, but in some cases they could set no outward parameter because none of the plants of a specific species died, including buckhorn cholla and ephedra, or Mormon tea.

Not all ancients are plants. Clarke explained the centuries-long process that produces the varnish on desert pavement.

“In some aquifers,” Clarke said, “when you turn on the tap, that water hasn’t seen light since ground sloths roamed.”

Clarke’s first slide was from a favorite camping spot of his east of Cima Dome, a panorama of nearby granite, distant mountains and a Joshua tree forest. Clarke said Joshua trees generally have twice the lifespan of humans.

His next two slides showed the same tree photographed about 60 years apart. In the black and white version, Twentynine Palms pioneer photographer Burton Frasher had captured a particularly distinct-looking Joshua tree (aren’t they all?) growing in the desert northeast of Los Angeles.

The modern-day image of the same plant was the album cover for the band U2’s 1987 album “The Joshua Tree.” As Clarke flipped back and forth between the two images, it was apparent the plant hadn’t grown much in six decades.

Alas, that tree has since fallen over after a long and well-photographed life. Clarke said 300-year-old Joshua trees exist but are a rarity. They are relatively short-lived compared to other plants he mentioned in the lecture.

As the slide show continued, a Google Earth image showed a small, blurry blob Clarke identified as a 13-foot-wide clump of yucca northeast of the Mojave National Preserve. That ancient is no longer there, replaced by an array of solar panels.

Joshuas in peril

Are Joshua trees facing extinction?

STORY AND PHOTOS BY CHRIS CLARKE
Special to the Victor Valley Daily Press

SUNSET: The setting sun shines on the Joshua tree forest on Cima Dome in the Mojave National Preserve. (CHRIS CLARKE Special to the Daily Press)

The emblematic tree of the Mojave Desert is in big trouble. At a February 2009 climate-change symposium in Joshua Tree sponsored by the National Parks Conservation Association, scientists spoke with gallows humor about the eventual need for Joshua Tree National Park to change its name. The way things are going, it looks as if there will be no Joshua trees left in the park before too many more decades go by.

In a recent study, U.S. Geological Survey scientists Kenneth Cole and his colleagues used climate change models to predict the effects of global warming on the Joshua tree. Cole’s team calculated the likelihood of tree survival and the rate at which the trees reproduce and spread, and mapped the species’ likely range late in this century. The resulting map was empty. Only when the team tweaked their models to assume that the trees disperse their seeds 10 times as efficiently as they actually do, did the model predict Joshua trees would still exist in the wild in the late 21st century.

Even in Cole’s optimistic scenario, the Joshua tree would become extinct in Arizona and Utah. No Joshua trees would survive in JTNP, nor in the Mojave National Preserve. The species would be forced into the northernmost part of its range in eastern California and central Nevada. And all the web of life that depends on the trees elsewhere would unravel.

Take the yucca moth, for instance. The welfare of the Joshua tree depends utterly on the welfare of this inconspicuous insect. The moths and the Joshuas have evolved a remarkable partnership without which neither could reproduce. The moths visit male yucca flowers and gather pollen. They then pollinate and lay eggs in the female blossoms. The eggs hatch and the moth larvae eat some of the developing seeds. Adult moths emerge from the ground when the trees bloom, the timing due to unknown triggers. If changes in spring temperatures prompt moths to emerge when Joshua trees have no open blooms, then both species could suffer catastrophic reproductive failure.

Other desert animals play a role in the Joshua trees’ fate as well. In 2001, rangers observed large missing patches of the bark-like layer on trees throughout JTNP. The next year less than an inch of rain fell in the park. Researcher Todd Esque and his colleagues found that jackrabbits, ground squirrels and pocket gophers, struggling to obtain food in a year when many desert plants failed to germinate or put out new growth, were stripping bark off the trees. Of those trees that had been stripped of even a little bark, very few survived. By 2003 there were no areas of JTNP in which Joshua trees did not exhibit damage. Thousands of the park’s trees died.

Drought interferes with the production of new trees as well. In order to bloom, Joshua trees require significant precipitation in mid-winter, preferably in February. Drought inhibits bloom. Fewer flowers mean fewer seeds and thus fewer baby Joshua trees.

The recent increase in desert wildfires is another climate-related change. Torrential storms have prompted flushes of plant growth throughout the desert, which then provide fuel for dry-season fires. Invasive plants such as red brome grass and Sahara mustard have spread throughout the deserts, increasing fuel loads and filling in bare soil between shrubs that had been a natural firebreak. Before the invasives, lightning could strike a Joshua tree and that tree could burn without the fire spreading. Now fires threaten whole forests of Joshua trees, especially in JTNP.

