Coyote Crossing

Collapse

A quarter of my life I’ve lain here in these rocks and thorns, watching Orion’s cold shoulder wheel through the late autumn sky, or waking a few hours into a summer night to watch the bleary Pleiades ascend.

The great bear circles warily in the

7:55 pm Saturday July 25 2009, Cima Dome

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On Cima Dome

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Cima Post Office, RIP

An era has ended: The Cima, California Post Office — Zip Code 92323 — has closed down permanently.

The Cima PO was established in 1904, mainly to serve the railroad workers and ranchers in the area. It was about the funkiest public service

Cedar Canyon Road, July 31 2005

A month before, lightning strikes had sparked one of the worst fires in the East Mojave’s history. 71,000 acres burned in the course of a couple days.

My friend Matthew and I headed for the burn area to see it for ourselves.

The temperature

Kelso Dunes

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Providence Mountains from Kelso Dunes

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Ivanpah Road, Tuesday PM

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Morning

Cactus wren call and the smell of blackbrush. Four months since I woke in the Joshua tree forest. Sage sparrows and wind through pointed leaves. Four months ago I awoke after sleeping little. Patches of snow in the shade of Joshua trees.

There are

Beanery open at Kelso Depot

A little happy news for fans of the Mojave National Preserve:

(Kelso, CA) – The Beanery lunch counter is open for business at the Kelso Depot Visitor Center in Mojave National Preserve. The counter’s operator, Mike Williams, is serving light food

Desert Pavement

This wind is a tide. Plant your footsoles on the earth: the wind will scour the sand out from underneath, send you toppling backward into the holes it digs beneath your heels. It is relentless. It is patient. Sandgrain after wind-driven sandgrain

Ferocactus on Lava

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Compare and contrast

Below are two satellite images, courtesy Google Earth, of different pieces of the Ivanpah Valley. Both photos show land at around 3,000 feet in elevation, at a resolution equivalent to 1,500 feet up.

One of the photos is of land whose

Yucca schidigera

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Eagle over Morning Star Mine Road

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US National Park Meme

I call the Mojave National Preserve “The Park” as often as not, but I’m painfully aware that it isn’t one. The difference between “Preserve” and “Park” status? Hunting is allowed in National Preserves. Letting hunters shoot things in the Preserve

Wee Thump Sunset

Slept on the ground last night in sub-freezing temperatures. Woke up surrounded by Joshua trees growing out of patches of snow. Drove with The Raven along Route 66. Ate lunch-dinner at the Bagdad Café.

Best Birthday Ever.

Also, please join me

Castle Peaks Sunset

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Gray

The first storm of winter will come a day from now, or two. At noon today the clouds arrived, a cirrus haze thin as a knife’s edge. Over Nevada the sky was still pale turquoise, but gray lowered in the west.

By two the sky was wrapped in

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