Barstow to Needles: The California Mojave

Barstow is a town that exists because of the railroad and the military and nothing else. The Santa Fe Railway built a major repair yard here because the location split the desert run conveniently. Fort Irwin, the Army's National Training Center, sits about thirty-seven miles northeast.

The Marine Corps Logistics Base is a few miles to the east. Without those anchors, Barstow would be a gas station and a junction sign. The Mojave Desert between Barstow and the Colorado River at Needles is among the hottest places in North America in summer.

Needles has recorded one hundred twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, most recently in June of two thousand seventeen. The Joshua trees that grow in the western Mojave, and which you may still see in this stretch, are a marker species for the transition between the lower Colorado Desert and the cooler Mojave proper. They are also under stress at the edges of their range as summers grow hotter.

The Mojave people, Hamakhav, in their own language, have lived along the Colorado River for thousands of years and occupied the desert on both sides of the river. Their territory includes the land around Needles. The Fort Mojave Indian Tribe holds federal recognition and land along the Colorado.

The Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation, upriver in Arizona, is home to Mohave and Chemehuevi people, and also to Navajo and Hopi families relocated there in nineteen forty-five. The desert does not record any of this. It simply continues being the desert.