President Barack Obama/Castle Mountain from the southwest; Bow River in foreground | Wikimedia Commons
President Barack Obama designated three national monuments in Southern California on February 12, 2016, which placed nearly 1.8 million acres of federal land under national monument protection. President Barack Obama/Castle Mountain from the southwest; Bow River in foreground | Wikimedia Commons More than 350,000 acres within Mojave Trails had already been designated as wilderness by Congress, and Obama’s proclamation placed the wider landscape under the national monument designation and linked it with other protected areas in the region. Sand to Snow National Monument stretches from the Sonoran Desert floor toward San Gorgonio Mountain, which is the highest peak in Southern California, across an elevation range of nearly 10,000 feet. The monument contained more than 100,000 acres of wilderness that Congress had already designated, and also included about 30 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, desert oases and archaeological sites, including an estimated 1,700 Native American petroglyphs. Federal officials identified more than 240 bird species and 12 threatened or endangered wildlife species in the area. The three designations covered roughly 1.775 million acres, which federal officials rounded to nearly 1.8 million, and the administration said that the new monuments would connect existing protected areas, including Joshua Tree National Park, Mojave National Preserve and 15 congressionally designated wilderness areas. The February 2016 designations instead added another layer of federal protection across a landscape that already contained several different categories of protected public land.
Department of the Interior said the designations followed decades of local input and conservation efforts. Federal officials said that activities including hiking, camping, hunting, horseback riding, photography and other outdoor uses would continue under monument management rules. The three sites were Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow and Castle Mountains, which are a group of desert landscapes that also connected several areas that were already protected as national parks, preserves and wilderness. The U.S. The Mojave Trails proclamation specifically identified lava flows, volcanic features, caves, sand dunes, mountains, and other geological formations as resources to be protected. The designations were made under the Antiquities Act, which gives presidents authority to establish national monuments on federal land to protect objects of historic or scientific interest. Obama had used the law repeatedly during his presidency, but the California desert action was one of his largest single conservation designations.
