California’s new monument is a desert of wild beauty and an uncertain future
Everyone’s talking about it. The Los Angeles Times and Backpacker Magazine ran feature pieces on it. The lady in front of me at the grocery store protested to protect it. But nobody I spoke to had actually visited Chuckwalla National Monument. Biden used the 1906 Antiquities Act to create Chuckwalla National Monument on January 14, 2025, just days before he left office. In doing so he set aside over 700,000 acres of mountains, canyons and arroyos in southeastern California, an area only slightly smaller than Yosemite National Park.
The new monument spans the transition zone between the Mojave desert, our nation’s driest, and the Sonoran desert, North America’s lushest. Reaching from Joshua Tree National Park’s southern border east to the Colorado River, and west to the Coachella Valley on the edge of the Salton Sea, the newly protected lands feature stunning geology, sweeping vistas, incredible biodiversity, Indigenous petroglyphs and historic mining debris.
Internet information is sparse, and when I dialed a number for the monument I got a busy signal all day long. Email inquiries were useless; I was told there was nobody available to answer questions. So, armed with a vague plan, four gallons of water, a 4WD high clearance vehicle and a full tank of gas, a friend and I set out from Joshua Tree to check it out. Turns out our nation’s newest national monument is its own cautionary tale. 
Just eight miles south of I-10, along a graded dirt road, Corn Springs Campground features towering fan palms and a startling variety of desert flora, thanks to the springs which haven’t flowed above ground for over 50 years. The name comes from the land management practices of the original stewards, who defied the binary categories of modern anthropologists by enjoying a nomadic lifestyle that also included growing corn. Indigenous people from the Iviatim (Cahuilla), Nüwü (Chemehuevi), Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave), Kwatsáan (Quechan), and Maara’yam and Marringayam (Serrano) groups continue to steward this oasis as their ancestors did for thousands of years. Petroglyph panels are prominent on boulders above the wash along a well maintained interpretive trail.
We visited two months after designation, during spring break when daytime temperatures were in the mid-70s and every campsite at Joshua Tree was booked out. At Corn Springs Campground we found only two other campers. The rumors of potable water turned out to be false but the pit toilets were among the cleanest I’ve ever seen.
Less than two miles beyond the campground we found John de la Garza’s remarkably well preserved cabin. Born in Texas, de la Garza walked from Moapa, Nevada to Needles, California, arriving in Corn Springs in 1930, at the age of 52. He spent the rest of his life there, as a prospector and one of the only year-round residents. His children have kept the cabin tidy, a quaint altar to the mining past, with dented rusted cans of food and a visitor log book.
Beyond de la Garza’s cabin, ocotillo loomed ten feet tall, crowned with brilliant orange blossoms. Cholla stems were surrounded by a glowing corona of thorns in the fading light. Chocolate mountains loomed in the distance, with barren washes between.
A 4WD vehicle became necessary as we approached the ruins of the Aztec Wells mining community just a few miles past de la Garza’s cabin. The desert preserves even while it destroys and we found a few well kept private homes with dire “No Trespassing” signs next to desiccated trailers ravaged by the desert wind and critters. Care and neglect are neighbors at Aztec Wells. We wandered deeper into the entropy of the abandoned mining town and found rooms full of dried droppings, piles of old shake shingles, plastic knives strewn about on the ground.
It looked like an abandoned movie set from the 1950s, with cracked linoleum, ancient outlets, and exposed mattress springs. A crispy newspaper in one shack had screaming headlines about Israel, Gaza and Hamas dating from the mid 1990s. Rubbish overflowed from the open doors of one home, the yard a garbage heap of scattered debris. We found a magazine from 2019 and a sign that declared this was an Active Mining Site.
I always imagined the threats our public lands faced from mining involved industrial scale devastation. Aztec Wells revealed that BLM management allows wanton disregard for scenic splendors and history, in favor of people trashing a place one ATV load at a time. In order to preserve a semblance of the mining history of this area, we need to get rid of mountains of modern junk. If you want to understand why Chuckwalla is worth protecting you only need to witness what happened when it wasn’t.
The most popular attraction in the new monument is the ladder hike in the northwest corner. Painted Canyon in Mecca Hills features heavy erosion that looks like enormous dribble castles or a melting temple. There’s endless scrambling, exploration and adventure potential in these crumbling shallow canyons; desert rats have been flocking here for decades.
Dispersed camping in the Mecca Hills is easy and plentiful. I’ve enjoyed campfires with friends in these lonesome washes. I’ve also called in a fire started by an arsonist or careless camper that threatened to decimate the sparse habitat of the entire area. While libertarians complain about the hassles of overregulation, the consequences of poor management can be severe.
Almost half of our national parks began as national monuments. Eighteen of the past 21 presidents — nine Democrats and nine Republicans — have used the Antiquities Act to create 168 national monuments. And while locals occasionally object to the creation of these national monuments, they often come around. Every national park that started as a national monument received consent from the state’s two senators. Change is hard. What was once controversial becomes accepted and even venerated. The Antiquities Act is a powerful legislative tool.
So of course several bills that would eliminate or hamstring presidential creation of national monuments are winding their way through our hallowed legislative halls. Fighting to protect the Antiquities Act may be our best path forward if we want to continue to preserve huge swaths of land from extraction and exploitation.
But as the OG desert rat, author Edward Abbey reminds us, struggle is only part of the battle for wild lands. “Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast … a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic,” he wrote. “Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.”
Main Image: Sunset over the eroding Mecca Hills Wilderness. Photo: Bob Wick / BLM
Read other articles by Leonie Sherman here.
