Mojave Desert

“ The bandits led us over and around mountains, down washes and across the beds of dry lakes. Often there was no sign of a road, at least no sign that was apparent to us. On the desert you must travel one of two ways, either along the water-courses or across them. It is strange to find a country dying of thirst cut into a rough chaos by water-channels. Rain on the Mojave is a cloud-burst. The water rushes down from the rocky heights across the long, sloping mesas, digging innumerable trenches, until it reaches a main stream-bed leading to the lowest point in the valley. ”

“ It was a land of desolation—an extension of the Mojave Desert on the south, and the alkaline flats and mineral mountains of Nevada on the north, of Death Valley and the Funeral Mountains of California to the northwest—a burned-out land of grim-looking mountains extending north and south across our way; a dried-out, washed-out, and wind-swept land of extensive flats and arroyos; a land of rock and gravel cemented in marls and clay; ungraced with any but the desert plants,—cactus and thorny shrubs,—with little that was pleasing or attractive. ”

“ The characteristic mesa of the Mojave curves up on both sides, sandy, covered with stones, but often entirely bare of vegetation. Death Valley is always full of such illusions. Even afterwards, when we knew better, we could never look down into the valley from a height without feeling that the mountains rose precipitously out of it. That camp among the mesquites blazed. The yellow sand seemed to smite our eyes. Across the valley under the edge of the Panamints the mesa looked a beautiful dark-blue, but around us was an even greater ecstasy of light than we had known at Keane Wonder. ”

“ Ever since leaving Barstow we had been penetrating further and further into the Mojave. With every mile she had become more terrible and more beautiful. The colors which had delighted us at Joburg were pale beside the colors around Silver Lake, the mountains were hills compared to these beautiful, sinister masses. The sun had been brighter there than any eastern sun, here it was a hot, white blaze. All the way Mojave had asserted herself more and more. In the Imperial Valley, at Joburg and Barstow, we had felt men upon the desert, the drama was partly their drama ”

“ It spread in every direction, reaching to the distant Panamints across the valley and to the hazy outline of the low range at the southern end. The hill which we were passing rose into the sky, white as the plain except for a few streaks of ugly, greenish-yellow-like sulphur. No living green thing appeared. The white expanse was unbroken by a bush or even by an outjutting rock. The desolation was complete. An intense silence lay over it. If we dropped far enough behind the wagon not to hear the creaking of its wheels, we felt utterly alone, the only survivors in a dead universe. ”

“ We left home without plans—too many plans in vacation are millstones hung around your neck—sure only that such places as Santa Barbara, Redlands, Riverside, and San Diego would be for us nothing more than points on the way to somewhere else. An atlas showed a great empty space just east of the Sierra Nevada Range and the San Bernadino Mountains vaguely designated as the Mojave Desert. It was surprising to find the greater part of southern California, the much-advertised home of the biggest fruit and flowers in the world, included in it. ”

“ Nearly everybody who has money to invest buys stock in a gold mine once. Great hopes converged on the desert here from many a board-sidewalked town and prairie-farm; futures were built on it. There is a throb in the throat for Ryolite, fading into the mountain, its corrugated-iron roofs rusting red like the hills. The desert is licking the wound with her sandy tongue until not even a scar will remain. Sooner or later she heals all the little scratches men make on her surface.
The dead town faced a wide valley stretching like a green meadow to the opposite mountains. ”

“ We needed a man accustomed to living on the desert, who knew the valley thoroughly, who could work in its heat and brightness, and who had the courage to take two ignorant enthusiasts there. We had lost the easy assurance with which we had talked at Joburg about going to Death Valley. No wonder the inhabitants of that town had been stunned when we said that we were on the way there! The unspeakable road beyond Saratoga Springs and the little gravel-ridge which we could not climb were sufficient warning of the nature of the undertaking. Mojave is not easily to be known as we would know her. ”

