The verges of Cima Road are lined with penstemon flowers just past their peak, with desert milkweed and evening primrose, datura full open despite it being midday. The Teutonia Peak trail winds past mainly spent desert bloom. Mojave mound and hedgehog cacti hold withered flowers tightly closed, protecting a new season’s developing fruit. Bright green seedpods grow on the Joshua trees, the banana yuccas. Rabbitbrush blooms yellow, aster and fleabane in pale violet, four-o-clocks clasped shut after the previous day’s effusion. The whole desert seems to be waking up after a few days’ carouse, greeting the bleary sunlit aftermath.
There is still revelry in progress. A few Opuntia flowers are open wide to the sun and enticing beetles into mad, pollen-drunk orgies.
Most of the cactus blossoms are eaten away, spent, petals wrinkled and drooping, shards of prom dress on the morning’s motel floor.
I sit halfway up Teutonia Peak. The road a mile away through the Joshua tree forest, I can almost forget it’s there until the occasional car comes rolling up toward Sunrise Rock, slows briefly at the scene of the crime, then heads on south toward Cima. Far enough uphill that I could see the whole of the broad saddle between Teutonia and Kessler Peaks, I relax in the shade of a juniper. The air smells of gin.
The sky is full of cheerful white clouds, and now and then one rolls between the sun and me, chilling the sweat in my hair, on the back of my neck. I watch their shadows track across the base of Kessler Peak two miles east.
I’d filled my Camelback “canteen” in my pack at the trailhead, but neglected to screw the lid back on as tightly as I should have. I got the pack six years ago, and one of the features that recommended it to me was its mesh interior pocket designed to hold a drinking bladder, and the conveniently sited hole through which the thirsty hiker might thread the accompanying drinking tube. The thought of being able to drink without taking off my pack appealed to me. I probably drink too much water on desert hikes as a result — when I remember to bring water. About half a mile into today’s little hike I felt something wet bumping into my left hip: there was a quarter inch of water in the bottom of the pack. Good thing I’d kept my camera in my hand. I’ve found that rattlesnakes and bighorns don’t usually wait around for you to dig your camera out of your pack. That behavioral quirk saved me about a thousand bucks in camera replacement costs this past weekend. I’d retightened the lid on the bladder before hiking any farther. Sitting up by the juniper I rummage in the pack’s moist entrails. Nothing lost except a cup of water. Even the whole wheat crackers are tolerably dry in their paper wrapper. I prop the pack open and set it in the cool desert sun to dry out.
I feel like I’ve hiked this trail a hundred times, though lately it’s just been short jaunts of a few minutes from the road. The last time I got as far as Teutonia’s “foothills” was two years ago and the time before that was in 2005. It’s been a while. The boulders around me glisten in the sun, then fade as each cloud passes overhead.
Striped Mountain far downhill to the northeast, Clark Mountain beyond it on the other side of the interstate. That must be Kokoweef over there in front of them, the bright white outcrop with its mythical deep caves. Due east is a low pass in the Ivanpah Mountains. I hiked to it some years ago, gazed down onto the Ivanpah Valley as a pair of juvenile golden eagles soared a few hundred feet below me.
I know this place as well as I know anyplace, and yet on each visit I see something I’d missed before: a dramatic clump of cacti in a spot I’ve passed a hundred times, a dike of microcrystalline granite running through an outcrop with the usual dime-sized salt and pepper crystals, a juniper twisted into a corkscrew, a memory, an idea, a resolution. I sat up here with Matthew once with snow still holding on in the shady spots, all that was left of the two inches that fell on us the night before. It had been raining when we got into the tent. We’d sat under a tarp for hours that night passing a bottle of rye back and forth. We woke the next morning to a quiet winter scene.
That was a long time ago. Children born that February are these days clicking “it’s complicated” on their Facebook relationship statuses. I suddenly wish I had some rye. Half an hour ago as I was hiking toward Teutonia the air got very hot for a moment, and very still, and the air was full of solvents exuded by the junipers around me, and the smell hit me without warning. It takes me by surprise every single time, even when I remind myself to expect it.
A very nice piece of writing Chris. As you intended, I felt as if I were along side of you on this short journey.
Thanks.
Bill:www.wildramblings.com
You make me want to go on this trail, I have not visited this part of the Mojave Preserve yet.