Joshua trees are damaged directly by fire, with even minor damage often resulting in mortality. They remain standing for years afterward, hellish forests of white-trunked trees with black leaves, like a photonegative of their live counterparts. But if the direct damage done to Joshua trees by fire is devastating, the indirect damage fires do is even worse. Wildfires destroy slow-growing shrubs and facilitate their replacement with grasses. Blackbrush, an important understory plant in most Joshua tree forests, seems not to re-establish at all after wildfires. This is a serious long-term problem for Joshua trees. Joshua seeds that germinate under blackbrush are more likely to escape being eaten by rabbits until they are older and less palatable. Wiping out the blackbrush understory of a Joshua tree forest nearly guarantees that no new trees grow there. And invasive plants fill in where the blackbrush doesn’t, ensuring more frequent future fires.

Migrating trees

Many other trees face threats from climate change, but for most of them the outlook is not nearly as dire. Though individual trees may succumb, if their seeds get dispersed to more habitable locations — as a Clark’s nutcracker might do with whitebark pine seeds, for instance — the species has a chance to survive. But Joshua trees aren’t very good at seed dispersal. Pack rats will carry seeds up to 50 feet from the parent tree, and a few other birds and rodents play a role in moving Joshua tree seeds around. Unless the tree is on a long, steep hill, its seeds don’t move more than a few meters from the parent tree. The seeds have none of the adaptations found in other desert plants to enable wind or animals to carry them long distances: no sticky burrs, no sweet pulp surrounding a gut-proof seed coat, nothing but a delicate little black flake. Usually when something eats a Joshua tree fruit, it kills the seed. It’s very likely that the trees evolved to be dispersed by the Shasta giant ground sloth, which lived throughout the region until about 12,000 years ago, wandering long distances after gorging itself on Joshua tree fruit. Now that the ground sloth is extinct, Joshua trees disperse their seed much less effectively.

There are mature Joshua trees a hundred miles north of their current range. But little is known of what conditions Joshua tree moths can withstand. Some researchers suggest planting Joshua trees in habitats more likely to be hospitable to the trees’ survival. But until we learn more about the needs of the moths, we have no way to know whether those new forests would be able to sustain themselves.

Chris Clarke is a California environmental journalist and natural history writer, whose work can be seen at http://faultline.org. He has been studying Joshua trees since the mid-1990. This piece was adapted from an Educational Bulletin of the Desert Protective Council in San Diego. The full report is available at http://dpcinc.org.

Our Desert Home - Cima Dome

BUD LORKOWSKI

Special to the Press Dispatch
Victorville Daily Press

Photo from Back Roads West


From the rest stop on Interstate 15 near Cima Road in eastern San Bernardino County, a gently sloping mountain can be seen to the south. It is covered by Joshua trees. Outcrops of granite rocks stand tall near its summit.

This is the Cima Dome.

There are a half dozen of these features in the Mojave Desert, known to geologists as domes. They are rare.

Domes are large features covering a hundred or more square miles in area. The Cima Dome is perhaps the easiest to recognize. The best views of the dome are from the crests of the Mid Hills, which are to the south; Cima Road traverses Cima Dome between Interstate 15 and the post office at Cima.

Topographic maps show circular contour lines on the dome. If you put a pencil under a sheet and align the pencil until it is straight up, you will create a model of a dome.

Looking down on your model you should be able to observe that the lines of equal elevation, or contour lines as they are called, are circular. The top of the dome comes to a point, like an upside-down cone.

To understand how Cima Dome was formed, you have to understand a little about the history of the crust of the Earth in the Mojave Desert.

The Mojave Desert has been subject to a lot of pushing and pulling by tectonic forces in the last few million years. First the crust was stretched and thinned by the same forces that formed the Basin and Range Region of Eastern California, Nevada and Utah.

The thin crust of the Mojave Desert was then subjected to compression by forces placed on it when the Baja California micro-plate collided with North America. When these forces squeezed the thin crust of the Mojave Desert, hot plastic material from beneath the crust, known as the mantle, was pushed up to form the dome.

The Cima Dome has a thin crust and there is a bulge of mantle material beneath the crust. Some of this mantle material found its way through fractures and faults to form the 31 or more volcanoes of the Cima Volcanic Field, on the western flanks of the dome.

