After my enjoyable couple of days in Joshua Tree National Park, I wanted to experience more of the Mojave Desert, but in a slightly more wild and uninterpreted way, so I drove to the Mojave Desert Preserve, to the visitor center at Kelso Depot.  Kelso is an old train depot that served the miners and ranch owners in the area, and the station house has been fixed up beautifully as a visitor center and gallery.  I’m not sure how much water it took to keep that grass green, but it was the only green I saw for days, and for that reason seemed so lush and fresh!

The rangers there were very helpful, and advised me on the condition of the roads in the preserve, since many of them are only dirt tracks.  I also got a kick out of the old two cell jail outside that used to house the occasional drunk overnight when there were a lot of miners in the area.

I’m actually really enjoying off-roading in the desert, and this is becoming my favorite road sign!

Camping is allowed anywhere in the preserve, although they do ask you to reuse previous camping spots when possible, and many of them have a fire ring so they’re easy to spot.  I was about 20 miles down a 4wd track when I pulled over on the top of a hill and set up camp for the night, not having seen anyone for over an hour of driving.  There’s a stark beauty to the desert, but somehow it wasn’t really the look of the place that was appealing to me, but rather the atmosphere, the feel of it.  It just felt remote, peaceful, calm.  I could curl up in my blankets as the sun set and just think… of nothing.  It’s not often that I actually let my brain shut off and think of nothing, but it was easy to do here, and a relief in some ways.

But on the other hand…. it gets really freaking cold in the desert at night!!  One blanket really just wasn’t enough, and I ended up in warm clothes, with a hat on my head, and still shivering.  Odd that the first place I’ve been cold has been the desert.  I did spend some time staring up at the night sky since I was already awake, and it was stunning.  With no towns anywhere near, and low humidity in the air, the stars were brilliant, and the Milky Way swept across the sky.  It’s so hard to describe the depth of a desert night sky, and it almost seemed to be filled with colors that were just outside my range of vision — sensed, but not quite seen.  What a lovely universe we belong to.

There were no coyotes to wake me, but I was up early anyway, grateful for the warming rays of the morning sun.

One of the biggest issues with desert travel is making sure that you have enough fuel to make it to your next stop, so I had planned out a loop route that took me down some additional 4wd tracks and by some lava beds and cinder cones in the morning, and left me enough fuel to get out again to the nearest town.  The track started out fine — a bit rougher than the one I did the day before, with the occasional washout a couple of feet deep, but I’ve seen worse, and the FJ is a trooper and can walk over those with ease.

The road eventually got into some fairly deep sand, but without a compressor onboard, I didn’t want to decrease my tire pressure to give me float, so just had to deal with swimming around a lot, trying to keep momentum and not get bogged down.  The sand alternated with patches of these fist-sized lava rocks that were also pretty shifty and slippery when piled deep.

The toughest part of the track was over this cinder cone, where the road was made up almost entirely of lava rocks, up a steep gradient, and was washed out deeply in several places.  Luckily that was the worst of it, because travelling alone, without any self-rescue equipment such as a winch or air bags, I couldn’t have done much more without being kind of stupid.

Although I enjoyed the experience of living in the Mojave for a couple of days, I think visiting Joshua Tree was actually the better time for me.  The Mojave Desert Preserve was indeed wilder, but also more harsh and uncompromising, hotter, colder, less beautiful.  A good story to tell, but maybe not an experience that I have to repeat.