Ecologists have a practice called long-term ecological monitoring: returning to the same patch of ground again and again, season after season, until the ordinary reveals its patterns and shifts.
For the past five years, I’ve been returning to a patch in the California desert, drawn by its solitude and the ability to walk unimpeded through an open landscape without steep mountains or dense forests blocking the way. The shape of this area resembles an imperfect circle, 9.6 miles around, enclosing roughly 3,382 acres of rocky ridges, sandy washes and hidden oases. Over time, my walks have become a kind of pilgrimage through the seasons, a deliberate act of slowing down, of paying attention. What I’ve found here isn’t spectacle, but subtlety, a world unfolding in slow motion. It lies within the newly minted Chuckwalla National Monument, a place where patience reveals beauty, and protection came just in time for lands too often overlooked.
Chuckwalla’s rugged desert landscape — 624,270 acres in the southeast corner of the Golden State — encompasses five wilderness areas and 375,747 acres of previously unprotected public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Within this enormity lies Corn Springs, the place I’ve visited in autumn, winter and spring — a loop of green where native trees, shrubs, cactus and springtime wildflowers stitch color into the arid country.
Chuckwalla National Monument is a place where patience reveals beauty, and protection came just in time for lands too often overlooked.
Wandering this circle becomes a lesson in endurance, sweat and blood. Shade is scarce, cast only by ironwood, palo verde and a few fan palms rooted in a perennial spring.
It’s a sun-weathered palette shaped by time, geology and aridity — its colors more tonal than saturated, as if baked into the land itself evoking silence and resilience.
In that silence, the rocks tell human stories, too, etched into the faces of the Chuckwalla Mountains. For at least 10,000 years, this region has been the homeland of the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mojave, Quechan and Serrano peoples — a landscape of movement and residence, where ancient travel corridors link the Colorado River with the coast and the interior Southwest. The springs offer water, food, and shelter, sustaining both seasonal and long-term habitation. Petroglyphs of rain, spirals and other markings record journeys, prayers and the lives lived here.
One sunrise, I found a long-eared owl feather resting in the shade of these etchings, as if the bird had flown straight out of the stone and left a marker. Standing there, it was impossible not to feel the weight of continuity: the same cliffs, the same springs, the same sky — and the same human urge to make meaning from it all.
HOW DO WE HONOR such continuity in our own time? National monuments go beyond protecting land; they are acts of memory, our acknowledgment that certain histories, species and landscapes hold stories too vital to be entered into a balance sheet.
This isn’t abstract — it’s written in my own footsteps across these lands. I’ve felt it under my boots and witnessed the transformations in monuments all across the West — education centers where schoolchildren step into the stories of the land, endangered species receive room to recover, and Indigenous ecological knowledge is restored to its rightful place.
Yet the case for monuments is not only about what they hold; it’s also about what they exclude. No billboards here. No artificial lights to drown the dark sky. No new mining scars, paved roads cutting through mountains, subdivisions pushing into washes.
What is a monument but a declaration of reverence?
What is a monument but a declaration of reverence?
THE MEASURE OF THAT reverence lives in what endures. Within Chuckwalla, 408 species of flora and fauna have been logged on iNaturalist — reptiles, arachnids and desert plants among the usual suspects, along with celebrity mammalian residents like bighorn sheep and an unlikely cast of fungi. A diversity this rich feels improbable in such an austere place, yet each entry reminds me how much of the desert remains hidden.
I am not the only one who returns to this place. Colin Barrows, a board member of the Cactus to Cloud Institute, has been coming here since his boyhood in nearby Coachella Valley, his curiosity rooted in the quiet companionship of the desert’s living things. Of the 408 species logged on iNaturalist, he has personally observed 79.
When I asked what kept him returning year after year to one of the driest regions in North America, he laughed. “Well, if you’re interested in cacti,” he said, “this is the place to be.”
Among the rarities are two of Barrows’ favorites: the Chuckwalla cholla, first documented in 2014, and the senita cactus, discovered by his father a year earlier — the first senita recorded in California, more than a hundred miles from its previously known range in Arizona and Mexico.
If Barrows’ devotion is to the cactus, mine is to the season when the desert loosens its restraint. After a pulse of spring rain, apricot mallow and golden suncups light the washes; scorpionweed spills purple across the slopes; brittlebush flares bright yellow. The California poppy draws crowds elsewhere, but here it’s the cryptic desert poppy — small, elusive, adapted to hide in plain sight — that steals my attention.
I’ve walked these acres in three seasons, practicing the ecologist’s discipline — returning, watching, taking note. From a distance, this place can seem unremarkable, just another stretch of rock and sand. But step inside, and it speaks in color, in scent, in movement. That intimacy with the land is what drew me into the larger fight to protect it — a fight that would span a decade and unite tribes, scientists, lawmakers and ordinary citizens like me.
