Well, we’re at the edge of desert season now. The mesquites are pushing out their feather-like leaves, rattlesnakes are emerging from dens, and daytime temperatures are climbing well past what feels reasonable.

This week’s dispatch takes us to the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountain National Monument, where public lands rise abruptly from the Coachella Valley floor to elevations nearing 11,000 feet — protecting an astonishing transition from creosote flats and palm oases to alpine forests and snow-covered peaks.

Jointly managed by the BLM and U.S. Forest Service, the monument contains a vast network of campgrounds, canyons, trails, and wilderness areas. Near the desert floor sits a surprisingly excellent visitor center — the kind more commonly associated with national parks than BLM land — complete with interpretive exhibits, maps, helpful staff, and a much appreciated blast of air conditioning before heading back into the heat…

—

Read more…

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…

—

Read more…