It’s been in the triple digits every day since I dunno, the 1970s, and by triple digits I mean above 110 more often than not. And so, given my reluctance most days to die of heatstroke, it has been a very long time since I have wandered out the door and gone for a hike in the local hills. Weeks. Probably months.
But there’s this peculiarity to the landscape in my neighborhood, in that while our house is at about 400 feet above Mean Sea Level, there is a nearly 11,000-foot mountain summit eight miles due west of our living room, and the mountain that is the owner of that summit has a significant flanking ridge of some 4,000 feet less than two miles from that same living room, and this means that on a typical summer day the sun goes behind the earth some hours before the sky actually gets dark. When this happens it is much easier to go outside. Even if the temperature is still a respectable 108F post-eclipse, the lack of direct exposure to the giant ball of fusion in the sky makes a difference in how it feels to be out in the out of doors.
Get away from the parking lots and bank buildings that surround our place and it’s even nicer. This afternoon, that meant a cool and refreshing 105 degrees. I wasn’t the only one who noticed the lack of bursting into flame. The Gambels quail were gamboling along Ramon Drive, and the Costa’s hummingbirds were accosting passing mosquitoes, and the Audubon’s cottontails were, um, du-ing the bon-ny hop in the overgrown palo verde hedge at roadside. I saw a California kingsnake, even, my first in town. The California kingsnake might be my favorite snake: harmless to humans and relatively shy, but eats rattlesnakes. This one seemed four feet long so according to the law of what I usually call crotalid linear folkloric inflation (because it usually happens with crotalids, aka rattlesnakes) let’s say it was two feet long, Pretty though, bright black and white bands, and I would have a blurry picture of it if I hadn’t discarded the blurry picture to take a better one which I couldn’t do because the snake ran away.
After a few moments I got to the base of the mountain, which was as far as I had planned to go, and I got impatient with myself having not hiked in yonks and kept going. 105 felt good, and yet because the trail is kinda steep at first I kept myself to a saunter. A few switchbacks, no more, and though I was soaked with sweat I felt really good, hiking in the company of my animal friends. It brought to mind the scene in Cinderella where the birds and mice and squirrels are dressing her, except that for me it was cottontails and quail breaking trail in front of me, and hummingbirds sewing up my hiking shorts with their little needly beaks, the kingsnake tying itself into a knotted belay line for my convenience and mosquitoes en masse sinking their pokynoses into my skin, hoisting me and carrying me effortlessly up the trail as they all whistled a happy little tune about hiking in perilously hot weather. Though I may have imagined the whistling. No, not hallucinated. Imagined.
Anyway, it was nothing I couldn’t do longer with a Camelbak of ice water in my backpack and more icewater in my veins, so it looks like the Summer No-Hiking Interlude is starting to be over. Unless it gets back above 115. I’m not stupid.
Just a few short miles away lies the Big Morongo Canyon Nature Preserve beckoning for you to come up for a visit. There are a couple of nice old cottonwoods there for you to sit under in the shade, as you ponder life.
Another side benefit, this sacred place was saved from renewable energy development by the actions of an outraged local citizenry, development that was to place gigantic transmission lines down through the canyon, a fact I point out to the readers, if you ever despair that the desert will just be totally destroyed- go to Big Morongo, saved from such a fate by caring neighbors, and think about what could happen-
if the average person knew, and cared enough to try to get involved.
This site’s author has been a leader in trying to stop the pillaging of the deserts, what have the rest of us done? The men and women trying to effect change need some backup, now!
I am serious. Take a drive up to Big Morongo, and walk through one of God’s Cathedrals, as Shaun over at the Mojave Desert Blog calls them, and see what average people can accomplish, if they just care enough to try.
So you’re another one of those “local men” I’ve been reading about, eh?
Nice walking post. What’s the flower in the photo? It looks catalpa-ish.
Are we to begin logging vertical feet once again? At this point, I’m certain you would be likely to outgain me, as I’m recovering from an early summer compound fracture of the left tib-fib still. And, with San Jac looming, I’ll bet you could reel off quite a few K in no time once you set your mind to it. Have at it and enjoy on my behalf! Nothing like hard-won elevation to bring on the illusion, at least of sanity.
Hiking in 10f5degrees sounds pretty damned hot to me. My hats off to you! Even in that “dry” heat its say hotter than anything I would ever hike in.
And an 11,000 foot mountain only eight miles from 400 feet above sea level. That must be spectacular! Ever been to the top? I know, I know not in !05 degrees, but perhaps in the cooler seasons?