NATIONAL MONUMENTS aren’t born overnight: Chuckwalla took the better part of a decade. Linda Castro, associate policy director for CalWild, told me the long road to designation was built on “tireless organizing, coalition building and compromise.” She might have added the quiet labors involved: the miles driven between desert towns, the hours spent in community centers and the careful adjustment of boundary maps.
The push began in 2015, Castro told me, when CalWild and the Mojave Desert Land Trust met with Rep. Raúl Ruiz to consider protecting these ecologically sensitive lands. For years, the effort crept along. Momentum arrived in 2019 with the passage of the Dingell Act, a bipartisan public-lands bill. That same year, Frank Ruiz of Audubon California joined, insisting that the proposal center tribal voices and address renewable energy. By 2020, the coalition had widened to include conservation groups, local businesses and all 13 of the region’s federally recognized tribes.
From there, the timeline picked up speed. Democratic Sens. Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler introduced a bill in 2024 alongside Ruiz. And in January 2025, President Joe Biden signed the proclamation under the Antiquities Act.
The proclamation carried more than ink: It promised a new management plan and a framework for tribal co-stewardship, weaving Indigenous knowledge into the care of the land and ensuring cultural access. For the 13 tribes who supported the effort, it is both protection of ancestral lands and a step toward healing from forced removal. “This is not just a bare landscape,” Donald Medart of the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe told CalMatters. “This is a living, breathing, thriving place, where people have lived since time immemorial.”
Designation also meant the land could be drawn closer to the public’s reach. For many BLM lands, a lack of information, trails and infrastructure keeps them inaccessible. In Chuckwalla, designation doesn’t just guard against threats; it invites families, schools, and neighbors into relationship with the land.
It was a hard-won success, and one that should have marked the start of a new chapter. Instead, the ink on the proclamation was barely dry before new threats emerged.
JUST WEEKS AFTER Chuckwalla’s proclamation, President Donald Trump’s Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, launched a review of “all withdrawn public lands,” including national monuments — echoing a 2017 review that drew 2.8 million comments, nearly all opposed to any rollbacks. Backing this new review is a controversial Department of Justice memo released on May 27, claiming the Antiquities Act allows presidents to revoke or shrink monuments. The memo overturns 85 years of precedent; if upheld, it would gut the Act and its protections.
In August, a lawsuit filed by the BlueRibbon Coalition and a Michigan miner sought to erase Chuckwalla’s proclamation, prompting nine conservation groups and five tribes, including Medart’s, to intervene. Then, in September, the assault spread beyond Chuckwalla when Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona introduced bills to abolish two monuments outright — Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon and Ironwood Forest. Why wait for the review when you could eliminate them with a single act of Congress?
Dismantling these protections would erase promises made to tribal nations, unravel safeguards for wildlife, and silence thousands of years of stories. Lands that took a decade to protect could be opened in months. Yet public sentiment remains strong. The latest State of the Rockies Poll shows that the majority of Republicans (83%), Independents (87%), and Democrats (97%) in Western states agree that keeping monument protections is critical — proof that this is one cause Americans clearly agree on. The question is whether the public’s voice will rise loudly enough, and soon enough, to turn the tide.
What these voices seek is balance within a system that has long been tilted toward use over care. The BLM oversees 245 million acres of public land, yet only 15% of that land is protected as part of the agency’s National Conservation Lands, the system that includes monuments like Chuckwalla. The rest remains open under a “multiple-use” policy that too often translates as extraction first, protection when convenient. That lopsided 85/15 imbalance is why monuments like Chuckwalla matter. Their designations mark the rare occasions when the BLM is asked to put care ahead of consumption — to tip the scales, however slightly, toward restraint.
During the summer months, when triple-digit heat lingers, I return to Corn Springs only in memory. Beneath the palm fans, I listen for owls, trace stories written on stone, and breathe in the scent of creosote after a monsoon rain. This place of persistence has taught me to listen. To sit still. To return.
Places once dismissed as barren have a way of proving they were essential all along, harboring the quiet continuity of life. The fate of Chuckwalla is worth defending not only for itself, but for every stretch of BLM land still waiting to be seen.
Wallace Stegner called wilderness “the geography of hope.” In Chuckwalla, that hope is rooted in remembering — the stories, species and silences that have endured here for millennia — and in the stories made anew as each generation forges its own relationship with the land. It reminds us that hope is not passive; it’s a decision we make again and again, to protect what cannot be replaced. In that choice lies a future where the wild still breathes, and where hope, like the land itself, endures.
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