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Sunday, April 30th, 2017

Rendezvous With Deep Time

Sunday, April 30th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.

Arrival at Night, and the First Day

I got a late start, and entered the mountains just as full dark was falling and all the stars were coming out on this moonless night. The military refueling flights were occasionally deafening as they droned though their long mechanical circles overhead, but they stopped at 10 pm. Snug in my sleeping bag, there under the glittering arch of heaven, I felt much more comfortable and at home than in my bed back in Silver City.

On the first day, temperatures were mild, with alternating wind and calm, clouds and blue sky, and I hiked up to the Shade House. There, I strung my hammock and lay reading and watching birds and pollinators move among the nearby shrubs and boulders. The clouds, some tantalizingly dark, brought temporary humidity but no precious rain. I was plagued by gnats, but at least they didn’t bite. I hiked up to the seep and found the catch basin dry – something that only happens in the deepest droughts.

A Walk Across the Bajada

The next morning I woke to a cold wind and put on layers of fleece before making breakfast and coffee. Discouraged by the drought, I thought of leaving and going elsewhere. But the sky cleared and I saw the big boulder pile 2 or 3 miles across the basin, where I knew there were inner chambers with shade from the full sun of afternoon and views out across the bajada.

The walk across the bajada reminded me that this is a special place for plants. I found dense stands of healthy bunchgrass, and surprising groupings of very different plants living together in harmony, in a desert that’s more commonly known for plants that isolate themselves from each other with chemical repellents. Many were blooming, long after the “official” annual bloom, from the tiny annuals at ground level to the tall cholla cactus and creosote shrubs. And I came upon bees, butterflies, birds, rabbits and hares, all enjoying springtime on the bajada.

That night it was so windy I had to anchor even heavy things down and turn my sleeping bag away from it, to the south. I could tell the wind was on the rise and planned to leave in the morning, discouraged by both wind and drought.

Rendezvous With Deep Time

High winds in the morning. I took my time packing up, and on the way out down the broad main wash, noticed a wedge of snow on Mount San Gorgonio, a hundred miles away through a haze of wind-raised mineral dust.

Then, just outside the mountains, I unexpectedly came upon a vehicle driven by someone I only knew as a legend – the geologist who’d discovered this place and helped put it on the international map of earth science. He was bringing some young students out, hoping they’d like it enough to resume research out here. So I turned around and joined them, and the legend gave me some glimpses of an incredibly dynamic, and incredibly ancient, story.

Here, the crust of the earth, then consisting of sedimentary – the limestones, shales, and sandstones of the Grand Canyon – and ancient metamorphic rocks such as gneiss – had been folded under unimaginable forces, and interpenetrated by younger granite rising from below, and the interfaces between the rocks were incredibly complex. In fact, much of the story remains a mystery today after decades of study.

In this migmatitic exposure, beautiful marbles had been formed, and embedded with colorful skarns in reds and greens. Layer upon layer of granites and recrystallized carbonates that had flowed over and under each other repeatedly, to be eroded across eons and exposed here for us in frozen waves and thin sheets like iced cream. Almost two billion years of the Earth’s history we hiked over, up a few hundred feet of steep mountainside.

The students hungrily scanned the rocks at their feet, but the legend kept redirecting their attention up to the deep blue of the sky behind the stony ridge, and to the special plants scattered around them, like the red Dudleya and the barrel cactus, that thrive on this particular substrate. And I pointed out my new obsession, biological soil crusts, which arise at the interface between rock and life. Easily missed knots of nondescript black matter in fissures of white stone. Subdued now in the drought, but ready to swell and glisten after a rain.

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