I seem to have a talent for drawing nasty weather to the Mojave.
Last year’s section hike of the Desert Trail featured rain three of the first four days. The last of those storms was an all-day affair, complete with high winds and flash flood danger. At least today it only rained for half an hour Although perhaps I speak too soon–the patter on the tent is rising once again, driven by a cold ferocious wind.
My discomfort is no comparison to the horror at home, ten of my fellow citizens gunned down while grocery shopping. It seems indulgent to be out hiking, yet I could do nothing at home to help them or their families.
All we can do is keep pushing to outlaw weapons specifically designed to kill large numbers of people in the shortest time possible. These things have no practical use. They are toys in the the hands of law-abiding fools, a way to make chumps feel powerful. In the hands of the evil or deranged, they multiply the body count.
I made the drive from Barstow in good time and left Kelso Depot around 9. I’m starting off following the Providence Mountains section of the DT: a few miles along the highway north, then striking east up the alluvial fan and up-canyon to the ridge crest.
Train coming up out of the Kelso Valley
Kelso Dunes in the distance
I am not in good shape and am carrying a heavy pack–6 days of food and 6 liters of water. The relatively gentle trail made carrying such a load not too difficult. But my hips were aching and the wind was punchy as I approached the crest of the range and so I called it a day around 4 pm when a gravelly bench up out of the wash bottom presented itself.
I encountered a few seeps and small tanks in the wash, a good sign for the chances of finding water later on. The water attracts the local burros, whose shit is everywhere in the wash and who dug out a few holes in the damp spots.
A hanging cactus garden on the canyon wall
The vegetation is looking brown and poor. Not a flower to be seen, and few green leaves of any kind, although there was a pine tree at one favored spot in the wash.
A Jackson Pollock dryfall blocks the wash.
All of the catclaws appear dead, which is no reason for a hiker to mourn, but they are parasitized by mistletoe. The mistletoe berries are a prime food source for desert birds. I saw numerous phainopeplas flitting from bush to bush, looking confused and singing sad songs: “why?”, “where?”.
The climate they have known, the one they are adapted to, is disappearing as world warms and the American Southwest is gripped by a megadrought. Life here will not disappear. But it will change. There are over 900 species of plants in the Mojave Preserve, an astonishing number for a place we think of as lifeless and barren. Who knows how many of these plants–and the animals who depend on them–will be here in the next decade, the next century.
The rain has stopped, although the wind continues to box my tent from all sides. The ground is hardly wet. No end to the drought tonight.