Road Trip Through Sand Land

Once again I was a bystander caught in the annual mall madness as shoppers fretted over the right gift, the right card, the right ham to make Christmas perfect. Having been raised Jewish, all I wanted last month was some peace (and quiet) on Earth.

I found it in Mojave National Preserve, created by the California Desert Protection Act of 1994. Mojave gets far less attention than the national parks of Death Valley to the north and Joshua Tree to the south; fewer than 400,000 people visit Mojave each year, compared with 1.2 million for Death Valley and 1.3 million for Joshua Tree. Sandwiched between Interstates 15 and 40, about 200 miles east of L.A., Mojave is perhaps best known only as what passersby see on the way to Las Vegas or Arizona.

But as I discovered, Mojave is indeed worth a visit--at Christmas or just about any other time from October to May, though winter can be cold. The preserve may not have roller coasters or an Eiffel Tower or mega-hotels with room service, but it does offer 1.6 million acres of splendid nature: rolling desert, soaring mountains, sand dunes, limestone caves, volcanic remnants and an oasis. The park also is home to the threatened desert tortoise, but it hibernates in fall and winter.

I hit the road early one Saturday, driving east on Interstate 10 from Los Angeles. To avoid Vegas traffic on I-15, I approached from the south on California 62 through Morongo Valley and Twentynine Palms, then continued north on Amboy and Kelbaker roads to one of the park’s many ungated entrances (no admission fee).

My first stop was Hole-in-the-Wall, so named because of the area’s window-like rock formations. Here a narrow, sheer-walled canyon links two plains of different elevations. Water bottle and camera in hand, I descended into the canyon’s slightly claustrophobic crevasse, feeling like a very small Alice in a very big Wonderland. Near the trail head, a ranger at a small visitor center had warned me about the path, which becomes so steep in two spots that hikers have to climb down iron rungs driven into the rock.

At the bottom, where the canyon opens out, I had two choices: Turn around and follow the same route back, or loop around two miles to the parking lot. I chose the loop, returning to my car in less than an hour.

A 16-mile drive brought me to the next stop, Mitchell Caverns in the Providence Mountains State Recreation Area, which is inside Mojave National Preserve. I joined a dozen other tourists on a 90-minute guided walk through passageways and alcoves filled with elaborate limestone formations with exotic names: flowstone, coral pipes and drapery.

Rebecca Lee, our guide, told cautionary tales about the caverns’ past: In the early 1900s, souvenir-seeking visitors snapped off some stalactites, which had taken millions of years to grow a few feet.

When the park service linked two caverns by blasting a tunnel, the change in humidity damaged the delicate limestone. (Airtight doors were installed later.)

And when Oliver Stone’s film crew added pictographs to the walls for a scene in the 1991 movie “The Doors,” Lee said, the oil-based paint seeped into the rock. The image appears in the movie for two seconds; the damage will last forever. Despite these signs of human intrusion, the caverns were magnificent, with much of nature’s work left intact.

Although I love the outdoors, I’m not fond of camping. So after the tour, I drove east for an hour to Needles, checked into the palatial Super 8 Motel (well, at least it seemed that way after a day in the desert), dropped off my belongings, freshened up and, this being Needles, left town.

Twenty-five miles north lay Laughlin, Nev., and an all-you-can-eat buffet with my hungry name written all over it. The spread at the Edgewater Casino filled the bill nicely: ham and turkey carved to order, steaks, chicken breast, fried shrimp, crab cakes, three kinds of soup, salad fixings, rolls, cake, pie, brownies, ice cream. . . .

When it comes to food, I’m a volume person. This was definitely a volume meal, and the Edgewater made no money off me that night.

The Colorado Belle Casino, however, almost did. After dinner I played a little roulette. Intending to stay only an hour, I ended up staying four, mostly because I was determined to win back the money I kept losing. When I finally landed back in the black on a spin of double-zero, I cashed out and high-tailed it back to Needles.

Sunday morning began back in the preserve with photo stops at Kelso Dunes, 45 square miles of wind-sculpted sand reaching as high as 600 feet, and at Kelso Depot, an abandoned train station that park officials want to renovate and reopen as a visitor center. The depot, built in 1923, is surprisingly large--a former Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad station, employee boardinghouse and restaurant combined into one Mission-style structure.

About 30 minutes north was another impressive sight: Teutonia Peak, an isolated, craggy monolith that crowns a wide granite mound called Cima Dome. A two-mile path led from the parking area to the summit, on the way passing through one of the largest and densest concentrations of Joshua trees in the world. Also visible along the trail were Mojave yuccas and the invitingly fuzzy cholla cactus, called “jumping cactus” because it can reach out and touch someone, or so it seems. Only from the top of Teutonia could I fully appreciate Cima Dome’s symmetrical bulge in the earth, which remains hidden for most of the hike.

I made one more photo stop at the nearby Cinder Cones (also called the Lava Beds), a forbidding-looking landscape of more than 30 volcanic formations and hardened lava flows. Then I set out for my final destination: Zzyzx.

Like millions of other Angelenos, I had often passed the exit sign for Zzyzx while driving to Vegas on I-15. As it turns out, Zzyzx (pronounced Zie-zix) was a word coined by radio evangelist and self-proclaimed “doctor” Curtis Springer, who opened the Zzyzx Mineral Springs and Health Resort next to the Soda Springs oasis in 1944. Springer figured that if his spa was the last word in the dictionary, it would also be the last word in health resorts.

Zzyzx was indeed successful for years, but in the early ‘70s, federal land managers evicted Springer. The Bureau of Land Management took over the resort, which in 1976 reopened as the Desert Studies Center, operated by a consortium of seven California State University campuses.

The buildings were closed for the holidays, but I still enjoyed Zzyzx’s primary attraction: the grounds, a palm tree-lined oasis. In the late afternoon light, with a few ducks playing in the lake, I walked along the calm, reed-covered shores in perfect silence. I found my peace and quiet.

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Budget for One

Super 8 Motel, one night: $39.60

Dinner, Edgewater Casino: 9.62

Other meals: 16.00

Mitchell Caverns tour: 3.00

Gas: 77.40

FINAL TAB: $145.62

Super 8 Motel, 1102 E. Broadway, Needles, CA 92363; telephone (800) 800-8000 or (760) 326-4501, fax (760) 326-2054, Internet https://www.super8.com. Mojave National Preserve information center, 707 W. Broadway, Needles, CA 92363; tel. (760) 326-6322, https://www.nps.gov/moja.