BLM Dispatch #48 - BLM Campgrounds in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts
Over the past six months, we’ve traveled together across the Mojave, Sonoran, and Colorado deserts of the American Southwest. But every desert season eventually comes to an end, and though people live in the desert — and though the temperatures haven’t yet reached their true boiling point — every May my body, brain, and spirit begin quietly saying goodbye.
I have already covered the BLM campgrounds in California’s Eastern Sierra in Dispatch #5, but now to close out the season, I wanted to shift to some of my favorites in California’s Mojave (and Colorado) deserts…
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BLM Dispatch #32 - McCain Valley Resource Conservation Area
If you left Downtown San Diego and followed CA-94 east, then swung onto Interstate 8 and let it carry you farther and farther from the coast, seventy miles in all, you’d pass the small outpost of Alpine — where I lived in an RV one summer between college, and where the carne asada burritos are worth a detour — then slip into the Cleveland National Forest, rise over the 4,055’ Laguna Summit, exit at Campo Boulevard, turn right, make a left onto Old Highway 80, and after 1.9 miles spot the faded green sign for McCain Valley Road 2100, where you’ll make a left and follow it 2.3 miles until the potholed pavement gives way to potholed gravel.
That’s where you cross into a strange mosaic of jurisdiction and purpose — BLM land sliding into Wilderness, Native reservations stitched along the margins, Anza-Borrego State Park looming to the east, and one lonely 619-acre square of California school lands holding its ground in the middle.
Welcome to the McCain Valley Resource Conservation Area…
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