The Desert Tortoise Natural Area (DTNA) is a 39.5-square-mile (102 km2) area northeast of California City, California set aside for the California State Reptile, the Desert Tortoise. The area is located at the southwestern end of the Rand Mountains in the Mojave Desert, and has an interpretive center for visitors.
The Bureau of Land Management recognized the significance of the area and designated it an "Area of Critical Environmental Concern" and as a "Research Natural Area" in 1980.
Famous quotes containing the words desert, tortoise, natural and/or area:
“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Deathlessness should be arrived at in a ... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“What journeyings on foot and on horseback through the wilderness, to preach the gospel to these minks and muskrats! who first, no doubt, listened with their red ears out of a natural hospitality and courtesy, and afterward from curiosity or even interest, till at length there “were praying Indians,” and, as the General Court wrote to Cromwell, the “work is brought to this perfection that some of the Indians themselves can pray and prophesy in a comfortable manner.””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.”
—Willem De Kooning (b. 1904)