The California Desert

By Kim Heacox

The Final Frontier: Alaska | A Changing Climate | Ecology Emerges | The California Desert
The Centennial Challenge | A Diverse and Dynamic Workforce

"The Great American Desert" is how maps once described all lands west of the Mississippi River. For more than a hundred years the desert was anything but a destination. It was a dangerous and daunting place; a wasteland, a place to get through, not to. The promise of California always waited farther west; along her golden coast, or cradled in her fertile Central Valley, not in the sands and salt flats of her deserts, among the hottest and driest in North America.

That's hardly the case today. With passage of the California Desert Protection Act in 1994, Death Valley National Monument (established in 1933) gained about 1.2 million acres and was redesignated Death Valley National Park, the largest national park in the contiguous United States—50 percent larger than Yellowstone. Joshua Tree National Monument also grew (by 234,000 acres) and became a national park. And sandwiched between the two, the East Mojave National Recreation Area, previously administered by the Bureau of Land Management, became the 1.4 million acre Mojave National Preserve, home to 11 mountain ranges, four dry lakes, numerous cinder cones, badlands, mesas and buttes, and one of California's most complex and compelling sand dune systems.

Sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the act passed just days before the November elections that ushered Congressional Republicans into power, and gave them the chair of every Senate and House committee and subcommittee. They responded by appropriating one dollar for an annual NPS budget to administer the new Mojave NP.

The storm had since settled, and Californians—and most Americans—now accept the new desert park and preserve lands as a welcome addition to their maps and dreams.

Year round, buses arrive filled with urban school kids from San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and elsewhere. They come to see the desert, to see the stars in ways they've ever seen them before, to hear stories from rangers who speak with gravity and drama about the land and the animals that live here. They come to have their lives changed, to have their eyes opened, to sleep on the ground, laugh in dreams and sing from their toes.

Everywhere they see the signatures of water, yet nowhere do they see water itself. How? Why? By the time they leave, they understand. They learn about soundscape studies and air quality studies being conducted by the National Park Service to measure the diminishing degrees of quiet and clean air in America, and how they, the inheritors of this land, can turn it around.

Like all visitors, they find many new facilities that have been recently constructed to improve their experience, including the complete makeover of the Historic Kelso Depot as the Mojave's headquarters and visitor center. Every day people arrive in these places with a reverence and gratitude that's visible in the way they walk, in how they regard the beauty around them, and know, if only for a day, that this is where they're supposed to be. The desert is not a wasteland, it's a gift.

The Final Frontier: Alaska | A Changing Climate | Ecology Emerges | The California Desert
The Centennial Challenge | A Diverse and Dynamic Workforce

Published:  September 19, 2009