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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Dispatch #39 - Climbing Inside the Amboy Crater
ou first spot the Amboy Crater from Route 66 as a dark speck rising from the flat Mojave floor. At that distance it barely registers, a small interruption in an otherwise endless horizon. But mile by mile, it grows as you pass ghost towns with names like Klondike, Siberia, and Bagdad, until the black cinder cone dominates the landscape, looming in full view, as if it could wake up at any moment.
Nearly 79,000 years ago, it did exactly that. Molten lava erupted from what is now a quiet, extinct volcano, spilling across the desert and carving out the basalt plains that still surround the cone today. The most dramatic remnant of that eruption is the breach on the crater’s western side, where lava once surged outward. Now, that break in the cone serves as the gateway into the crater itself.
As you approach the crater’s edge, the scale snaps into focus. What looked like a simple mound from the highway suddenly drops away beneath your feet, revealing a vast, bowl-shaped interior. Walking down into the crater feels strangely intimate, like stepping into the hollowed-out heart of the earth. It’s dreamy and otherworldly to realize you’re standing inside the center of an extinct volcano, tracing the contours left behind by fire and time.…
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BLM Dispatch #31 - Cadiz Dunes Wilderness
There are plenty of dune systems in California — some with greater vertical relief, some extending across broader aeolian plains, others teeming with richer floristic diversity — but the Cadiz Dunes, my favorite of the bunch, rise at that sacred roundabout where remoteness, solitude, dark skies, and untetheredness all meet.
Thanks to a 1994 Wilderness designation, the 19,935-acre dune field is protected in perpetuity, free from mechanized transport, development, structures, and roads that would fragment its sweeping continuity. Here, wind and time remain the only architects, continually shaping a landscape as untamed and quiet as it’s been for millennia.
Geographically, the dunes lift from the desert floor near old Route 66, which still runs for roughly 75 miles south of Interstate 40, linking Ludlow in the west to Fenner in the east. The route winds past the charmingly named ghost towns of Klondike, Siberia, and Baghdad, and through Amboy, where Roy’s Motel and Cafe still glows in neon at night.
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