On your next trip to Vegas, spend some time at the rest stop between Cima Road on Interstate 15 and look at Cima Dome. Think about what is under your feet in the crust and mantle. This should help you understand some of the forces that are constantly changing “Our Desert Home.”

Bud Lorkowski is a retired science teacher. He is currently doing a geologic study in the Mojave National Preserve for the National Park Service. He has recently completed a geological study of Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument in Idaho.

Mojave milestones

Braving the perils of the historic road -- and nearly succeeding.

By Susan Spano, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

A bullet-riddled street sign on Old Mojave Road marks a turn near the Piute Range. (Robert Gauthier / LAT)

Baker, Calif. — Some people love the desert. They love it at 110 degrees with the AC off. They love rusted junk, abandoned mines, sand traps, rattlesnakes, old bones and dry washes. You're pretty sure they're touched until you go there with them, as I did in October with my brother, John.

He'd been wanting to drive the 130-mile Old Mojave Road, a dirt, rock and sand path across Mojave National Preserve that passes landscapes you don't get to see on paved roads. It was the historic route from the Colorado River to Barstow for Native Americans, explorers, stagecoach drivers and the Army.

When the railroad laid tracks to the south, the old road was all but forgotten until Dennis G. Casebier, a Navy physicist from Corona with a passion for desert history, decided it should be re-opened for recreation.

In the early 1980s, the Friends of the Mojave Road, founded by Casebier, mapped, repaired and erected stone cairns along the desert route. But with the creation of the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve in 1994, the group's custodial role diminished.

Now Casebier has moved on to tending a historic schoolhouse museum in the Mojave Desert hamlet of Goffs and collecting oral histories from people who once lived in the East Mojave Desert. But he still sometimes checks the mailbox his group installed near Kelbaker Road, where people record their passage over the old road. Casebier estimates that several thousand make the trip annually.

One tends to think all deserts are the same, places that get only a scant amount of rain. But in North America there are four kinds: the Great Basin, Sonoran, Chihuahuan and relatively small Mojave, all in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.

Deer keep their distance at the Mid Hills Campground in the Mojave National Preserve. (Robert Gauthier / LAT)

Sailing the desert in an SUV

The Mojave National Preserve has some of the tallest sand dunes and thickest Joshua tree forests on the continent and, better still, a combination of elements — lava cones, dry lake beds, basin and range topography that make it a kind of desert primer.

If a desert has something to teach, I want to learn. Then too, I like tagging along with John on hiking and backcountry driving trips. He has the skills and gear, although when camping he would eat protein bars for breakfast, lunch and dinner if I didn't bring along some real food. For protection in the wilderness, he takes my grandfather's World War I saber, about as deadly as a papier-mâché prop in an operetta. He pores over maps before setting out and then basically ignores them in order, I think, to give expeditions a sense of discovery and adventure.

John told me this would be a very rough trip — two days of driving and one night of camping — and that I better not wimp out, the way I did a few years ago when I made him turn back on the appallingly rugged road that leads to the Maze District of Utah's Canyonlands National Park.

I rented a beige Ford Expedition with four-wheel drive and left a day ahead of John so I could see a few sights, including Kelso Depot. This desert oasis at Kelbaker and Kelso-Cima roads (two of the paved arteries that cross the preserve) was born with the completion of the railroad between Salt Lake City and L.A. in 1906, when there was considerable mining in the area.

But passenger trains began bypassing the little settlement after World War II. The handsome early '20s Spanish Revival train station, with its restaurant and regal stand of palm trees, was left to molder.

Now the National Park Service is in the final stages of renovating the building as an interpretive center and museum, scheduled to open this summer. It's a good rest stop between visits to the Cinder Cone Lava Beds about 15 miles north and Kelso Dunes to the south.

Then I headed up Kelso-Cima Road, which rounds the south side of gently sloping, astonishingly symmetrical Cima Dome, a 75-square-mile area of volcanic uplift in the wild heart of the preserve. The two-lane highway, often used as a shortcut between Palm Springs and Las Vegas, is straight and flat, paralleling railroad tracks before branching off across the Ivanpah Valley.

The sun was setting in a pink puddle by the time I reached Nipton, on the northeast side of the preserve, with its bushy tamarisks, pint-sized hotel and general store. I chatted with the clerk and drank a soda before heading for the Avi Resort & Casino, on the Colorado River about midway between Needles, Calif., and Laughlin, Nev.

