The desert tortoise has been crawling across the Mojave for roughly 15 million years. It outlasted the mammoths, the sabre-toothed cats, and the short-faced bears. What it has struggled to outlast is the fat-tired truck. A federal judge has now decided that needs to change.
Judge Susan Illston ruled in February 2026 that the Bureau of Land Management had failed to adequately protect desert tortoise habitat across the western Mojave and ordered the closure of roughly 2,000 miles of off-highway vehicle routes. The ruling followed years of legal action brought by environmental groups who argued that motorised traffic was driving the tortoise toward regional extinction. Judge Illston agreed, finding that off-highway vehicles remain a significant ongoing threat to tortoise survival in the region.
The numbers that informed the ruling are hard to argue with. Scientists monitoring tortoise populations have recorded declines of up to 96 per cent in some areas since the 1970s. The species spends most of its life underground in burrows it excavates itself, burrows that do not survive contact with a vehicle tyre. Because other desert wildlife also shelters in those same burrows, the tortoise's decline cascades through the broader ecosystem in ways that go well beyond the animal itself. Crushed burrows, compacted soil and destroyed vegetation all contribute to habitat degradation that persists long after the vehicles have passed.
The Bureau of Land Management now has until 2029 to design and implement a new route network that balances recreation access with habitat protection. Until that plan is in place, the 2,000 miles identified by the court stay closed.
Like this? Get the app: iOS | Android
The ruling does not shut the Mojave to off-roaders entirely, and that point is worth making clearly. Around 3,800 miles of routes remain open. Approximately 270,000 acres of open terrain where vehicles can roam freely are unaffected. Major recreation destinations including Johnson Valley are expected to stay accessible. What has been removed is the network of routes cutting directly through the most sensitive tortoise habitat, where the conflict between recreation and survival was at its sharpest.
That distinction has not much softened the backlash. Off-road advocates and the small desert towns that depend on motorsport tourism have pushed back hard, arguing that the closures penalise an entire community for environmental pressures that include invasive plant species, disease, urban development and climate change as much as recreational vehicles. It is a legitimate point. Blaming off-roaders alone for a 96 per cent population collapse overstates their contribution. But the counter-argument, that vehicles should therefore be allowed to continue operating through the most critical remaining habitat, does not really follow.
The Mojave tortoise has survived ice ages and mass extinctions. The question the court has now answered, at least provisionally, is whether it also gets to survive the weekend warrior with a winch and a roof rack. For now, in at least part of the desert, it does.
Sources: CarScoops / MotorBuzz | Los Angeles Times, 19 February 2026 | Jalopnik | US Bureau of Land Management
