Coyote Crossing

Letters from the desert: Photos!

In the regrettable looming orgy of end-of-year buying, please don’t forget to cut me in!

Like many of my fellow Americans in this time of economic crisis, I have seen a number of investments fail to provide me with any return. There’s my grocery

Letters from the desert: CRN Archive accessible

A revamped archive of most of the posts from Creek Running North, and most of the comments thereon, is now available here.

Some of the comments seem to have gone missing. A server crash in July—which also ate a few blog templates—is the likely

Letters from the desert: Stop Bush’s End Run Around Nuclear Waste Safety

A forward from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service: We have three days to speak out to keep Bush’s team from falsifying science yet again in order to justify filling Yucca Mountain with high-level nuclear waste.

New Sign-On- By Nov 10th:

Letters from the desert: Back

...and then off again, heading south to watch election coverage with The Raven. But I wanted to report that my Taos pal got great news: no sign of metastasis and expectation of full recovery. Go Team Us! More soon, and thanks to all of you who

Letters from the desert: While I’m in New Mexico

Heading to Santa Fe tomorrow to accompany my pal to doctor’s appointments and such. My feeling for this place is surprisingly intense. I will be distilling said feeling into writing over the next couple days. Until I do so, take a look at this

Letters from the desert: Dark

A few hundred miles of desert two-lane at night, no radio nor moon nor competing traffic to interfere with the cascade of thought, and the dark folds itself in around my pallid headlamps. The high-beams have developed a disconcerting tendency to go

Letters from the desert: DIY Rapture

The bumper sticker on the Hummer in front of me at the traffic light got me thinking. It read:

“Don’t let the car fool you. My treasure is in heaven.”

I was stuck in traffic in Las Vegas, which heightened the effect a bit. I’d been hiking in the

Letters from the desert: A quick note or two

I’ll be doing a bit of writing here over the next days, but it’s not ready yet, and I want to push that layout-breaking photo off the front page. (The monitor-breaking photo at top left of the front page stays. Sorry.)

Item: I’m sitting in the

Letters from the desert: From the current High Country News

… (continues)

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

Letters from the desert: Jarhead

At the wheel on Saturday afternoon, The Raven flinched. “What the…?” A low black sports car came out of nowhere behind us on Kelbaker Road, passed us doing at least 40 miles per hour more than our sedate 60 or so, and straddled the center line as

Letters from the desert: Good news about the devastating Hackberry Fire

I took it upon myself to answer the implied question I posed here, about the existence — or lack thereof — of surviving piñon pines in the Mid-Hills.

I drove up into the burn zone Tuesday for my first thorough look at the place. I’d been up there

Letters from the desert: Thresholds

Creosote bush, Larrea tridentata, grows in the lower elevations of the Mojave. At least it does so in places where the soil is not too alkaline. In the flattest part of this valley nothing grows, and the fringes of the dry lake are the domain of

Letters from the desert: Crotalus scutulatus

Were one to insist on a strictly rational, actuarial accounting of the risks involved, one would of necessity admit that the little meeting The Raven and I had Saturday with the most dangerous snake in North America was not the riskiest thing

Letters from the desert: Tortious Conduct

Thunderstorms rolled in this morning, one or more from each of the four directions, and the smell of wet creosote was thick on the wind.

I decided to go get my mail. This involves about a forty=mile round trip. My mail tends to pile up in the box

Letters from the desert: The Lucy Grays

In the last few days the weather has shifted, the days’ highs under 100 degrees consistently for the first time since early July. The shift was sudden. On Saturday The Raven and I braved temperatures of 115 degrees along the Colorado; by Sunday

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

Letters from the desert: Seeing stars

Another sunset, another sky over the Clark and Ivanpah ranges turned by imperceptible increment from deep blue to blood red, the slow tilting of earth and air erasing shade after subtle shade from sky. Soon all that is left is sanguinary. Soon that

Letters from the desert: Pie

The mountains are a hell’s rainbow, greens and reds and blues in layers dredged up from some unfathomable depth. I watch them, imagine climbing from the pediment up into the folded and crenellated side canyons.

I stir my coffee absently, though I

Letters from the desert: The Jeep

My traveling around in the desert is made possible by a 1992 Jeep Cherokee, itself made possible by Diane and Sherwood Harrington, who gave me the thing for free to facilitate my writing. It’s a trusty beast. It has ghosts that have taken control