Mojave Preserve
I camped in the Mojave Preserve last year about 100 feet from the road. People came streaming into my campsite all week, and one person actually plopped his rear a few feet from my door and stayed there all night and half the next day in an Involuntary Campsite Sharing Incident. I was not eager to repeat that experience, plus now I have a back-country-capable vehicle, so we drove into the mountains to camp among the Joshua trees. The road in (Ivanpah) wasn’t bad. Driving out over New York Mountain Road was quite the experience, though. Definitely wouldn’t recommend that for a regular car. A lot of it was quite passable, but there were some gnarly spots that would have been quite hair-raising (were quite hair-raising even in a truck), and once I actually had to shift into 4WD to get un-stuck out of deep gravel. Not to mention bashing my trike rack against the ground several times due to severe unevenness in the road.
The Mojave Preserve is great…I plan to return there on a regular basis. It’s not all that photogenic, but here’s a snapshot of the terrain around our campsite just to give you the flavor of it.