What is Mid Hills Campground?
Mojave National Preserve is about 1.5 million acres of California desert between I-15 and I-40 that almost nobody from Arizona visits, which is a mistake. It has the densest Joshua tree forest anywhere, singing sand dunes, lava tubes, cinder cones and three developed campgrounds. Mid Hills is the high one. It sits at 5,600 feet in the saddle between the New York and Providence mountains, in what was, until June 2005, an unbroken pinyon-juniper woodland. The Hackberry Complex Fire took most of it. Twenty years on, about half of the 25 sites are still shaded by live trees and the other half sit in a silver ghost forest with grass and cliffrose filling in, which is less grim than it sounds and gives those sites bigger views.
Each site has parking for one or two vehicles, a table, a fire ring and a tent pad; vault toilets and trash cans are spaced around the loop. There is no water. At this elevation the campground runs ten degrees cooler than Hole-in-the-Wall, its lower sibling 9 miles south, which is the whole argument for it from May to September. The Mid Hills to Hole-in-the-Wall Trail starts at the campground and drops 8 miles through washes lined with barrel cactus and cholla, crossing the burn, to the volcanic rock of Hole-in-the-Wall; the Rings Loop there climbs Banshee Canyon on iron rings set in the rock.
What you get is a cool, dark, half-wooded camp in a desert park the size of Delaware, with no entrance fee, no crowds and a trail from your tent. What you do not get is water, pavement, a store or any shade at half the sites.
How to camp Mid Hills right
Reserve and choose the site. $20 per night, 8 people, recreation.gov only, six-month rolling window, same-day allowed. No entrance fee. Study the site photos before you click: the unburned sites under live pinyons are a different campground from the gray ones, and the loop has both.
Get there. About 5 hours 25 minutes from Old Town. Loop 101 west to US 60 to Wickenburg, US 93 north to Kingman, I-40 west 100 miles past Needles to Essex Road (exit 100). Go north 10 miles on Essex Road, right onto Black Canyon Road for 16 miles (paved to the Hole-in-the-Wall Information Center, dirt after), then left onto Wild Horse Canyon Road for 2.5 miles to the campground. The dirt is graded but steep and rutted in places; the Park Service says not for large motorhomes or trailers, and in rain or snow it becomes a problem for everyone. From the I-15 side, come in on Cima Road or Kelbaker Road to Kelso-Cima Road, then Cedar Canyon Road east 6 miles and Black Canyon Road south 3. Fuel in Needles or Kingman; there is none in the preserve. Hualapai Mountain Park above Kingman is the natural halfway stop.
Pick the season. Spring and fall. Summer days reach 100 here and 110 below, which still makes Mid Hills the only summer camp in the preserve worth considering. Winter is 30s and 40s by day with snow and ice on the road and a 40-mile-an-hour wind through the saddle.
Water. None. Jug water at Hole-in-the-Wall Visitor Center and Kelso Depot, neither set up for tanks. Carry at least a gallon per person per day, more for the hike.
Fire. Fire rings, when conditions permit; gathering wood is prohibited everywhere in the preserve, so bring it. Check the preserve’s alerts for restrictions.
Walk the trail downhill. Start at the campground, drop the 8 miles through the washes to Hole-in-the-Wall, and have a car at the bottom. The climb back is a separate day. The night sky here is as dark as any within a day’s drive of Scottsdale; see the stargazing note for the moon calendar.
Dogs. Leashed, in camp and on trails and backcountry roads. Keep them off the tortoises and out of the cholla.
Skip it if a paved loop with water matters more; book Hole-in-the-Wall instead. If the drive is too long, the Colorado River camps at Katherine Landing and Cottonwood Cove are two hours closer with water and a lake; for a free night on the way in, Nipton is the BLM option on the preserve’s north edge.
A BLM campground that became a national preserve, then burned
The Mid Hills are pinyon and juniper country because they are high enough to catch snow, and for that reason they were Chemehuevi country first. The Chemehuevi ranged across the eastern Mojave hunting and gathering pinyon nuts, mesquite beans and agave, while the Mojave, concentrated along the Colorado River, ran the Mojave Trail through the desert as their trade route to the Pacific. Father Francisco Garces walked it with Mojave guides in 1776; Jedediah Smith followed in 1826 and John Fremont in 1844, and in the 1860s the Army put outposts along the route to protect the mail wagons. The trail still runs across the preserve north of the Mid Hills as a four-wheel-drive road.
Minerals brought the next wave. In 1883 silver was struck at the Bonanza King mine on the east side of the Providence Mountains, a few miles below the campground, and the ranges filled with claims, camps and the cattle outfits that fed them. The springs in the Mid Hills watered stock for a century; in the 1940s Kaiser Steel took two million tons of iron ore out of the Vulcan mine in the Providence Mountains for the Liberty ships. The Union Pacific’s depot at Kelso, built to serve the grade over Cima, is the building the preserve now uses as its visitor center.
Protection came in two steps. In 1981 the Interior Department designated the East Mojave National Scenic Area under the Bureau of Land Management, the first area of its kind. The BLM’s two developed campgrounds, Mid Hills in the high woodland and Hole-in-the-Wall among the rhyolite below, date from its tenure; we could not find a construction year for either. Then came the long fight over the California desert, which ended on October 31, 1994, when President Clinton signed the California Desert Protection Act. It made Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks and turned the scenic area into Mojave National Preserve, about 1.5 million acres, a preserve rather than a park so that hunting could continue. The House, unhappy, gave it a first-year budget of one dollar. The Park Service inherited the BLM’s campgrounds and kept them as they were: tables, rings, vault toilets, no water.
On June 22, 2005, around noon, a dry lightning storm started fires across the Mid Hills, and a second storm that evening started more. The Hackberry Complex burned for four days and took 70,736 acres, most of the pinyon-juniper woodland in the range, the upper half of Wild Horse Canyon almost entirely, Winkler’s Cabin, and the campground’s entrance kiosk. Single-leaf pinyon and Utah juniper do not resprout, so the burned half of the loop will be gray snags and grass for the rest of anyone’s lifetime; about half the sites kept their trees because the fire ran patchy through the lower canyon. The Park Service rebuilt the kiosk and left the burn alone, which is why the campground is the preserve’s best lesson in what a desert woodland fire does.
The latest change is money. On January 1, 2025, the Park Service raised Mid Hills from $12 to $20 and made every site reservation-only, ending the first-come era that had suited a campground at the end of a dirt road. The preserve itself still charges no entrance fee, which in the national park system is now rare.
Why it matters
Mid Hills explains the eastern Mojave in one loop: a woodland that exists because of elevation, a BLM campground that the Park Service inherited and did not improve, and a fire that reset half the place in four days. It also shows what a preserve is, as opposed to a park: hunting allowed, a dollar budget, no gate and no fee, and a landscape left mostly to itself. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the farthest camp on this site that is still worth the drive, and the only one where a July night is cool. Go in spring or fall, book an unburned site, carry every drop of water, and walk the trail downhill.