Coyote Crossing

US National Park Meme

I call the Mojave National Preserve “The Park” as often as not, but I’m painfully aware that it isn’t one. The difference between “Preserve” and “Park” status? Hunting is allowed in National Preserves. Letting hunters shoot things in the Preserve

By A Nail

A running coyote, painting by Carl Dennis Buell

The ancestor of all dogs climbed trees like a cat.

Or so the experts hypothesize. The raccoon-sized, foxy omnivore Prohesperocyon is as likely a candidate for the ancestor of all dogs, wolves and

Ripley Desert Woodland

Snow remains this afternoon, thin glazed patches underneath the junipers. Ravens fly in pairs through the Western Mojave sky. A pair approaches, not seeing us behind a stand of juniper and Joshua. First one and then the other double-takes, stumbles

End of November

The valley here runs south to north. At sunset the shadow of the Clark and Ivanpah mountains creeps across the valley floor, a second hand marking the time in yards. From where I sit, a mile up the washed-out road to the Lucy Grays, I watch the

Taos 3

Coyotes sing just outside my window. I awake. It isn’t a dream. The dogs take off after them, singing joyous outrage. The sheep must be protected. Hazel the little goat has broken her leg somehow, and my host will cart her down to the vet in an

Letters from the desert: The kind of place I live

On my way to a hike today (and more on that to come) I stopped at the Cima, CA post office. (My mail arrives there at PO Box 43, 92323: send a letter!)

There was a roadrunner in the parking lot when I got there.

I left and went on my hike (and

Coyote Song in Joshua Tree

Theriomorph sent this along, seemed like it oughtta go up here. Thanks, … (continues)

Comment on the Draft Alternatives Working Paper for the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport EIS

In the evening of October 1, two days before the deadline for public comment on the Draft Alternatives Working Paper for the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport Environmental Impact Statement, I left the little house I am renting in the Ivanpah

Beauty

It is raining, a little. The wind off the little storm front brings the temperature down to a positively comfortable level. It’s almost cool. Not even 80°, and the scent of wet juniper and rock hangs in the air.

How long has it been since I’d

Letters from the desert: Light and Sound

This valley I live in is quiet.

It’s not silent. Sometimes, in fact, there is a hell of a lot of noise here. Eighteen-wheelers roar down the road in front of my house fairly often, as do RVs ridiculously towing boats through the desert toward the

Coyote Crossing

Today I pulled a dead coyote pup off of the road.
He’d evidently lain out in the sun a little while,
but death and desert sun had not erased the sweet sly guile
there on his face, mute eyes with arid dignity unbowed
despite a cloak of flies. Across