A car sits by itself at a dirt trailhead in the Mojave Desert. Nobody knows who drove it there or which way he walked, and the wind filled in his footprints hours ago. One morning at the Kelso Dunes I came close to being the man who belonged to that car, and I didn’t like it one bit.
I love the desert. I’ve done more than fifty hikes in Joshua Tree with a camera. The desert also watched me do some stupid things, and two of them could have ended with a ranger puzzling over an empty car. People who write about the desert as a spiritual retreat love the sunsets and the silence, and they skip the part where it tries to kill you. I’m not skipping it.
Six in the morning on the Kelso Dunes
The Kelso Dunes sit in the Mojave National Preserve in California, between Baker on Interstate 15 and Interstate 40 to the south. I went out there at six in the morning, with the sun barely up, and started climbing.
That early start was the one smart thing I did that day.
Sand makes for miserable climbing. Every step up slides half a step back down, and the slope gives way under your boots in little avalanches that pour over your shoes. A big face takes forever to climb, and loose sand gives no warning before it lets go. I climbed up the dunes, and then I fell and rolled down maybe ten feet.
Ten feet doesn’t sound like much.
Then I looked out. The freeway looked like it was thirty miles away, and there was nothing anywhere on any side. There was nobody there. No rangers, nothing.
And I thought, if I die here, I’ll be buried under the sand, and nobody will ever even know, except for the car.
How tall are the Kelso Dunes in the Mojave Desert?
The tallest of the Kelso Dunes rise about 650 feet above the desert floor, and the whole field covers roughly 45 square miles. It’s the largest field of wind-blown sand in the Mojave. I’d have told you they were the largest dunes in the western United States, and from the bottom of a slope with sand in your teeth they certainly feel like it. Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes run taller, at around 750 feet, so Kelso has to settle for second place.
It’s a short hike. Figure about three miles round trip from the parking area with roughly 470 feet of climbing, and there’s no real trail once you hit the sand, because the wind reshapes the dunes all the time.
There’s no cell service either. Who exactly did I think was going to find me?
My thirty miles was a guess made from the bottom of a sand slope. By road, the trailhead sits about nineteen miles from Interstate 40, fifteen of them up Kelbaker Road and four more on a dirt road, and Baker is farther still. On foot, in soft sand, in summer heat, any of those distances will kill you. The preserve gets brutally hot in summer, and no amount of good intentions puts water in an empty bottle.
Kelso is famous for something else, too. When the sand is dry, sliding down a steep face sets off a low booming rumble you can hear and feel, and people call them singing dunes.
Damp sand stays silent. Dry sand on a hot afternoon can sound like a distant jet engine under your boots.
The car would have been the only witness
Picture that car. A broken leg up there, and the wind would have covered me in a few days. Somebody would have found a car parked at the trailhead with nobody in it. They’d have searched, maybe. Then they’d have towed it. The car would have stayed a mystery forever, and it would have been all that was left of me in the Mojave.
I didn’t feel terror. All I felt was a sudden realization that what I was doing wasn’t that bright. Okay, I’m getting out of here, I said, and I did.
Every ranger and every search-and-rescue volunteer begs you not to go out alone and tell nobody where. I’d done both. A car and a vague plan made up the whole safety net.
I hate that I did it.
For twenty years I ran computer operations for a company, a job built on asking what happens when the power goes out and the backups fail. Then I walked into one of the emptiest places in California without a plan anybody else could read. How dumb is that?
Lost half a mile from the road in Joshua Tree
The other time, in Joshua Tree, was worse.
Joshua Tree got a lot of my time after my wife died, trail after trail with a camera. One day I got off the path somehow. Turned around, and there was no path. The other way, no path there either, just rocks and Joshua trees and one thought: where the hell am I?
Half a mile. That’s all the distance there was between me and the road.
Ten minutes of walking would have covered it, if only I’d known which way to go. Joshua Tree is like that. The boulder piles all look alike after a while, the trees look alike, and every wash looks like the one you came up. You can lose a road you were standing on twenty minutes earlier.
So I did the one sensible thing left. I went totally quiet and waited, something like ten minutes without moving, and listened. Finally a car, very faint, way off in the distance.
My sense of direction for sound is pretty good, and I trusted it. I walked toward where the car had been, and I was right. A big ravine sat in the way, with a climb down into it and back up out of it, and there were rattlesnakes down there.
The desert doesn’t care how smart you think you are, and it won’t send a ranger to tell you. – Richard LoweShare on X
Florida hurricanes have rattled me, starting with Irma, and the one that hit us in 2024 freaked me out badly. Terror has hit only a few times in my life. Joshua Tree was worse than that hurricane. In a storm you know where you are and you know it’ll end. Out there, nothing told me how the hell to get out, or promised that I would.
What should you do if you get lost hiking in the desert?
Stop moving. Everything else follows from that.
A lost hiker who keeps walking turns a half-mile problem into a five-mile problem, burns water he can’t spare and walks away from the place a search will start. Search-and-rescue people teach a simple rule called STOP, for stop, think, observe and plan, and the first letter carries most of the weight.
