Coyote Crossing

Solar Rush

Via Larry Hogue, an article on the National Parks Conservation Association website:

The Mojave Desert is on fire. Private land worth $500 an acre five years ago is now selling for as much as 20 times that amount, with Fortune 500 companies

Alluvium

This pebble in my boot, when it was one
still with its mother rock, cooled over tens
of centuries: a batholith. Bright grew
the flakes of muscovite, bright grew the pale
discolored quartz, each grain an infinite
fine tetrahedral tesselation, it … (continues)

Could green kill the desert?

Biologist Bruce M. Pavlik, author of The California Deserts: An Ecological Rediscovery, which I’m working my way through this week, has a great piece in the Los Angeles Times on Big Solar vs. the deserts.

The costs of industrializing the

Tortoise alert: letters needed

From the Center for Biological Diversity:

Last year, the Army moved more than 750 tortoises off of pristine desert lands in order to expand its Fort Irwin army base in California’s Mojave desert. Not all tortoises were monitored, but of those that

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

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

The Memory of Water

This is my whole life: driving alone through the landscapes of the arid West. There is someone waiting for me at home, or there is no one waiting for me at home, or I am already home, watching the far horizon recede through the dust-spattered

Desert Magic

I was pleased with the way the Phantom Seed reading went in Riverside in Saturday. The new issue of Phantom Seed looks great, and there’s a serious pile of good writing there, as well as my pieces “Kessler Peak” and “Epilobium.”

The event drew a

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