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 #33 - A Rock Called Snaggletooth
It was a new moon phase the first time I camped at a rock outcrop called Snaggletooth, named for the escarpment that rises from the Mojave floor like teeth, as if some sentient underground being were heaving its way toward the surface for a meal and then froze in time.
What’s left are jagged and jumbled striations, terra cotta colored with tiny islands of green scattered across the landscape by the likes of creosote, Mojave yucca, teddybear cholla…
This is prime desert tortoise country — the elusive reptile whose lineage reaches back millions of years, surviving heat and drought by sheltering in burrows and conserving water so effectively they can endure more than a year without a drink — a creature I’ve hoped to see in all my miles walking the Mojave but never have.
I arrived in winter, an hour before the sun fell out of sight, and immediately scampered up the one hundred and seventy foot climb from the desert floor to the top of Snaggletooth Rock for a good look around.
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