I am not much of a gambler and had never been to the Needles-Laughlin area, where the tamed Colorado River is a bathtub favored by motor boaters and water skiers. But the eastern portal of the Old Mojave Road is near the Avi, which is owned by the Mojave Indians who settled the river's flood plain and helped blaze the trail that became the road.

They led Spanish explorer Father Francisco Garcés across the desert in 1776 and did the same for the American trapper Jedediah Strong Smith in 1826. But eventually, relations turned hostile between newly arriving white people and the Indians. As a result, in the 1860s the U.S. government built a chain of forts along the old desert trail, which by then had become a rump-blistering wagon road carrying supplies and mail.

I doubt the people at the Avi, propped at slot machines with plastic cups full of quarters, were thinking about history. Together with the casino's garish lights and the gorging at the Native Harvest Buffet, they vaguely depressed me, so I went to my room — big, clean, simply furnished, not bad for about $25 on a weeknight — and went to sleep, anticipating a rendezvous the next morning with John, who wasn't able to leave L.A. until after work.

I banged on his door at 9 a.m. and had a map spread out on a table in Avi's Feathers Café when he showed up for breakfast. Our plan was to drive half of the road that day, camp overnight and finish the next day, coming out at Afton Canyon just south of I-15 between Barstow and Baker. Then we would head back to the Avi, where we were leaving John's car, for a dip in the pool, another go at the buffet and beds with clean sheets.

But we were in no hurry, because two days of driving would easily get us over the road, with time to stop and explore such features as Soda Dry Lake on the west side of the preserve. After rainy weather, it becomes a vast, tire-swamping mud flat. When John saw the Expedition, he said it was probably too heavy to make it across the playa, but he cheered up when I told him it was insured for every conceivable mishap.

We packed the water, food and gear John had brought, spent a cool $50 filling the gas tank and set out. The unmarked turn-off west across the desert was about three miles north of the Avi; we found it with the help of Casebier's "Mojave Road Guide," annotated mile by mile. John made me manage the wheel at the beginning, to prove I could do it. Like most novice dirt-road drivers, I tended to take my foot off the gas when we came to sand. But my brother kept saying, "Follow the ruts. Keep going. Don't stop."

Then he cracked open a liter of Coke and yelled out the window, "No problem anyway! We're fully insured!"

That day was a pure desert joy from start to finish. The temperature was about 80 degrees when we left, and the sky was mounded with clouds. A lop-eared jackrabbit jumped out of a nest of creosote, birds tittered, the air smelled like a spice rack.

And, suddenly, everything sharpened up, as it will in the desert, from the yellow rabbitbrush to the brittle Piute Mountains, as if I'd just had Lasik surgery.

About 23 miles west of the Colorado River (using Casebier's distance calculations), we reached Ft. Piute, one of the military redoubts built on the road in the 1860s. It sits in the shadow of Jedediah Smith Butte, above dependable Piute Creek, and once harbored 18 enlisted men of Company D of the 9th U.S. Infantry.

John went looking for Native American petroglyphs in the creek bed while I ate a packaged cheese-and-cold-cut snack on the knee-high stone walls that are the remnants of the fort. Just before we relaunched our Old Mojave Road sortie, he did a saber dance in front of the Expedition with Grandpa's sword.

The setting sun colors the Marl Mountains in the central section of the Mojave National Preserve, about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles.(Robert Gauthier / LAT)

Mysterious turnoffs

With John driving, we climbed 3,412-foot Piute Pass, infamously rough in the old wagon road days. The view west swoops over the Lanfair Valley, where homesteaders tried to make the Mojave bloom in the early 20th century, to range upon range of desert mountains, separated by basins, in a Western geography lesson.

From there, we tooled across the valley, so thick with Joshua trees you would think they had been propagated. Here and there we saw old stuff scattered over the desert, including a wrecked school bus that made me think of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine."

There were also mysterious turnoffs that John said could lead to crystal methamphetamine labs. He likes to put me on edge. When I asked if we needed gasoline, he routinely said we were about to run out.

We crossed paved Ivanpah Road at Casebier mile mark 41.7 and caught graded Cedar Canyon Road west to avoid a more treacherous stretch of the Old Mojave Road along Watson Wash. Eventually, we reached Government Holes, where one of the last gunfights in the West took place in 1925. It's a pretty place in the Round Valley, with a windmill and abandoned corral, and we considered making camp. But it was starting to get chilly and there were no windbreaks, so we turned south on Black Canyon Road, heading for Mid Hills Campground in aromatic forests of pinyon pine and juniper.

