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The expansive chunk of open desert sits just northeast of Joshua Tree, and depending on who you ask – it can be a lot of things.
If you ask Google – Sunfair is a dispersed camping paradise, with plenty of YouTube videos showing content creators waking up to catch beautiful sunrises with their drone as the arid lake serves as a backdrop to their adventure van setup.
Locals may know it a little different as its proximity to neighborhoods mean many locals can use it to go do a little offroading. Sunfair is also a street that leads right off highway 62 and into the open desert and off into the hills that butt up against sunfair – where you can often hear gunshots from target shooters taking advantage of the relative isolation.
Guns, motorcycles, campers and compounds can certainly give any area a reputation, and Sunfair has earned one as “the wild west” – where you can do just about anything without much fear of someone coming over and ruining your fun.
Sunfair is designated as BLM Land – a small sliver of the 15 million acres that the Bureau of Land Management oversees here in California. Sunfair is open for mixed use – similar to areas north of Joshua Tree like Soggy Dry Lake and the Johnson Valley OHV area. That mixed use comes with some regulations which – in theory – are enforced by the BLM.
However, unlike Johnson Valley, Sunfair Dry Lake is located incredibly close to Joshua Tree National Park, where campsites fill up quickly during most seasons. People hoping to camp in the desert are then pushed to find alternative spots like Sunfair Dry Lake
It’s a practice not only pushed by those videos on youtube, but the national park website itself.
On a page called “Camping Outside of the Park” – the National Park Service has a map that points to the area of Sunfair thats labeled “BLM Dispersed Camping Area” and points people to the BLM’s website for rules about camping.
That website states that camping is allowed for no longer than 14 days in a 28 day period. After those 14 days, you need to move at least 25 miles from the spot you camped, and for at least 2 weeks before returning.
Campers heading out to Sunfair will certainly find space to camp, but they will also find themselves sharing the dry lake bed with more long term residents – people like Dan, who was sitting outside of his minivan on the edge of the dry lake.
He says that although Fridays and Saturdays can get busy, its usually not too exciting where he’s camped
Dan “Well… the weekends typically like Friday or Saturday people come out with their with their quads their trailers and it gets pretty busy it gets pretty busy I don’t see anything wild… like wild parties, drunkenness and all that kind of stuff but then I’m kind of to myself.”
To Dan, who is an electrician by trade, Sunfair is an escape from his life further north. He says he comes out to Sunfair when work dries up and he doesn’t feel like heading back to Big Bear yet.
Dan’s been camping for about 4 months on and off – and people looking for privacy and space can certainly find it on the dry lake.
However that Sunfair has also been in the news recently, as a man who went missing on April 17 was found dead on Sunfair Dry Lake in his RV. The search for Daniel Lindell started at the National Park where the sheriff’s say that campgrounds and surrounding areas were checked for the RV to no avail. 11 days later the sheriff’s office received a tip that Lindell’s motorhome was on Sunfair dry lake, where he appeared to have died from natural causes.
Deputy Chris Jones out of the Morongo Basin Station says that BLM does do patrols on Sunfair, and the sheriff’s office even uses the area for OHV search training due to the varied landscape.
Whatever Sunfair can be characterized as, it sounds like some changes could be coming to the area. When the topic of alternative camping and Sunfair Dry Lake came up on last Friday’s “Up Close Show with Gary Daigneault,” 3rd district supervisor Dawn Rowe had this to say about enforcement on the dry lake:
Dawn Rowe: “They know.. Marc Stamer is the new Field manager out in Barstow he comes down to a monthly coffee that I host, and he’s engaged. We have shared Captain Warrick is great in communicating… there’s some joint enforcement efforts there”
