At last! - touring the California desert

Sunset, Jan, 1995 by Matthew Jaffe

The vast and wild California desert has taken its place as an official wonder of the West Visit now while the weather's cool and inviting

THEY'RE UNLIKELY RIVALS, THIS PAIR OF EAST MOJAVE herbivores. Cattle have been out in these parts for around 100 years, tortoises for millions. Recently, they came to symbolize two very different visions of the West, when Congress debated--and barely passed--the California Desert Protection Act, the largest and probably most controversial land action since 1964 in the contiguous 48 states.

The cattle catch your eye first. From a distance, they conjure up classic Western images: Remington bronzes, the film Red River. Up close, they look less romantic, appearing lean and weathered as they stop among the Joshua trees to stare at you with dark, imploring eyes.

Desert tortoises, symbols of an older, more natural order, aren't big on eye contact. When they aren't burrowed in the sand, they're busy dealing with the cattle--who compete with them for food and occasionally crush the reptiles--as well as a host of other threats, including marauding ravens who devour the tortoises' young and years of drought.

Drought is one thing cattle and tortoises share--the East Mojave's skies tease them both. Clouds often build up over the East Mojave's mountains, which rise dramatically from the sloping terrain like ships riding swells. Rain often seems inevitable, but usually the clouds just break up, leaving behind a thirsty land.

By the time Senator Dianne Feinstein from California finally got the desert bill through Congress last October, it had--like those storms--built up, then broken up, countless times over nine long years. The rhetoric was often shrill as opponents and supporters of the landmark legislation professed their love for the land while offering wildly different plans for how it should be managed.

In the end, the desert tortoise and countless other animal and plant species were given sanctuary within some 8 million acres of wilderness, much of it located in two newly created national parks, Death Valley and Joshua Tree [look for our article next month on Death Valley]. The cattle were given the right to graze forever in the East Mojave, which has become a national preserve. No longer the nation's dumping ground, the California desert has taken its place as an official wonder of the West, as worthy of protection as giant sequoia groves and the Alaska wilderness.

A PRESERVE FOR PEOPLE, TOO

The two interstate highways that mark the northern and southern boundaries of the East Mojave--which is between Las Vegas, the West's fastest-growing city, and Los Angeles, its largest--perpetuate an image of the desert as a wasteland to cross, and cross fast. To really experience the East Mojave's extraordinary natural diversity and considerable human history, you need to pull off the highway. Claudia Luke, codirector of the University of California's Granite Mountains Reserve, goes even further. She applies the three-day rule. "It takes three days to let go of all your thoughts and worries--city things," she says. "By the third day, you understand the silence here better. There's a certain amount of time that you need to allow the desert to show itself, or for you to see it."

On a superficial level, the East Mojave lacks a national park--style trademark. There's no Old Faithful or Yosemite Valley here. Even Death Valley and Joshua Tree are easier to get a handle on than the East Mojave: Joshua Tree has its namesake plants, Death Valley has Badwater, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere.

The East Mojave's identity crisis is perhaps best illustrated by one of its most famous nonlandmarks, Cima Dome, which covers 75 square miles and has eroded into the most symmetrical natural dome in the United States. The world's largest Joshua tree forest grows here--you can hike through it on a trail up Teutonia Peak--but Cima Dome itself might as well be invisible when you're on it because its gentle and perfect slope is visible only from a great distance. The stealth batholith.

Other things don't seem to belong here at all. A few plant communities at the extreme limits of their ranges remind you that this was once a cooler and wetter place. Tucked within the jumbled granite canyons of the incongruously named New York Mountains are canyon oak, ceanothus, and other species more at home farther west. And hidden within a single cave in the Granite Mountains near Interstate 40 is the Venus hair fern, a plant that's found in the Sierra Nevada above 7,000 feet.

"It's a remnant of the Ice Age," Elden Hughes, chair of the Sierra Club's California Desert Committee, says of the fern. "It hides back there, waiting for the weather to change."

And the weather does change in the East Mojave, with elevation and the seasons. Up in the Mid Hills area, at about 5,600 feet, occasional winter storms can dump huge amounts of snow. Adrienne Knute, a naturalist and author who lives in the area, remembers one winter when a waterfall near her home turned to ice after a storm: "The sheets of water hung down, frozen. It was just beautiful."