Qualla: Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range

Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range: Introduction

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Decruyenaere, CC BY-SA 2.0. There are places in California that appear on maps only as blank space, their boundaries marked by a warning rather than a welcome. The Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range is one of them — 459,000 acres of Sonoran Desert set aside by the Marine Corps as a live-fire training ground, roughly 20 miles wide and 50 miles long, with 700 square miles of special-use airspace overhead. It is one of the largest military restricted areas in the western United States, and it exists in a landscape so remote and so harsh that the designation of it as a bombing range has not, in practical terms, changed its accessibility much.

Image: Joe Decruyenaere | CC BY-SA 2.0

Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range: War Practice in the Desert

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Department of Defense Current Photos, Public domain. The range occupies the Chocolate Mountains, a rugged chain of dark volcanic ridges running northwest to southeast between the Salton Sea and the Colorado River. The mountains give their name to the range, and the range gives its name to the region — though few people outside the ...

Image: U.S. Department of Defense Current Photos | Public domain

Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range: The Scrapper Economy

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RoyceC, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2011, a documentary titled Scrapper examined the people who sneak into the Chocolate Mountain range to collect nonferrous metal — spent shell casings, scrap from aircraft pods and bomb components, wire, aluminum — and sell it. The practice is illegal and the risks are substant...

Image: RoyceC | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range: Wilderness in the War Zone

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PHC Dave Tate, U.S. Navy, Public domain. The Chocolate Mountains are not without natural value. The range includes desert bighorn sheep habitat, golden eagle nesting territory, and plant communities adapted to the extreme aridity of the Colorado Desert. The military's presence has, in an odd sense, protected parts of th...

Image: PHC Dave Tate, U.S. Navy | Public domain

Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range: Horizon Lines

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PHC Dave Tate, U.S. Navy, Public domain. From the air, the Chocolate Mountain range is defined by its restriction rather than its topography. Pilots navigating the low desert know these boundaries intimately — the precise coordinates where civilian airspace ends and special-use airspace begins, where the familiar concer...

Image: PHC Dave Tate, U.S. Navy | Public domain