If you ride the West Mojave, the map you knew got smaller on March 24, 2026.
That is the day the Bureau of Land Management closed more than 2,200 miles of designated off-highway vehicle routes across the West Mojave planning area, the stretch of high desert riders know as WEMO. The closure came out of a remedy order signed January 23, 2026, by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, which gave BLM 60 days to comply. Count the 60 days, and you land on March 24, which is why the date fell where it did. It takes roughly 37 percent of the WEMO route network off the legal map. The court's own finding is that the closure still leaves 63 percent of OHV routes available and 271,661 acres of designated Open Areas accessible. Access groups are calling it the largest off-road route closure in United States history.
If you ride in Michigan or Moab, it would be easy to file this under California news. That would be a mistake. WEMO is the second large-scale demonstration this year of how a designated, mapped, legal route network gets closed, and almost none of it looked like a vote to ban off-roading. We walked through the first one in the Oceano Dunes fight, explained, and the wider question of which ground is actually open to you in where overlanding is legal. This is the same machinery running on a much bigger piece of ground.
What actually closed
The order is narrower than the headline number suggests, and the distinction matters if you are planning a trip.
What closed is every route inside two protected zones: desert tortoise critical habitat and Lane Mountain milk-vetch critical habitat. If a designated route runs through either one, it is closed to OHV recreation. That includes street-legal vehicles being driven for recreation, not just dirt bikes and side-by-sides.
The closure does not affect entire riding areas. Designated county roads and highways stay open. So do routes needed for established easements, administrative access, emergency access, and other permitted uses, though not for public OHV recreation. Owl Canyon Campground is still open for camping and still reachable by designated route, even though you cannot ride there.
This is where a lot of the early coverage went sideways. Routes inside the Rand Mountains, the Red Mountain area, Cuddeback Lake, and Kramer Hills took real hits. But Rand Mountains is not gone. The order reinstated the permit system that existed there before 2019, meaning a short education requirement and a permit that is free but genuinely required, and the brochure is on BLM's site. Jawbone Canyon is not gone either. BLM still lists Jawbone Canyon among the OHV areas open for recreation. What closed in the greater Jawbone region is specific critical-habitat routes, not the riding area.
You will also see a claim going around that three of the nine travel management areas are closed entirely. That number comes from the Blue Ribbon Coalition, which is an access advocacy group and a party to the appeal. BLM does not use that framing in its own closure notice, and we could not confirm it independently. Treat it as an advocacy figure until BLM publishes something matching.
Where you can still ride
About 63 percent of the WEMO network is still open, and BLM has published the list of designated OHV recreation areas that remain accessible. These are the ones in or near the West Mojave:
- Jawbone Canyon. Still open and the region's anchor. Specific routes nearby are closed; the area is not.
- Dove Springs. Open, and immediately north of Jawbone if you are already making the drive.
- Spangler Hills. Open, east of Ridgecrest.
- El Mirage. Open, dry lake bed riding in the Victor Valley.
- Johnson Valley. Open, and the largest OHV area in the country outside the military share.
- Stoddard Valley. Open, just south of Barstow.
- Rasor. Open, off I-15 toward Baker.
- Dumont Dunes. Open, north of Baker.
- Olancha Dunes. Open, up the 395.
BLM's full California list also includes Imperial Sand Dunes, Ocotillo Wells, Plaster City, and Superstition Mountain. Those are real options, but they are in the Colorado Desert, several hours south, so plan accordingly rather than treating them as a WEMO substitute.
Two things before you load up. First, do not trust a guidebook or a track you ran two years ago, because the legal network changed in March and the appeal could change it again. BLM has posted the current closure map as a georeferenced PDF you can load on a device, alongside the rest of the documents on the West Mojave Route Network Project page. El Mirage mirrors the same map at elmirage.org.
Second, read the ground. Closed routes are being signed and fenced under the order. A fence out here is not a suggestion, and getting cited on a closed route costs you money and hands the next lawsuit another exhibit. When you cannot confirm a route is open, ride one you can.
An aside, because it is the Mojave
The tortoises are not the only locals who will notice the quiet. This stretch of desert is home turf for the Yucca Man, the Mojave's own Sasquatch, reported around Joshua Tree, Twentynine Palms, and the Antelope Valley since the 1960s. Seven feet, dark fur, famously camera-shy. With 2,200 fewer miles of engine noise out there, he is having a better year than the rest of us. If that is your corner of the backcountry, we mapped the rest of them in cryptids by state.
