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Mojave Preserve

Mojave National Preserve and surrounding region of California

30 posts

Chalcedony Cabin

Chalcedony Cabin

On a scorching late spring day in 2015, we journeyed out to a lonely cabin in the central heart of the Mojave Desert. This is a barren landscape of sand and lava. Any roads that once traversed this wasteland were wiped out by monsoonal thunderstorms long ago. Interestingly, there are

Mojave Lava Tube

Mojave Lava Tube

Out in the volcanic cinder cones, a few miles east of Baker in the Mojave National Preserve, and hidden among fields of broken basalt and cinder, is the Mojave Lava Tube. Over the course of the last seven million years (during the Pleistocene and Pliocene epochs) and perhaps as recently

Curtis Canyon Cabin

Curtis Canyon Cabin

In February of 2014, I visited the fairly remote Frank Curtis Cabin. I found Boxcar and Ed were already there and busy cleaning and restoring the cabin to a habitable condition. Follow Backcountry Cabin Etiquette when visiting. The narrow, one-man cabin was built by Frank Curtis in 1958, and he

Brannigan Mine Camp

Brannigan Mine Camp

While heading out on a trip to Nevada, we rendezvoused for a quick exploration of the Brannigan Mine, also known as the Oro Fino. The mine is in the Old Dad Mountains of the Mojave Preserve. These days, the mines are closed by iron bat gates. The cabins, however, have

Rosalie (Valley Wells)

Rosalie (Valley Wells)

Just off Interstate 15, in the shadow of Clark Mountain, lie the scattered ruins of Rosalie, also known as Valley Wells. Rosalie's tale began in 1898 when the Ivanpah Smelting Company of Los Angeles recognized the potential of nearby copper deposits. They sank two wells at a site

Mary's Cave Pictographs

Mary's Cave Pictographs

Mary’s Cave, also known as Shelter Rock, is a nice little rock shelter carved out of a volcanic rock formation in the Mojave National Preserve. There is a small tinaja (a depression in the bedrock made by water) next to the shelter in the canyon, which would have held

Counsel Rocks

Counsel Rocks

Counsel Rocks, also known as Womb Rock, is a fascinating site inside the Mojave National Preserve in the eastern Mojave desert. The petroglyphs and pictographs are on a handful of large volcanic boulders at the base of a mesa. What is interesting about this site is that a couple of