NOAA says it was 28°F a couple of nights ago. Balmy for much of the country, but cold for here. That means that the plants that can’t take cold, are inside covering every horizontal surface near a window. The house feels might full and we haven’t even started to put up Christmas stuff.
We have had a couple of hot days, and – it seems like all of sudden – our Epiphylums are blooming. Epiphylums are epiphytic cactus. Epiphytic meaning they are arborael; they grow in trees like some orchids and bromeliades, but are not parasites. The plants we have are from tropical areas of the Americas and are not species but have been hybridized for their flowers which I am normally against (because I am a species snob).
The flowers are spectacular with flowers up to 4″ across.
Our first night in Mojave National preserve, we went to bed about ten PM so we would be ready to get up early. About one o’clock in the morning, it started to rain. Rain may be over dramatizing it, a few isolated rain drops started falling. This has happened to me several times camping out in the desert and, every time, it soon stopped. My first thought was to ride it out but, after about a minute – it is hard to tell accurate time in the dark, at one o’clock, with heavy cloud cover; it could have been less, probably not more – I got up, threw my ground cloth and sleeping mat into the back of Ed’s truck and climbed into the cab with my damp sleeping bag.
It was warm, so I went back to sleep. At about three o’clock, when I woke up, the sky was clear and I was uncomfortable sleeping sitting up so I got out, took my ground cloth and sleeping mat out of the truck, laid out my bag, and went back to sleep. All in all, I was probably awake for ten minutes and was ready to go when the sun came up. I am still sort of amazed at how painless the whole experience was.
After a quick breakfast of Kellogg’s Super K and no tea or coffee – because we didn’t have a stove – we set out to explore. I first went to the area the year after I fell in love with the great California desert in April of 1977.
As an aside, Alan Cranston was then a California Senator and was pushing for a national park in the area. The problem was that the other Senator was always a Republican and the rule of the day – I don’t know if it is official or unofficial – was that both Senators had to agree to make it a park and the Republicans didn’t want to. Shortly after Dianne Feinstein became Senator, giving the state two Democratic Senators, the Mojave National Preserve was established, in 1994, along with the change – and enlargement – of Death Valley from a National Monument to a National Park. The Preserve is administered by the U.S. National Park Service and is located in California about three hours south of Las Vegas which was very handy for us. The Preserve is about the same size as Delaware at 1.6 million acres but with a lot less people (although with railroad tracks running through it and lots of power lines, only about half is designated wilderness). But there are three major mountain ranges; some great, 600-foot-high, sand dunes; several volcanic cinder cones with lava flows; and a couple of dry lakes. End aside.
We planned on exploring two areas, the Hole in the Rock area of the Providence Mountains in the morning and the Kelso Dunes in the late afternoon. On the way to Hole in the Rock, I was a little surprised at how many inholdings there were and how used up the land seemed. People have probably been running and over grazing cattle here for over a hundred years which may help to explain why the Republican Senators were against establishing a park.
.We did see more flowers than I expected, however, including some nice orange mallows – Sphaeralcea ambigua – which I think is related to the marsh mallow
and our friends, the same Echinocereus that we enjoyed near our campsite
but my favorite plant that we ran into was Salvia dorrii – desert sage – with its balls of purple flowers each with tiny purple orchids growing out of them
When we got to the Hole in the Rock visitor center, I was reminded – again – how good government architecture is. Not just in the big, expensive buildings like the Federal Building in San Francisco (not my picture)
but in cheap, small buildings, tucked away behind the mountains, in the desert; just fitting in perfectly with its solar panels – solar photovoltaic panels? – mounted on cheap, concrete, highway dividers.
We spent the late morning walking a couple of trails in the area and it almost felt like we were walking through botanical gardens.
Then it was back to the Visitor Center to have lunch in the shade of the covered porch.
Monday morning, we got up pretty much with the sunrise and got going. It was easier and quicker than we had planned – we didn’t bring a stove which wasn’t planned but did speed up the mornings – and we were on the road out of the Carrizo Plain by seven AM. The Carrizo Plain is a large graben in the middle of the coast range. The San Andreas fault runs through it – actually, I guess, it is caused by the fault – like a zipper.
We camped just off the road – on the left side of the fault, on the Pacific Plate – in the picture above but, on the ground, everything looks pretty flat and we wouldn’t know – without being told – that one end of the road is on the Pacific Plate and the other on the North American Plate. Behind us, in the picture below is the Trembler Range – great name! – and over it, past a few wildflowers blooming, is the San Joaquin Valley where they are still pumping out oil after over a hundred years. But first, we had to backtrack past the community center of the pseudo town just north of the Carrizo Plain. The picnic tables offer a great view of a future, sun powered, electric plant.
The it was just a matter of beating our way east – past Bakersfield, Tehachapi, Mojave, and Barstow – until we got to the Mojave National Preserve. I am not sure what a National Preserve is compared to a National Park except that a Preserve allows hunting – hunting what, here, I am not sure – but the Mojave National Preserve does have a heavy duty set of railroad tracks going through the middle and a lot of in-holdings. Our first stop was the Preserve headquarters at Kelso to get a couple of suggestions on camping spots.
Then it was up to Granite Pass at about 4,000 feet to find a legal camping spot. In Death Valley National Park, we can camp almost anywhere as long as we are three miles off the paved road; at Mojave, we had to camp where there was a fire ring. At DV, we can’t have ground fires and, at Mojave, we can (in the ring, presumably). I prefer the DV system because it spreads the campers out and there are no overused fire rings. But the area was nice and, at 4,000 feet, we were starting to run into Junipers.
We spent the late afternoon wandering around, looking at blooming plants – including several Echinocereus engelmannii and a cute little echeveria type plant (maybe a Dudleya saxosa) – and admiring the round, exfoliating, granite, boulders as the setting sun turned them orange.
After driving all day Thursday, we all slept in on Friday.
But it did not take very long before the sun got bright enough and hot enough to wake us. After a quickie breakfast, we packed up
and hurried over to the Eureka Sand Dunes.
The Eureka Dunes are not very large or famous but they are among the highest dunes in the United States at over 650 feet above the valley floor. They look smaller because they are framed by the striped limestone cliffs of the Last Chance Range that rise up 3000 to 4000 feet higher. Sand dunes are caused by wind blowing across the valley floor and picking up fine dust and sand; as the wind hits the higher mountains, it slows down, loses energy, and drops its heavy load. One thing that I find interesting is that the the individual grains of sand are constantly changing but the size and shape of the dunes do not.
As an aside, after getting home I realized that, with four people on our trip, I took alot less pictures than I usually do when I am only with Michele. Among things I didn’t take pictures of were the beauty of the sand dunes. Fortunately, Kirk Moore has some wonderful sand dune pictures over at his website. I highly recommend that you take a look. End aside.
By the time we got to the dunes, it was starting to warm up and the dunes were getting very bright. We hiked up about half way, maybe 350 to 400 feet, on sand that got looser and looser.
About the time that the day starting getting really hot, heading towards triple digits. We got back in the truck and looked for shade. First it was back to the main road and then over the Last Chance Range into Death Valley itself. As we started over the last pass before Death Valley, we started seeing more plants in bloom. First the Beavertail Cactus, also known as the Pricklypear Cactus and probably known as some other names which is why people who like plants and go looking for them in the wild end up using the botanical name. In this case, Opuntia basilarus. Just as we got to the pass overlooking upper Death Valley, we came across lots of clumps of Desert Aster, AKA Mojave Aster, or Aster mohavensis.
Then it was down into Death Valley, past Crankshaft Crossing, and on to Scotty’s Castle where we had lunch in the shade.