How this got here
This was not a bolt from the blue. WEMO has been in litigation since 2006, two decades of argument over how the West Mojave should be managed and who gets to use it.
The current chapter starts in 2019, when BLM formally approved the West Mojave Route Network, a system of roughly 6,000 miles of designated dirt roads and trails. A year later, environmental groups led by the Center for Biological Diversity sued, arguing the agency had not properly evaluated the plan's effect on threatened species.
The case turned on something called minimization criteria, a requirement in federal land law that agencies minimize damage to soil, watershed, vegetation, and wildlife habitat when they designate OHV routes. The court ruled against BLM on that point in an October 2024 summary judgment decision, finding the agency had never explained how designating thousands of miles of routes through desert tortoise critical habitat squared with that standard. The January 2026 order is the remedy phase, where the court decided what to actually do about it. It vacated the route network as to critical habitat, sent the plan back to BLM, and closed the routes in the meantime.
This has an end date, and it is 2029
The single most important thing in the order is the part almost nobody quoted. These closures are not a permanent ban. They are interim injunctive relief that stays in place during the remand, and the remand has a deadline.
The order sends BLM's 2019 route network decision back to the agency and requires it to complete the work by October 14, 2029. By then, BLM has to prepare a revised NEPA analysis, issue a new route network decision, and complete new consultation under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act. It also has to revise the Clean Air Act conformity determination within six months, and file reports with the court every 180 days until it is done.
Two things follow from that, and they cut in opposite directions. The closure is temporary by design, with a defined end date. But during the remand period, BLM is also prohibited from approving any new routes, so nothing opens anywhere in WEMO until this finishes. If you were waiting on a route proposal in the West Mojave, it is parked until 2029 at the latest.
The new route network BLM writes between now and then is the thing worth paying attention to. That document will decide what the map looks like afterward, and it will include a public comment period.
Where the appeal stands
As of October 2026, this is live.
The Department of Justice filed a notice of appeal on behalf of the federal defendants. The case is now before the Ninth Circuit as Center for Biological Diversity v. Bureau of Land Management, No. 26-2596. The Blue Ribbon Coalition moved to intervene in that appeal on May 5, 2026, to represent OHV riders directly rather than relying on BLM to argue the access side.
Nothing about that changes what is legal to ride today. The closures stand until further notice or until a court says otherwise. If you want the real-time version, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, the California Four Wheel Drive Association, the American Sand Association, and Friends of Jawbone are all organizing around it and are the groups actually reading the filings.
Both sides, handled honestly
For conservation groups, this is a straightforward win. The desert tortoise is listed as threatened, and the Lane Mountain milk-vetch is rare enough that its entire known range sits in a handful of square miles. Their argument is that motorized traffic fragments habitat and slows recovery, and that argument carried the day in court.
For riders, it is the loss of a legal, mapped, designated network that people used lawfully for generations. The frustration is not about ignoring wildlife. It is about watching permitted access disappear through a process most riders never saw happening, while the people who stayed on the route pay the same price as the people who did not.
Both of those are true at once. That is uncomfortable, and it is also the whole reason the next part matters.
What it does to the towns
Randsburg, Johannesburg, and Red Mountain sit within a few miles of each other off Highway 395 in Kern County, in what is still called the Rand Mining District. They are small. Randsburg counts a few hundred residents and the other two are smaller. What keeps them going is weekend traffic: a tank of gas, a burger, a room for the night, a tire patched on the way home.
Those weekends come out of the desert, and the areas closest to them are among the ones affected. The Rand Mountains are right behind the towns.
Here is where we are going to be careful, because this is the part of the story that usually gets loud. Nobody has published hard numbers on what the closure costs these towns. There is no visitor survey, no sales tax comparison, and no economic analysis covering the period since March 24. What exists is testimony from access groups and from business owners, which is worth hearing and is not the same thing as measured data. If you see a dollar figure attached to Randsburg, ask where it came from before you repeat it.
What can be said plainly is this. These are communities with narrow economies and very few alternatives, the areas nearest them took real closures, and the Rand Mountains permit system the order reinstated puts one more step between a visitor and a ride. Whether that adds up to a little or a lot is a question somebody should go and actually measure.
