California Desert Protection Act and Mojave National Preserve

The California Desert Protection Act of 1994 is one of the most important place-based public-lands statutes in Title 16. It did more than redesignate Death Valley and Joshua Tree as national parks. It also created Mojave National Preserve, dealt with mining, grazing, rights-of-way, Native American uses, water-rights questions, land transfers, wildlife corridors, and off-highway vehicle recreation areas, and generally rewired the governance of a huge part of the California desert. The Act is best understood as a desert-system statute rather than as three isolated park-unit laws.

Current Law (2026)

The Three-Part Desert Core

Death Valley

Part A at 16 U.S.C. §§ 410aaa-410aaa-7 redesignated Death Valley as a national park and handled boundary, transfer, grazing, and advisory-commission issues.

Joshua Tree

Part B at 16 U.S.C. §§ 410aaa-21-410aaa-28 did the same for Joshua Tree, again pairing redesignation with boundary, utility, and visitor-planning provisions.

Mojave National Preserve

Part C at 16 U.S.C. §§ 410aaa-41-410aaa-59 created Mojave National Preserve, the most legally distinctive of the three. Mojave was not written as a standard national-park statute. Congress built a preserve structure that explicitly addressed:

• mining regulation and validity studies
• grazing continuation
• utility rights-of-way
• management planning
• land acquisition
• advisory commissions
• special sub-areas such as the Granite Mountains Natural Reserve and Soda Springs Desert Study Center

That makes Mojave one of the clearest examples of Congress choosing a preserve model to accommodate continued uses alongside long-term federal protection. For Alaska's parallel preserve framework, see ANILCA.

Why the Miscellaneous Provisions Matter

The audit row for Part D — Miscellaneous Provisions is not filler. Those sections at 16 U.S.C. §§ 410aaa-71-410aaa-83 are the connective tissue of the whole Act.

They address:

• land transfers and tenure adjustments
• management of newly acquired lands
• Native American uses and interests
• federal reserved water rights (see Federal Water Reclamation for the broader western water framework)
• access to private property
• wildlife corridors (see Endangered Species Act for habitat-protection law that intersects with these corridors)
• military overflights
• authorization of appropriations

In other words, Part D is where Congress solved the regional governance problems that come with protecting a giant desert landscape crossed by military activity, private property, ecological corridors, and long-standing cultural use.

Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation

Part E includes 16 U.S.C. § 410aaa-91, designating off-highway vehicle recreation areas. That matters because the California desert is one of the places where Congress most explicitly confronted the tension between conservation and mechanized recreation rather than leaving it entirely to agency discretion.

How It Works

The CDPA worked as a coordinated regional framework rather than a simple add-new-unit statute: it simultaneously redesignated Death Valley and Joshua Tree from monuments to parks, created Mojave as a new category (national preserve) that allowed grazing and hunting to continue under NPS management, and transferred millions of BLM wilderness acres into permanent protection. Mojave's preserve designation was the political bargain that made the rest possible — it offered conservation advocates stronger protection than BLM multiple-use management while giving ranchers and hunters more flexibility than a traditional national park would have allowed. Water rights and private-property access appear prominently in the Act because desert law turns on them: reserved federal water rights, rights-of-way for inholding owners, and land-tenure adjustments for private parcels surrounded by federal land are not peripheral concerns but central to whether the conservation framework holds together in a region where water is contested and land ownership is fragmented. Reading any single provision of the Act in isolation misses the design logic; the statute only makes sense as one coordinated California desert package, and the Mojave provisions specifically reflect compromises built into that larger legislative deal.

By the Numbers

• Death Valley National Park: approximately 3.4 million acres — the largest national park in the contiguous United States, larger than Connecticut; approximately 1.1 million visitors/year; June air temperatures regularly exceed 120°F, making visitor safety a year-round NPS management challenge
• Joshua Tree National Park: approximately 800,000 acres; visitation surged from 1.4 million/year (2010) to nearly 3 million/year (2019-2023), driven by proximity to Los Angeles and social media; one of the fastest-growing NPS units before and during the pandemic
• Mojave National Preserve: approximately 1.6 million acres; approximately 1.5 million visitors/year; unique in the NPS system — California's only unit where hunting is permitted (as a preserve rather than a park, Congress explicitly allowed it)
• California Desert Conservation Area (surrounding BLM lands): approximately 10 million additional acres under BLM management adjacent to the three CDPA units; the primary zone for renewable energy development, OHV areas, and grazing that would not be compatible with the NPS units

How It Affects You

If you ride off-highway vehicles or use motorized recreation in the desert: The CDPA's OHV provisions (Part E) created designated OHV areas on BLM land adjacent to the three units — most significantly the El Mirage OHV Area and Dumont Dunes. Inside Mojave National Preserve, OHV use is permitted but restricted to designated routes. Inside Death Valley and Joshua Tree as national parks, OHV is prohibited. Where you can legally ride depends entirely on which part of this statute and the BLM California Desert Conservation Area plan governs the specific parcel — a detail that has led to enforcement actions and property seizures for riders who crossed from permitted BLM land into NPS jurisdiction without realizing it.

