In 1994, the California Desert Protection act established Joshua Tree and Death Valley as National Parks and the Mojave as a National Preserve. While national parks do not allow the removal of fish, game, plants, and minerals, national parks do. The Mojave National Preserve is a dynamic mixture of land use — cattle grazing, private residences, mining, off-roading, wilderness protection areas, and conservation areas. Often, certain areas are closed to allow privacy for American Indian harvesting of traditional materials. The Mojave Desert Land Trust has been acquiring land parcels within the Preserve for the last 9 years in hopes of conserving it - meaning keeping it off limits to off-roading, cattle ranching and mining.

I headed out with three other volunteers from the Land Trust to camp for a few days and monitor some of the parcels. We camped in tents and used a small cabin owned by the Land Trust to prepare meals. The first night the winds were so strong and cold that we climbed into our sleeping bags at 7:45pm, after dinner and a game of dominoes. The wind beat on the tent walls. It woke me from a dream in which I was sleeping on a boat - the tent wind reminding me of sailing, tent parts like the ropes that banged the hollow metal mast of my friend’s father’s catamaran.

Each day, we woke with the sun, slow mornings of coffee and breakfast. Then, we began monitoring. We walked the perimeter of each parcel, and took a photograph at each corner looking into the parcel. We looked for signs of grazing or dumping or roads being carved, and photographed them to keep track of the coordinates. We hiked 7-10 miles a day through remarkably diverse territory. The first day we hiked through a Joshua Tree and Yucca Palm forest (the Joshua Trees were smaller here and the Yucca Palms were bigger, it's the other way around in Joshua Tree National Park). The second day we hiked through a Creosote forest, the third day through a sandy wash.

We didn’t find much out of the ordinary. Some of the parcels butted up against ranching land and where we found coils of barbed wire and fence posts to report. The sun went down around 5pm. We tried to stay up until 8pm. Waking up at 5:30am meant 9.5 hours in bed - or in a bag - which is kind of a long time. I learned a lot about the early counterculture days in Joshua Tree. Two of the other volunteers, Al and Ann, have lived in Joshua Tree since the late 60s, first on a commune, and then when that burned down, in a house with an older woman named Teroma whom they looked after with a few others from the commune. Travelers would camp out behind the house. Frequent travelers included a woman named Krishna and her daughter Tree Wind Water, and a man named Teddy. Teddy studied poetry at Yale, and then dropped out to live in the boulders and study Hinduism. Evidence of his life remains in the rocks.