The hour or so before sunset is when I love this country most.
At noon, at four, the sun is deadly. Daunting. Detail on the land is lost behind relentless glare, and every speck of dust in the air catches the sunlight, further dazzles your already too-bedazzled eyes. Noon’s beauty is the beauty of endurance, the beauty of a spot of partial shade and blood-warm water from the old juice bottle you’ve carried in your pack.
But around six the heat ebbs imperceptibly, sliding slowly down from 106 degrees to a sane and comfortable 99, and something almost akin to a breeze catches you off guard. It rifles the hairs on your arms, the back of your neck. The light has changed. The sky still burns, but not quite so blindingly. The shadows of the creosote might stretch halfway across the road before you notice the change, again.
It is as though the passage of the hours has washed the air. The mountains all around you seem better-defined, more present and three-dimensional. Slanting sun casts slanted shadows. Shadows limn the hills. A bit of shade in the canyons and the mountains reveal themselves more thoroughly.
Ravens head homeward for the evening, two by two.
After a time the light changes color. White and gray clouds blush. Brown mountains bleed. A dozen miles off, or twenty or fifty, and the farther away the range the more solid the color it becomes. Last night I sat for a while beneath the west face of the Providence Mountains by Kelso, lost for the hundredth time in the infinite fractal wonder of the range’s limestone. I ran an errand last week, a quick trip to the closest ATM, in Henderson, fifty miles one way, and coming back an hour before sunset into the north end of the Ivanpah Valley I saw the Providence Mountains from seventy miles north. Their outline was as crisp as it was from Kelso, but distance had transformed the range to a solid ruddy gray. Find yourself a spot with a view of a few consecutive ranges and you may have trouble counting them. They fade stepwise and imperceptibly into the sky beyond.
