Pinto Wye is the one place on this drive where a wrong branch costs real time, a true Y where Pinto Basin Road heads about 30 miles south. Down that road lies the Cholla Cactus Garden, a flat quarter-mile loop that a regional biologist argued to keep inside the monument in 1940.
Coming up in a little over half a mile is Pinto Wye, a Y in the road. Keep left, north, for Twentynine Palms. The right branch is Pinto Basin Road, and it runs about thirty miles south. Down that road, the Cholla Cactus Garden, say choy-a, is a flat quarter-mile loop. In January of nineteen forty, with the boundaries in doubt, a regional biologist inspected the monument and wrote that this garden should be kept in. It was.
Photo: NPS / Hannah Schwalbe · Public domain (NPS staff photo)