Home Animals Desert Map Photography What's New?

In The Desert

Home Animals Desert Map Photography What's New?

Imperial Sand Dunes

Glamis, California

For the Glamis area only!

Don't forget to stop at Uncle Mike Gilmore's offroad store, just kidding, but it's a great place to get a fiberglass pole and flag for your vehicle.

The included GPS topo track is for a short trip into the mountains Northeast of Glamis. Nice side trip to the Mary Lode Mine with a loop back that takes in some interesting sites

Download Garmin GPS track

On a busy weekend like this expect to see a lot of people with a lot of toys! Some are really neat. The traffic here is in the vendors section and can get really hectic at times. Are these a bunch of rowdies, of course they are. It's a great thing to see though.

Speaking of over-powered -- is that a turbo charger I see? Some of these rails have Corvette V-8's in them. We've seen some of them do wheel stands for over an 1/8 of a mile. The amount of money invested in vehicles here must be astonomical. Fun I bet!

This is an active Maps.google Satellite Map. You can zoom in / out and change the formats to Street Map or Terrain; drag the map to scroll. Try it! Shown here - Imperial Sand Dunes.

The center 2 vehicles here are BLM rangers, and they giving someone a ticket. If you get too out of hand, you'll get smacked, or if you enter the dunes without a permit. The permit you have to buy (when we were there) was for a week, and you couldn't purchase one for just a day!

Aren't these things cooool! They look like a lot of fun. Some of these start around $40,000 for a basic one with a VW motor. They do ride nice and have a tremendous amount of travel in the suspension arms.

Big group get togethers here are common. It's not unusual to see a group of 30 people in different vehicles running across the dunes together. There's a lot of campgound sites here as well.

It doesn't make any difference what kind of off road vehicle you have or for that matter have ever seen -- this a great place to see them all in one spot. Rhino's are popular here too.

Acceleration! They have it, and a lot of them do 60 mph or more out here. Sandrails like this one run over the bumps and humps and you can tell they don't feel a thing. Great place to play with something like that.

ATV's, and Quads welcome here also! And how about a little room to play in? There's plenty here. Looking out across the dunes toward Yuma, Az. This is just a small section of the dunes. The Imperial Sand Dunes covers a large area and Glamis is only one place in the desert that you can access the dunes.

I know, I know -- I'm not too smart sometimes. But I had no idea that trail bikes could run around in the sand like this. They are more than capable of this. If you've never been here, you need to come out just to see this. Looking in the background you can see one of the groups camped out in the dunes.

Well here we are at the Mary Lode Mine. We left Glamis and headed East on Rt 78 for less than a mile to get to the turn off to the mine. The turn off is marked by a big tire with BULLET written on it. First part of the trip is flat till you get into the Chocolate Mts. Not a hard trip, but 4 wheel drive is recomended.

Looking up the hill to the Mary Lode Mine and the storage tanks they left behind. These tanks are 10 ft. high. You can drive up there if your careful -- if your not sure then don't do it. You can see Glamis and the Imperial Sand Dunes from up on the hill.

This is another mine on the looped trip back to Rt. 78. This shaft is only 48 ft. deep but enough to hurt you should you fall in. It's right down in the wash, wierd. There are remnants of an old building, and fenced in area here, along with some old junk left behind by the miner

This is an old town site and cemetary North of Glamis along side of the railroad tracks and just East of the Imperial Sand Dunes. This site is not on the GPS track. If you keep your eyes open there is a lot to see in the desert along the Chocolate Mts. There are a lot of roads out there, but be careful where your going as the main part of the Chocolate Mts. is an arial gunnery range.
This is a fun way to spend a weekend ----

Back to
Day Trips