Then listen. Sound carries a long way in the desert when the air is still, early in the morning or in the evening, and a road you can’t see can still be heard. A car, a truck downshifting, a plane on approach to an airport, voices from a campground: each one gives you a direction. Wind wrecks this, so wait for a lull. If you can’t place a sound, don’t guess and charge off. Stay put.
Be wary of following a wash because it looks like a path. Dry washes are the easiest walking in the desert, and they also run where flash floods run. The National Park Service at Joshua Tree warns that flash floods can hit even when it’s sunny where you’re standing, because the rain fell somewhere else. Ravines have the other hazard I met. Watch where you put your hands and feet, keep them out of holes and from under rocks, and if you see a rattlesnake, back away slowly and give it room.
A lost hiker who stays put gets found only if somebody is coming to look. That means telling someone your route and when you’ll be back, before you leave. The Joshua Tree rangers ask visitors to write a trip plan, leave it with a trusted contact and include the park’s phone number so that person can call for help.
Carry at least a gallon of water per person per day, more in summer, and download offline maps before you lose signal, because cell service in the park is thin and in many places gone. A paper map and a compass weigh almost nothing. As of 2026, many newer phones can also send an emergency text by satellite with no cell signal at all, and a satellite messenger or personal locator beacon does the same job more reliably. Learn how yours works before you need it.
Good ears got me out of Joshua Tree. Ears are a lousy plan. Any hiker who counts on them deserves the scare that follows.
Why do introverts love the desert?
After my wife died I spent eight years with a camera, photographing belly dancers and renaissance festivals. I’d been an introvert and shy most of my life, and I got over the shyness. I’ve written about how a camera changed my life, and the archive from those years and after has grown to 980,000 photographs.
Out there an introvert has room. California has miles and miles of desert, and a driver can go for hours and see almost nobody. Snakes and heat aren’t the only small dangers out there either, and I wrote up a desert wasp story separately. Quicksand I’ve never walked in, but I have walked in something like it in the desert.
I carried AAA’s deluxe plan with the 200-mile tow because I used to go out in the desert. I never needed the tow. It was nice to have in the middle of nowhere, and it’s about the only part of the desert planning worth bragging about.
At Kelso I was alone. Nobody else was on those dunes.
Introverts will understand that a group hike feels like a meeting with sand in it. Solitude in a place that big quiets the head in a way nothing else does, and nobody should have to give that up.
Is hiking alone in the desert a bad idea?
A solo desert hike is a reasonable risk with a plan behind it and a terrible one without, and at Kelso I took the terrible version. A solo hiker who has left a trip plan with a friend, carries enough water, starts early and turns back on time is in decent shape. A solo hiker who told nobody is betting his life on a stranger noticing his car. Pick a turnaround time before you leave the trailhead and keep it, even when the top of the dune looks close enough to touch.
Heat is the other killer. The Joshua Tree rangers suggest doing anything strenuous before ten in the morning or after four in the afternoon from spring through fall, and they mean it. Heat exhaustion creeps up on you with dizziness and weakness, and by the time you notice, your judgment is already going.
I get angry at the travel accounts and the bucket-list crowd who post the dunes at golden hour and never mention water. They sell the desert like a backdrop. Every summer some poor tourist believes them, walks out at noon with one plastic bottle and has to be carried out, or doesn’t come out at all. Who do they think goes looking for those people? The rangers who do it deserve better from the folks selling the pictures.
Limits count, too. I once had a goal of hiking down to Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Then I stood at the rim and took one look.
Seven miles down, with an elevation change of something like 5,000 feet, and every one of those feet had to be climbed back out. The descent is harder on your knees than the ascent, and the long haul back up is where people get into trouble.
No, I said.
Why do near-death stories belong in a memoir?
Close calls come out in conversation, tossed off like loose change. Then they vanish. That bothers me. My living comes from getting other people’s stories onto paper, and a story told once at a table and never written down is a story half lost.
How many near misses have you told at a barbecue and never written down? Most people treat them that way. They get a laugh and move on. Then they die, and the story goes with them.
My book Real World Survival covers ordinary disasters, and I’ve lived through a few: earthquakes, a forest fire where I thought I was dead, hurricanes. The desert stories belong with those. Each one carries a lesson worth more than it cost, and none of them is worth anything if it dies in my head.
Leave more than a car behind
The car is the part of Kelso worth remembering. If I’d died there, the car would have been the only record of the trip, and what can a car tell anybody? It can’t say why a man drove into the Mojave at dawn or what he was looking for. It sits there until somebody tows it.
Too many people leave nothing but the car. They carry a life full of stories, close calls and hard-won lessons, and they never write any of it down, and their families end up with an empty car and a lot of questions.
I hate that.
If your life has a few moments where the desert nearly kept you, get them on paper while you’re still here to tell them right. I help people do that through my memoir writing service, and the first step is the same one I skipped at Kelso: tell somebody where you’ve been.