Catching up with an old friend: Old Woman Mountains Wilderness
October 2, 2026-
Earlier this summer, while scanning documents as part of an effort to digitize many filing cabinets full of old project files (heroically undertaken by Tasha, our Senior Operations Manager), I got to thinking about how much of our work, once recorded, announced, and celebrated, has been all but lost to memory.
When we transfer an inholding property to public ownership, and it is added to the surrounding designated wilderness area, its history of private ownership is largely erased. The property itself is restored to its wilderness character, fence lines or private property signs are taken down, and its boundaries are removed from maps as it joins the solid green fill of the surrounding wilderness area.
Around the time our overworked little scanner gave its final death rattle, I came across a file drawer filled with past projects from an area I wasn’t familiar with: The Old Woman Mountains Wilderness. Its unique name stood out, but so did the volume of work completed there, made tangible by the stack of thick files, filled with everything from survey reports to handwritten notes.
Located in Southern California, the 165,000-acre Old Woman Mountains Wilderness sits at the intersection of the Mojave and Lower Colorado deserts. Granite monoliths rise from the surrounding sandy flats and dunes, dotted with juniper-pinyon woodlands and washes thick with acacia and desert lavender. The mountain range and wilderness get their name from the Old Woman Statue, a granite outcrop resembling a hunched figure. Between 2006 and 2010, with support from the Resources Legacy Fund and donors like you, the Trust purchased and transferred 36 private inholding properties totaling 1,657 acres there.
Twenty years later, the lasting impact of this work is that as hikers and wildlife like bighorn sheep and desert tortoises make their way across the landscape, these properties are indistinguishable from the surrounding lands. When our work is marked by lack of change, by development averted, the marks are all but invisible.
As in most of the wilderness areas we work in, more inholdings still remain in the Old Woman Mountains Wilderness. There’s still more work to be done to make it whole and healthy, more files to be fit into the already full (now metaphorical) cabinet drawers. You can join us in building this legacy, in adding acres to wilderness every year, by making a gift today!
In loving memory of our old scanner: thank you for your dedicated service.
