Coyote Crossing

Chuckwalla Valley

I went out today to see a landscape before it’s completely altered. My camera is on its last legs after only 6 years, but I squeezed a few more washed-out shots from its unwilling frame.

It was in the Chuckwalla Valley, site of the Desert

Sugar pine on Mt. San Jacinto

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Pleuraphis rigida: knitting the desert together

Left: Big galleta fills a wash in the Southern California portion of the Sonoran Desert.

[A preview of a piece I wrote for El Paisano, the newsletter of the Desert Protective Council.]

In April, Desert Protective Council staff and several

Christmas Tree Pass

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A trip to the Yuha Desert

My brief account of business conducted in the Imperial Valley this weekend is up at … (continues)

Emerging

Yesterday, in Hagen Canyon Wash.

I feel these last weeks as though a few layers of gauze have lifted from my face. There is less weight on me. I doubt myself less. I look back less to the life I once had, and spend more of myself anticipating

Hagen Canyon

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Regarding the African Iris

I taught myself to read pretty early in life, age three or thereabouts. My memories of the time before that are unreliable, mainly remanufactured from stories I’d heard told about those days, with a layer of remembered visual image plastered atop

Science!

After enough time spent paying attention to a tree species, you tend to come up with a bit of data even if you’re not really trying to.

This Joshua tree is at Keys View in Joshua Tree National Park, right around the southern limits of the

Sheep Pass

Yesterday, around 3:00 PM. Driving on Park Boulevard, Joshua Tree National Park. We drive past a sign that says “Sheep Pass Campground.”

Me: You know, I bet you could get a really good night’s sleep there.
The Raven: [near-silent groan]
Me: You

Pinto Basin Road

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A year full of Joshua trees

Forgive the crass commercialism, and I won’t even mention that thing that happens toward the end of the year with the orgy of consumption and the stress and the Carol of the Bells driving you into a tightly choreographed stabbing frenzy, but 2010

Yucca brevifolia

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Cedar Canyon Road, July 31 2005

A month before, lightning strikes had sparked one of the worst fires in the East Mojave’s history. 71,000 acres burned in the course of a couple days.

My friend Matthew and I headed for the burn area to see it for ourselves.

The temperature

A little bit of Earth Day green

Rainstorm clearing, evening, just west of … (continues)

About to bloom

Flower buds two or three days from opening, Tucson Mountain … (continues)

Ocotillo blossoms

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Saddleback Butte sunset

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Cephalocereus apicephalium

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A matter of a piñon

Pine City, Joshua Tree National Park. Snowy Mount San Gorgonio in … (continues)