What is the BLM camp near Nipton?
Google Maps shows a pin labeled only “BLM campground” on an unnamed road north of I-15, roughly between Nipton and the Mountain Pass rare-earth mine. The coordinates match the BLM’s Clark Mountain Camp exactly: a primitive camp at about 6,100 feet on the south end of the Clark Mountain Range, inside the Clark Mountain Area of Critical Environmental Concern, five rough miles up from the freeway. The BLM describes several picnic tables, a dual pit cooking grill and a parking area in pinyon and juniper. There is no toilet, no water and no fee, and the stay limit is 14 days. It is nearly always empty.
The mountain above it is the reason it exists. Clark Mountain rises to 7,929 feet, the highest point in Mojave National Preserve, whose detached northern unit covers the range above the BLM strip. The limestone summit carries a relict grove of white fir, a leftover from the Ice Age and one of only three stands in California, and the slopes below hold more than 4,000 years of Native use and 150 years of mining, from the silver camp of Ivanpah in the 1870s to the Colosseum gold pit. Mule deer and desert bighorn use the range; desert tortoises are why the ACEC was drawn. The views south take in the Ivanpah Valley, its solar towers and the lights of Primm.
What you get is a free, legal, high and empty camp with tables and a grill, 15 degrees cooler than the valley, 30 minutes from the Primm truck stops, on the long road to Death Valley or the Sierra. What you do not get is a toilet, water, a trail, a road for anything towed, or a reason to drive six hours from Scottsdale for it alone.
How to camp it right
Pay nothing, keep the rules. Free, no permit, 14 days. Use the existing site; this is an ACEC and the ground off the road is tortoise habitat. Pack out all trash. Past the camp, where the mining tracks continue toward the Colosseum Mine and the summit, the Park Service’s roadside camping rules take over: existing sites only, existing fire rings only, nothing within 200 yards of water, 14 days.
Get there. About 5 hours 50 minutes from Old Town, and the last 20 minutes are the hard part. Loop 101 west to US 60 to Wickenburg, US 93 north to Kingman, I-40 west to Needles, US 95 north 45 miles to Searchlight, NV 164 west 20 miles to the state line, where it becomes Nipton Road, and 15 more miles to I-15. Go west 6 miles on I-15 to the Bailey Road exit, turn right, take the first left onto Clark Mountain Road, and climb about 5 miles of dirt, rocky and washed in places, to the camp. High clearance is required; four-wheel drive is wise after rain; nothing towed should try it. Coming from Las Vegas, the Bailey Road exit is 15 minutes south of Primm. Fuel at Primm or Searchlight; Nipton has a trading post and not much more.
Pick the season. Spring and fall. Winter snow and ice make the road a liability; summer afternoons bring lightning to the range, though nights are 15 degrees cooler than the valley.
Water and facilities. Tables and a grill. No water, no toilet. Bring every drop and a shovel; bury waste 6 inches deep or pack it out.
Fire. The pit grill, with wood you brought. Gathering is prohibited on the preserve side and poor form on the BLM side. Check Needles Field Office restrictions in summer.
The mountain. There is no maintained trail. Experienced desert hikers reach the summit by old mining roads and a steep, loose route from the south; it is a full day with real exposure and needs a map and the ability to route-find. The white fir grove is on the hard-to-reach north side of the crest. The night sky is the easy payoff; the camp is darker than anything in the stargazing guide.
Dogs. Under control. Cholla, rattlesnakes in warm months, and tortoises that must not be touched.
Skip it if you want anything but ground and sky. It makes sense as a night on the way to Death Valley or the Sierra, or paired with Mid Hills for a week in the preserve. For water and a toilet on the same route, Cottonwood Cove and Katherine Landing on Lake Mohave and Boulder Beach on Lake Mead are the developed options. As a destination from Scottsdale on its own, it is not one.
A silver camp, a gold pit and a grove of fir that should not be here
The range was lived on long before it was mined. The BLM’s own page says the Clark Mountain area shows evidence of occupation spanning more than 4,000 years, and the springs and pinyon groves on the mountain were Southern Paiute country, the people the first miners called Piutes and put to work in the mines and camps. A Paiute chief named Pachoca gave his name to a spring and a townsite on the mountain’s west side, and it was a Paiute man who, in 1868, brought a piece of native copper to the prospector Johnny Moss and started everything that followed.
Silver had been found on the north side of the mountain in 1865, and the prospectors who organized the Clark Mining District named it for a Visalia saloon owner who grubstaked them. The copper led Moss’s partners to richer silver, and on April 13, 1869 they organized the Piute Company, staked about 130 claims, and laid out the townsite of Ivanpah in the heart of the district, the first settlement on the mountain in historic times. By 1870 the company was incorporated for five million dollars and had about 50 white men and 50 Native workers at the Eugene mine; by 1871 a furnace was pouring bullion; by 1876 two stamp mills were running and the McFarlane brothers had sold their mines for $200,000. A post office opened on June 17, 1878. In the spring of 1880 the Ivanpah Consolidated employed about 70 men at $4 a day, and that same April a man was shot dead after a poker game; the next May a federal revenue collector’s attempt to seize the company’s property ended in gunfire and John McFarlane’s death. Output faded after 1891, and the silver crash of 1893 finished the camp. What is left is foundations and dumps on the far side of the range.
Gold took longer. The Colosseum Mine on the northeast side was a small underground working that closed in 1942; Bond Gold bought it in 1986, dug an open pit, poured its first bar in the fall of 1987, and finished mining in July 1992. Two years later, in 1994, the California Desert Protection Act created Mojave National Preserve, and the BLM handed the upper range to the Park Service as the preserve’s detached northern unit, keeping the lower south slope, the camp included, inside the Clark Mountain Area of Critical Environmental Concern it had drawn for the tortoises and the view. On the mountain’s southern flank the Mountain Pass mine, the only working rare earth mine in the United States, began a major expansion in January 2011; its lights are the ones you see from camp. In 2025 the BLM approved continued mining at the Colosseum site inside the preserve boundary, and the oldest argument on the mountain, who gets to dig it, reopened.
The thing the botanists come for has nothing to do with any of that. On the north side of the crest, hard to reach, is a small stand of white fir, trees that belong to the Sierra and the Rockies, stranded here when the climate dried at the end of the Ice Age. Clark Mountain is one of only three places in California, with the Kingston and New York mountains, where they persist, and the pinyon-juniper sky island you camp in is the lower edge of the same relic forest.
The camp itself has no written history beyond the BLM’s listing: a parking area, several tables and a two-sided grill at the end of the easy road, built for hunters and rockhounds and left for anyone who can drive the five miles. Nothing suggests it will get a toilet.
Why it matters
Clark Mountain is the eastern Mojave in one range: a Paiute homeland, a boom-and-bust silver camp, a gold pit, a rare earth mine the country depends on, a national preserve drawn around all of it, and a grove of fir that explains how much wetter this desert used to be. The camp at its foot is the cheapest seat for the view. For a Scottsdale traveler the verdict is honest: it is not a destination, it is a night, and on the long road west it is the best free one between Kingman and the Sierra, a 6,100-foot pinyon camp with the Ivanpah Valley glowing below and nobody else there. Bring the water, bring the 4x4, and skip it when the road is iced.