There we claimed site No. 25, with the preserve's best view of Cima Dome. A fire pit was stocked with wood, left by some friendly earlier camper, and there was a nice flat place for my tent. John set up his cot outside so he could see the stars. We had steak and apples for dinner, talked for a while and then went to sleep.

I slept like a sunken ship and awakened in time for sunrise over Cima Dome.

Another day in the desert ensued, not quite as good as the last. We lost our way, making an unintended detour north toward Death Valley Mine on a track that kept getting fainter and fainter. Finally, we reached the paved Kelso-Cima Road, where there's a little convenience store and post office run by tiny, wizened Irene Ausmus, who came to the Mojave with her husband in the 1960s and refused to sell out when the National Park Service arrived.

It wasn't hard to find the Old Mojave Road again, with Casebier's help. In fact, the road's rutted route can be seen for miles as it pushes west across Kelso Wash and rounds the Beale Mountains, named for explorer Edward F. Beale, who tried to introduce camels to the Mojave in 1857 but had to abandon the experiment because they frightened the horses.

The views north to Cima Dome and south to Kelso Dunes only got better. But just east of Marl Springs, John realized we had a flat, necessitating an hour of hot, dirty work mounting the humongous spare. There was some cursing, after which we decided to get to Kelbaker Road, about 20 miles west, as soon as possible, so we could drive to the town of Baker on I-15.

With the rigors of Soda Dry Lake ahead, it seemed prudent to get the blown tire fixed so we'd have a spare.

In Baker, we stopped at the Park Service information office, where a ranger gave us more bad news. Autumn rains had made passage over the playa dicey. Several vehicles had gotten stuck there recently, languishing for days awaiting rescue as the salt crust of the dry lake corroded their undercarriages.

John wanted to risk it, but the day was more than half gone. Over a lunch of hummus, fried calamari and gyros at the Mad Greek restaurant, I persuaded him to abort and head back to the Avi. So we can't say we drove the whole road. Our names don't appear in the record book at the Old Mojave Road mailbox, which we bypassed in our rush to Baker.

But John plans to return and conquer the playa. Maybe I'll go with him. I'm starting to understand why he loves the desert. Besides, I'd like to see him brandishing Grandpa's saber again.


Rocking and rolling across the Mojave

GETTING THERE:

Mojave National Preserve is about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. From L.A., take Interstate 15 northeast to Baker and turn south on Kelbaker Road, or take Interstate 40 east from Barstow and turn north on Kelbaker Road, to reach Kelso Depot, a major historical site in the preserve. The eastern portal of the Old Mojave Road is on Needles Highway about halfway between Needles, Calif., and Laughlin, Nev.

Spring and fall are the best seasons to drive the Old Mojave Road. Consult the Mojave National Preserve or "Mojave Road Guide," by Dennis G. Casebier (Tales of the Mojave Road Publishing Co., Essex, Calif.), for information on how to prepare for the trip.

WHERE TO STAY:

Two campgrounds in Mojave National Preserve, Mid Hills and Hole-in-the-Wall, have drinking water and toilet facilities. Sites are $12 per night. Roadside car camping is also permitted, with restrictions.

Avi Resort & Casino, P.O. Box 77011, 10000 Aha Macav Parkway, Laughlin, NV 89029; (800) 284-2946, http://www.avicasino.com/. This complex on the west bank of the Colorado River has rooms in a new tower or an older poolside building. Doubles start at $19 Sundays to Thursdays, $49 on weekends.

Hotel Nipton B&B, 107355 Nipton Road, HCR-1, Box 357, Nipton, CA 92364; (760) 856-2335, http://www.nipton.com/. This homey desert enclave is on the northeast side of the preserve. It has a general store and five guest rooms with shared baths. Doubles are $69.50, including breakfast.

WHERE TO EAT:

Laughlin and Needles have a range of casino and fast-food restaurants. But if you're driving through Baker on I-15, don't miss the Mad Greek, (760) 733-4354, for serendipitous gyros, souvlaki and fried calamari in the desert. Lunch for two about $20.

TO LEARN MORE:

Mojave National Preserve Headquarters, 222 E. Main St., Barstow, CA 92311; (760) 255-8801, http://www.nps.gov/moja, or the NPS Baker Information Center, 72157 Baker Blvd., Baker, CA 92309; (760) 733-4040.

Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Assn., Goff's Schoolhouse, 37198 Lanfair Road G-15, Essex, CA 92332; (760) 733-4482, http://www.mdhca.org/.