If you hold mineral rights, a mining claim, or own property with extractable resources in the California desert: The CDPA required validity studies for all pre-existing mining claims within the new protected units. Claims that were valid under federal mining law at the time of the Act's passage (1994) can continue; the Act does not retroactively invalidate them. But no new mining claims can be staked in the national park and preserve units. Lithium deposits in the Mojave region — now among the most valuable mining targets in the United States given EV battery demand — mostly sit on BLM land outside the CDPA units, but proximity to CDPA wilderness corridors affects environmental review timelines and legal challenges.

If you develop or invest in renewable energy in the California desert: The utility-scale solar farms that now dominate the Mojave and Sonoran Desert landscape are sited on BLM California Desert Conservation Area land — generally not inside CDPA units themselves. But the CDPA's wildlife corridors, water-rights protections, and tribal use provisions directly affect what can be developed on adjacent BLM lands, how long environmental review takes, and what mitigation is required. Projects like Desert Sunlight (550 MW, Riverside County) and Genesis Solar (250 MW) went through multi-year review processes that engaged the tribal, ecological, and water-rights interests the CDPA specified. The tension between desert conservation and solar/wind development is the defining California public-lands conflict of the 2010s-2020s.

If you're a tribal member of the Chemehuevi, Mojave, Cahuilla, Serrano, or other desert nations: Part D's tribal-uses provisions specifically preserve traditional cultural and religious uses of desert lands within the park and preserve units. Water rights in the desert are existential — the desert springs and Colorado River tributaries that these provisions protect are not an abstract legal interest but actual sources of water for communities that have existed here for millennia. The Act's reserved federal water rights also matter for future allocation disputes as Colorado River water becomes scarcer.

State Variations

This is federal law specific to California's desert region, but its practical effects vary by subregion:

• Mojave: the preserve's hunting-permitted status makes it functionally different from adjacent death valley and Joshua Tree; grazing continues on some Mojave lands; Kelso Depot visitor center is the primary NPS interpretive facility
• Joshua Tree: intensive visitor pressure from the Los Angeles metropolitan area has required significant investment in entrance reservation systems, campground management, and fee collection; the park is a bellwether for how NPS handles surging urban visitation at smaller, accessible parks
• Death Valley: military overflights from nearby China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station and Fort Irwin are an active ongoing coordination issue; the valley's remote roads, extreme heat, and backcountry character require a different visitor-safety approach than the higher-visitation parks

Recent Developments

Lithium mining proposals near CDPA units have emerged as the most contentious resource-use debate in California's desert since the Act itself. The Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron mine proposal in Nevada and the Thacker Pass mine are near but outside CDPA boundaries; however, proposals on BLM lands in the Mojave have directly engaged the CDPA's wildlife corridors and tribal protections. The Biden administration tried to balance clean-energy transition goals with desert conservation through its Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan; the Trump administration's 2025 executive orders on energy production directed BLM to prioritize energy development approvals, creating direct tension with the CDPA's protection framework for adjacent lands.

Joshua Tree's visitation surge — from under 1.5 million/year in 2010 to nearly 3 million in recent peak years — has strained visitor facilities designed for a fraction of that use. The park has implemented day-use reservation systems for peak weekends, expanded parking and entrance fee collection, and accelerated campground reservation requirements. Overcrowding has led to vegetation damage from off-trail foot traffic, overflowing waste facilities, and multiple rescues of visitors who underestimated desert conditions. NPS has requested and received some Great American Outdoors Act funding for infrastructure improvements, but visitation growth has outpaced physical infrastructure capacity.

The Trump administration's 2025 NPS staffing reductions hit the California desert parks in a specific way: Death Valley in particular depends on law enforcement rangers for remote search-and-rescue, backcountry permit monitoring, and visitor safety in extreme heat conditions. A reduction in law enforcement ranger capacity at a park where summer temperatures regularly kill visitors who attempt hikes without water is a concrete public-safety concern, not an abstract staffing dispute.