Airport on Monday night from New Orleans, according to the White House.

The president had been scheduled to travel to Thermal in Riverside County early Tuesday afternoon to officially announce his action establishing Chuckwalla as well as the Sáttítla National Monument in Northern California.

With Santa Ana winds whipping across the region, however, the White House canceled his trip to Thermal and planned for him to speak from the Los Angeles area. But the White House later said the event was being rescheduled for next week.

According to the White House, Chuckwalla is Biden’s “capstone action to create the largest corridor of protected lands in the continental United States, covering nearly 18 million acres stretching about 600 miles.

“This new Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor protects wildlife habitat and a wide range of natural and cultural resources along the Colorado River, across the Colorado Plateau, and into the deserts of California,” a White House fact sheet reads. “It is a vitally important cultural and spiritual landscape that has been inhabited and traveled by Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.”

California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot was among the officials who traveled to the Riverside County desert Tuesday.

About half of California’s lands are federally owned and managed and “any of those lands are available for industrial uses,” Crowfoot said.

“What (the monument) basically means is this land is protected for future generations (for outdoor recreation), but then also to protect those environmentally sensitive places and those tribally important areas too.”

Since taking office in 2021, Biden has used his executive authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create six new monuments and expand four others, The Washington Post reported.

By establishing Chuckwalla and Sáttítla, Biden will have protected more public lands than any president in a single term with the exception of Jimmy Carter, according to the Post.

That stands in contrast to President-elect Donald Trump, who supports opening public lands for energy development. In his first term, Trump shrank two national monuments in Utah.

Ruiz, a physician, said Chuckwalla will be an asset to local tourism and public health by promoting hiking and other opportunities for physical exercise.

Through talks involving energy and utility companies, the monument also strikes a balance between conservation and renewable energy development, Ruiz said.

“This is a unique model that shows that you can have conservation and renewable energy expansion at the same time,” the U.S. representative said.

Ruiz, who grew up in Coachella, said the land preserved by the monument has special meaning to him as a place where he went to pray and reflect on major life decisions, such as going to medical school and proposing to his wife.

Ruiz said he’s confident the monument’s boundaries will stand because Chuckwalla “falls within the accordance” of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a road map for energy development and conservation covering 10.8 million acres in California.

On Monday, the president moved to ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in most U.S. coastal waters.

He said he is using authority under the federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect offshore areas along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea from future oil and natural gas leasing.

Biden’s orders would not affect large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico, where most U.S. offshore drilling occurs, but it would protect coastlines along California, Florida and other states from future drilling. Trump on Monday declared that, after he’s inaugurated Jan. 20, Biden’s drilling ban will “be changed on day one.”

Establishing Chuckwalla “is another major victory for safeguarding California’s public lands for generations to come,” U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said in a news release.

“This historic announcement accelerates our state’s crucial efforts to fight the climate crisis, protect our iconic wildlife, preserve sacred tribal sites, and promote clean energy, while expanding equitable access to nature for millions of Californians,” the release stated.

Gov. Gavin Newsom also applauded the news in a Tuesday statement.

“California is now home to two new national monuments that honor the tribes that have stewarded these lands since time immemorial,” he said.

Named for the lizard found in the Sonoran and Mojave Desert and northwestern Mexico, Chuckwalla joins other national monuments created in the past decade to preserve the Southern California desert and mountains.

In 2016, President Barack Obama established the 154,000-acre Sand to Snow National Monument and the 1.6 million-acre Mojave Trails National Monument in San Bernardino County.

The Chuckwalla monument area includes the Bradshaw Trail near Riverside County, a trade route used by 19th century gold prospectors and “an even more ancient Native American trade route that crosses the region connecting one spring to another spring,” Ryan Henson of the California Wilderness Coalition said in 2022.

Gen. George Patton used the area in the early 1940s to train World War II soldiers in the harsh realities of desert combat. Tank tracks, abandoned camps and training areas can still be seen today, Henson said.

Bighorn sheep, golden eagles, desert tortoises and native plants live in the monument area, which also includes land considered sacred by a number of Native American tribes.

Tribal officials who planned to attend Tuesday’s event included Zion White, a council member for the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe of Yuma, Arizona.

The monument includes “a plethora of indigenous artifacts” documented by the Quechan and other tribes, White said.

The monument protects “what was left for us by our ancestors,” including ceramics and “human foot trails that are embedded in the ground and … for a long time used by the tribes to traverse these lands,” White said.

He added the tribe “has maintained an upbeat, hopeful optimism for the protection of these places and we’re happy … to see the monument come to fruition.”

Biden’s move follows lobbying by Southern California members of Congress, environmentalists and leaders of local Native American tribes. Last year, at least two dozen members of the California congressional delegation, including Ruiz, Padilla and Sen. Laphonza Butler, called on him to preserve Chuckwalla.

The monument has faced pushback from the city of Blythe near the Arizona border as well as energy interests, who fear it could shut off land for clean energy development.

Tuesday’s appearance would have marked Biden’s first visit as president to Riverside County, though first lady Jill Biden spoke at a political fundraiser in Rancho Mirage in March. Trump held a campaign rally just outside Coachella in October.

The Associated Press and City News Service contributed to this report.