Dispatch #43 - Chuckwalla National Monument Part 2
I have spent a lot of time wandering this small patch of land over the years, learning its contours both on foot and on the map. Its shape is an imperfect circle, 9.6 miles in circumference, enclosing roughly 3,382 acres of rocky ridges, sandy washes, and hidden oases centered around Corn Springs, a loop of green where trees, shrubs, cacti, and wildflowers hold their ground against the desert.
The dark yellow marks BLM land designated as Wilderness, the highest level of protection we have for land in the United States. The aqua square is California State Lands. The small gray parcels are privately owned, held by miners who laid claims here long ago.
And that light patch of yellow where I’ve been roaming, the area roughly encircled in red on the map, was BLM land without formal protections.
That changed with the creation of Chuckwalla National Monument. More than 624,270 acres in California’s southeast corner now carry a shared name and a shared protection, bringing together long-designated Wilderness with 375,747 acres of previously unprotected BLM land.
—
BLM Dispatch #23 - Summer Reading
It was a bountiful summer of reading, these books connecting me to friends and places near and far.
A visit to The Strand bookstore in New York brought me serendipitously to early hardcover editions of The Pine Barrens and Coming Into the Country and a signed copy of Macfarlane’s new book. Fifteen blocks south in lower manhattan, I picked up Things Become Other Things at McNally Jackson Books.
The Way Around came with me on a plane to Minneapolis, and then heartbreakingly stayed on the plane when I left it in the seat pocket along with two sheets of scribbled notes and dozens of dog eared pages and underlined sentences. Upon arriving to my sister-in-laws home in the Twin Cities, I walked to Magers & Quinn in Uptown and bought it again.
Vromans in Pasadena and City Lights in San Francisco rounded out the other connections, which further proves that the real reason to ever travel is to visit bookstores (and, for gods sake, MORE TIME TO READ).
Dropping in some capsule reviews for those who might be interested in picking up a new book or three…
—
