By the time we pull into Twentynine Palms and get a room, we’re starving. Luckily, we find a fantastic Indian place not far up the road in Joshua Tree called Sam’s Indian Food and Pizza. Not a name to inspire confidence, but it is wonderful! Max and I go face down and don’t come up for air until we’re in pain, it’s that good. I love having a good dinner after being in the desert all day. Unfortunately the new Fairfield Inn we stay in in Twentynine Palms has paper thin walls. The room’s terrific, and you can’t beat the price, but naturally we have noisy neighbors and I am about as sturdy as the princess in The Princess and the Pea when it comes to sleeping in a strange place. Exhaustion in the morning, alas.
But then it’s time to head up the hill to Joshua Tree! There’s something about it up there, a vibe or feeling, that I just love. It feels like going into a really cool and inviting prehistoric world, sort of like the Flintstones, where everything is beautiful and strange and fun all at the same time. A desert otherworld.
We spend a day just roaming at will, no particular destination, stopping where it suits us. Just seeing the Joshua Trees lifts my spirits. I’m a big fan of all of the yuccas, but these are yucca trees! They have such a remarkable energy and character.
We decide to try the Barker Dam nature trail since we’ve never done it. It’s a perfect day so it’s pretty crowded, but well worth it. In a little valley that’s sheltered from the cold wind I find an excellent pile of boulders to climb up on where we have lunch and I make some molds and onsite impressions in clay. I love to find a nice warm boulder on a winter’s day and lie on it like a lizard in the sun.
The end of the day is spent at Jumbo Rocks, where some of the best boulders in the park make their home. It sits up on a rise in the landscape and you feel like you can see forever from up in the rocks. There’s a very special beauty to the place.
The next morning after a second night of little sleep, we drive east to the Cadiz Valley. I discovered this place when driving to Joshua Tree one year. On the north side of the highway there was a sign that said “Heart of the Mojave” and road going out into the distance into the most stunning white granite bajada. It was irresistable, but I had to be somewhere on time, so mentally filed it away for another trip. When I did have the chance to explore it, I wasn’t disappointed and have wanted to go back ever since.
The Mojave is full of expanses like this, endless stretches of creosote on tilted alluvial fans, canted ever so gently down into salted valley floors. It isn’t a place with spectacular formations or tourist attractions, so no one goes there. It’s just a pure expanse of stone, space, light, and silence.
Max also wants to see it, so we drive a long way back on a spur road along the eastern side of the Sheep Hole Mountain Wilderness. Then we stop, get out, and start walking towards the mountains several miles away to the west. It’s hypnotic, just a slow progress through a landscape that changes very little. We look at stones and plants. There are even some flowers here and there, extravagant yellow blooms that surprise us where everything else seems dormant. Eventually I realize Max wants to go all the way to the edge of the mountains, which rise straight up out of the bajada. Ok. We do it.
On the first slopes we reach we climb up a bit and have lunch, then start poking around a little in the wash. A little further back we had each found a perfect quartz point in the sand, surprising to see something like that intact, so we hope to see more. I go over to examine a rock that has some white patches on it to find out what it is.
Only it’s not a rock, it’s a tortoise shell, from the rare Desert Tortoise. It’s on the small side so it must have been young when it died. I am amazed. The outer scales are mostly gone, scattered around it on the ground, the brittle white bone revealed. The shell is fully intact but has been vacant for a long time. I am surprised by the bone; for some reason I’ve always thought that turtle shells are solid chiton all the way through, but they’re made of bone covered with scales.
I gather some of the scales, thinking that they will make incredible molds. What a find! A few years ago Max was lucky enough to come across a living tortoise, a juvenile, at Joshua Tree. The rangers said it was the first sighting of the season. As terrific as it was to find the weathered scales for molds, I would have loved to see a living tortoise even more.
We walk back to the Subaru and slowly make our way down the sandy track back to the main graded road—still plenty of deep sand there—to the main road. The time has passed so quickly…it always does when I’m out in the desert.
The next morning it’s time to head for home. We have a long day’s drive ahead of us, but it is still a perfect morning for a drive across the desert.
Like I said, the desert seems to cause people to do things they wouldn’t normally do. Maybe it’s a way of coming to terms with all of that space, or maybe it takes you so far out of your normal way of thinking that more creative ideas come in. This place is literally out in the middle of nowhere in a little ghost settlement called Rice. Once upon a time this was a gas station. Now people leave their shoes here, and along a fence a little further down. No idea why. It just is what it is.
One last stop just before we cross the Colorado River into Arizona: the Topock Maze. You have to know about this place to be able to find it, even though it’s literally right on top of I-40. It’s a massive geoglyph, a large area where people hundreds of years ago (maybe more) moved the dark stones aside from the light earth underneath and created pathways, hundreds of them in parallel lines, over dozens of acres. No one knows why, but the Mojave have their own traditions about the place and what it is for. From the air it looks like a fingerprint.
For me it’s one of those places that has a silence about it, that takes you out of ordinary time into deep time, and into mystery. It is surrounded by heavy industry, and part of it was destroyed to make way for 1-40 and the railroad tracks, but there is still something here that is alive and conscious. It’s part of a stronger, deeper part of the desert dreaming that is beyond all of our modern imaginings.
This photo is from Google Earth, showing part of the Maze cut through by I-40 for scale. There is so much out there, if only we take the time to look.
Max and I make it back to Albuquerque safe and sound, in time for dinner at a favorite Persian restaurant. Kebabs and a salad hit the spot. Then safely home to Placitas for me, and Rio Rancho for him. What a journey…
Till next time…
Blessings,
Dawn