The San Gorgonio Wilderness is located in the eastern San Bernardino Mountains, in San Bernardino County and into northern Riverside County, Southern California.
The Sheep Hole Mountains are a mountain range in the Mojave Desert, to the north of Joshua Tree National Park, in San Bernardino County, California. The mountains were once Chemehuevi hunting grounds.
The Clipper Mountains are located in the eastern Mojave Desert and protected within Mojave Trails National Monument, in San Bernardino County, California.
The Castle Mountains are located in the Eastern Mojave Desert, in northeastern San Bernardino County, California, and Clark County, Nevada. The range lies south and east of the New York Mountains, southwest of Searchlight and west of Cal-Nev-Ari, Nevada.
The Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument is a National Monument in southern California. It includes portions of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto mountain ranges, the northernmost ones of the Peninsular Ranges system. The national monument covers portions of Riverside County, west of the Coachella Valley, approximately 100 miles (160 km) southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Hart was a short-lived gold mining town located in the Mojave desert, in San Bernardino County, California. It existed between 1908 and 1915, and was located on the northeastern edge of Lanfair Valley near the New York Mountains. The area is now in the Castle Mountains National Monument, administered by the National Park Service.
Joshua Tree National Park is a national park of the United States in southeastern California, east of San Bernardino and Los Angeles and north of Palm Springs. It is named after the Joshua trees native to the Mojave Desert. Originally declared a national monument in 1936, Joshua Tree was redesignated as a national park in 1994 when the U.S. Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act. Encompassing a total of 795,156 acres – slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island – the park includes 429,690 acres of designated wilderness. Straddling San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, the park includes parts of two deserts, each an ecosystem whose characteristics are determined primarily by elevation: the higher Mojave Desert and the lower Colorado Desert. The Little San Bernardino Mountains traverse the southwest edge of the park.
The Bighorn Mountains are a mountain range of the Mojave Desert and Transverse Ranges, located in San Bernardino County, California. They are primarily within a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) protected area.
The Santa Rosa Wilderness is a 72,259-acre (292.42 km2) wilderness area in Southern California, in the Santa Rosa Mountains of Riverside and San Diego counties, California. It is in the Colorado Desert section of the Sonoran Desert, above the Coachella Valley and Lower Colorado River Valley regions in a Peninsular Range, between La Quinta to the north and Anza Borrego Desert State Park to the south. The United States Congress established the wilderness in 1984 with the passage of the California Wilderness Act, managed by both the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. In 2009, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act was signed into law which added more than 2,000 acres (8.1 km2). Most of the Santa Rosa Wilderness is within the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument.
The California Desert Protection Act of 2010 was legislation proposed by U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein. The stated aim of the legislation was "to provide for conservation, enhanced recreation opportunities, and development of renewable energy in the California Desert Conservation Area."
The San Gabriel Mountains National Monument is a United States National Monument managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which encompasses parts of the Angeles National Forest and the San Bernardino National Forest in California. On October 10, 2014, President Barack Obama used his authority under the Antiquities Act to create the new monument, protecting 346,177 acres of public lands in the San Gabriel Mountains of the Transverse Ranges. The effort to protect the San Gabriel Mountains began more than a century earlier, in 1891 with another U.S. President, Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, using a congressional act, to designate and delineate the first federal protection in the United States of forested lands, using the same mountain range name, as the San Gabriel Timberland Reserve. Two earlier California conservationists, Abbot Kinney and John Muir, influenced President Benjamin Harrison.
The Wildlands Conservancy is a nonprofit organization with a mission to preserve land for public recreation. It manages 25 preserves, detailed in the list of its preserves, covering over 200,000 acres (81,000 ha) across the western United States. The preserve system encompasses diverse landscapes including mountains, valleys, deserts, rivers, and oceanfront lands. The Wildlands Conservancy buys and restores land, builds public visitor facilities, and provides outdoor education programs for children. All usage is free of charge, attracting over 1.5 million visitors annually.
Basin and Range National Monument is a national monument of the United States spanning approximately 704,000 acres of remote, undeveloped mountains and valleys in Lincoln and Nye counties in southeastern Nevada. It is described as "one of the emptiest spaces in a state famous for its emptiness."
Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument is a national monument of the United States comprising 344,476 acres (139,404 ha) of the California Coast Ranges in Napa, Yolo, Solano, Lake, Colusa, Glenn and Mendocino counties in northern California. Cache Creek Wilderness is located within the monument.
Mojave Trails National Monument is a large U.S. National Monument located in the state of California between Interstates 15 and 40. It partially surrounds the Mojave National Preserve. It was designated by President Barack Obama on February 12, 2016, along with Castle Mountains National Monument and Sand to Snow National Monument, also in southern California. It is under the administration of the Bureau of Land Management.
Sand to Snow National Monument is a U.S. National Monument located in San Bernardino County and northern Riverside County, Southern California.
Gold Butte National Monument is a United States national monument located in Clark County, Nevada, northeast of Las Vegas and south of Mesquite and Bunkerville. The monument protects nearly 300,000 acres of desert landscapes featuring a wide array of natural and cultural resources, including rock art, sandstone towers, and important wildlife habitat for species including the Mojave Desert tortoise, bighorn sheep, and mountain lion. The area also protects historic ranching and mining sites such as the ghost town of Gold Butte, although little but mine openings, cement foundations, and a few pieces of rusting equipment remains. The monument is managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Cadiz Dunes Wilderness is a protected wilderness area in the Mojave Trails National Monument in San Bernardino County, California. Established in 1994 by the U.S. Congress, the area is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. This wilderness area is north of Joshua Tree National Park, Sheephole Valley Wilderness lies to the west, Old Woman Mountains Wilderness to the east. The dunes of Cadiz Dunes were formed by blowing sands from the Cadiz dry lake, all located in the Cadiz Valley between the Calumet Mountains and the Old Woman Mountains. The ecology is typical of the Mojave Desert with wildlife that includes coyote, black-tailed jackrabbits, ground squirrels, kangaroo rats, quail, roadrunners, and rattlesnakes. The area is known for a brilliant display of springtime desert wildflowers including the Borrego milkvetch.
Whitewater Preserve is a nature preserve owned and managed by The Wildlands Conservancy, a nonprofit land conservancy. Consisting of 2,851 acres (11.54 km2) of land in Riverside County, California, the preserve features the perennial Whitewater River flowing through a desert canyon. The preserve is located within the San Bernardino Mountains and is part of the Sand to Snow National Monument. More preserves can be found in the list of preserves.