Calico gets grouped in with these three in some coverage. It is a different case. Calico sits further east near Barstow and is a San Bernardino County regional park, a restored ghost town run as an attraction, rather than a small community living off passing riders.
What a wheeler can actually do
None of it is dramatic, which is why most people skip it.
Comment on the new route network. BLM must produce one before October 2029, and it will include a public comment period. That document decides the map you ride for the next decade. Agencies are legally required to consider substantive comments and respond to them. A specific, factual, non-hostile comment naming the route you use and why carries real weight. A furious one does not.
Stay on the designated route. Every documented instance of off-route damage becomes an exhibit. The photographs used against access are almost never staged, and that is the uncomfortable part. We traced how one line driven around a mud hole becomes a closed trail in what closes a trail.
Pull the permit where one exists. Rand Mountains still requires a free permit. Programs like that are the evidence that a user group can be managed rather than excluded, and they only survive if people actually use them.
Support the clubs doing maintenance. Volunteer trail work is the strongest evidence that riders are an asset rather than a liability, and it is the one thing on this list that shows up in an administrative record as a point in your favor rather than against you.
Why this one hits home for us
Read the order and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with tortoises. The court did not find that off-roaders are bad for the desert. It found that BLM never explained how its route designations met a standard the law already required. The routes closed because the paperwork behind them did not hold up, and the people who lose the miles are the ones who were following the map they were given.
That is the uncomfortable lesson in every closure like this one. The fastest way to lose a trail is to hand a land manager a reason, or to leave them without a record of anyone making the opposite case. Staying on the route, packing out what you packed in, and showing up for maintenance days are not good manners. They are the evidence file.
That is the whole idea behind our Trail Stewardship Micro-Grant. Every quarter we put money behind a club or crew doing the unglamorous work of keeping public land open and healthy, because those are the groups whose work ends up in the record when the next route network gets written. If that is your club, apply. If it is not, the clubs near you can use the hands.
Two thousand two hundred miles is a hard number to look at. The part worth remembering is that the court set a date, and a new route network gets written before it. What that map looks like in 2029 depends a great deal on how the people using the remaining 63 percent behave between now and then.
Frequently asked questions
Is the West Mojave closed to off-roading?
No. About 63 percent of the WEMO route network remains open as of October 2026. What closed on March 24, 2026, is every designated route inside desert tortoise and Lane Mountain milk-vetch critical habitat, roughly 2,200 miles, or about 37 percent of the network.
Is Jawbone Canyon closed?
No. BLM still lists Jawbone Canyon among the OHV recreation areas open to riding. Specific critical-habitat routes in the greater Jawbone region are closed, including routes in the Rand Mountains, the Red Mountain area, Cuddeback Lake, and Kramer Hills, but the riding area itself is open.
Does the closure apply to street-legal vehicles?
Yes, when used for recreation. The order closes the affected routes to OHV recreation generally, not just to dirt bikes and side-by-sides. Designated county roads and highways remain open, as do routes needed for easements, administrative access, emergency access, and other permitted uses.
Where can I see the current closure map?
BLM publishes a closure map and a georeferenced version on its West Mojave Route Network Project page, and local groups mirror it at jawbone.org and elmirage.org. Check it before every trip, because the network changed in March 2026 and the appeal could change it again.
How long will the West Mojave closures last?
The order is interim relief that stays in place during the remand, and the court set a deadline of October 14, 2029, for BLM to finish. By then, the agency has to complete a revised NEPA analysis, issue a new route network decision, and finish new Endangered Species Act consultation. BLM is also barred from approving any new routes until that work is done. A Ninth Circuit ruling could change things sooner.
Can the closure be reversed?
Possibly. The Department of Justice appealed on behalf of BLM, and the case is before the Ninth Circuit as No. 26-2596. The Blue Ribbon Coalition moved to intervene on May 5, 2026. Until a court rules otherwise, the closures stand.
What is the Lane Mountain milk-vetch?
A rare desert plant listed as endangered, with a known range limited to a small area of the central Mojave near Barstow. Because the range is so small, its critical habitat designation covers ground that overlaps heavily with existing routes, which is why it accounts for a meaningful share of the closures alongside desert tortoise habitat.
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