Creek Running North

In Pinto Basin, near the center of Joshua Tree National Park, an imaginary line snakes through a forest of cholla. On one side of the line lies the Sonoran Desert, or at least that painfully hot, desolate section of it that lies in California. On the other side, to the north and uphill, is the Mojave. On maps of the park, the line is fixed to an absurd level of precision, as if it were a coast or a county line. Truthfully, the line’s course is somewhere between an arbitrary decision and a biologist’s best guess. To the north grow the Mojave’s Joshua Trees. Southward, Sonoran ironwoods thrive. Each is an effective vegetative field mark of its respective desert. Except when they willfully grow in the wrong one. Which happens a lot. But not here. You can’t see either species from this patch of cholla. To stand unambiguously in either the Mojave or the Sonoran desert, you will need to get back in your car and drive a few miles, or trudge that same distance over the waterless slopes of the Pinto Mountains or the Hexies, which the Park Service officially discourages.

Instead, I gaze to the east at the Coxcomb Mountains, about forty miles away across the plain. A pair of ravens passes. (That might mean I’m in the Mojave, as most ravens I’ve ever seen there fly in pairs.) They are a half-mile off, but I hear their feathers as they softly scrape the dry air. I feel their wing-beats in my chest.

This is the second in a series of ten photo-prompted posts.