“ All day the white blaze of the sun was around us and the silence, after a week of tumultuous wind, was a mighty dreaming. It was the living silence which we had first known on the night when we wandered away from Silver Lake, the silence in which the earth moves. The mountains dwelt in it majestically. Mojave was again making her fine gesture, unconscious of the discomforts and terrors of small living things. Her pointing at the far-off shining is always a [Pg 218] conquest of grimness, as though sorrow were a stepping-stone to beauty. ”

“ Our appearance must have been against us. Certainly it was no lack of persistence, for we interviewed everybody, hotel-managers, ranchers, druggists and garage-men. They all looked us over and gave the same advice. As far as we could learn, the Mojave Desert which we tried to go to in the first place was where we should be. We suspect now that they wanted to get rid of us.
We returned to Los Angeles and attacked the Automobile Club again. As before we had to listen to arguments about the roads and the sand and the distances and the accommodations, but this time we listened unmoved. ”

“ Lucinda insisted, rising: "it is late, and I want to wake up early, I don't want to miss anything of this wonderful country."
"You won't see anything in the morning but desert, the edge of the Mojave."
"But we've been in the desert all afternoon and I adore it."
"Oh, these Arizona plains! they're not real desert; they're just letting on; give them a few drinks and they'll start a riot—of vegetation. But the Mojave's sure-enough he-desert: sand and sun, cactus and alkali. I'm much more interesting, I'm so human." ”

“ The desert has no foreground; you soon stop looking much for things near at hand and get the horizon-gazing habit. If a flower or a shining stone is at your feet you see it joyfully, but if it is a tin can it does not exist. There are too many far-off, enchanting things to look at. You are never unaware of the sky, nor the beautiful curves of the mountains; no forests nor roofs conceal them from you, and your eyes pass untroubled over small uglinesses.
We made our camp in the shelter of an immense rock that stood alone in the middle of the wash, and settled down for a long resting space. ”

“ If he loved the mountain, rather than so disfigure it, he would throw ink at his most cherished possession; and only lovers of mountains have the right to invade their loneliness. The Panamints, with their feet in the burning heat of Death Valley and their heads in the snow, almost unknown to any save a few prospectors, guarded on all sides by the solitudes of the desert, seemed utterly desirable to us.
We sat on a rock studying the map, which was no help at all, and eating the big, sweet, California prunes of which we always carried pockets-full as aids to wayfaring. ”

“ THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.
Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil. ”

“ Mile after mile it steadily climbed until the sweat made furrows in the shaggy coats of Molly and Bill; but to us, walking ahead of the wagon, the valley looked level as before, and only our greater exertion convinced us of the rise. Here was one of the characteristic mesas of the Mojave; nothing is quite flat there except the narrow bottoms of the valleys. Suddenly the road reached the outposts of the mountain and became much [Pg 91] steeper through the sandy wash of a canyon. The walls on either side gradually grew higher and the sand deeper. ”

“ A good road led through the Cajon Pass to Victorville and thence over sand dotted with groves of Joshua palms to Barstow. A Joshua palm is a grotesque tree-yucca which appears wherever the mesas of the Mojave rise to an elevation of a few thousand feet. It becomes twenty feet high in some places and its ungainly arms stick up into the sky. It has long, dark green, pointed leaves ending in sharp thorns like the yucca. It attains to great age and the dead branches, split off from the trunk or lying on the ground, look as though they were covered with matted gray hair. ”

“ All the growth was changing as we neared the lower altitudes and the mouth of the Grand Canyon, being that of the hot desert, which had found this artery or avenue leading to the heart of the rocky plateaus and had pushed its way into this foreign land.
Even the animal life of the desert has followed this same road. Occasional Gila monsters, which are supposed to belong to the hot desert close to the Mexico line, have been found at Diamond Creek, and lizards of the Mojave Desert have been seen as far north as the foot of Bright Angel Trail. ”

“ Our first night's camp was out on the barren waterless plain, now known as the Mojave Desert. There were no shrubs large enough to make a fire of, and nothing to tie our cattle to, so we fastened all our animals together to keep them from scattering and getting lost. We ate a little dry meat and drank sparingly of the water, for our scanty stock was to last us another day, when we might reach prospective water holes. Starting early, John and I took all but Old Crump and the other travelers, and hurried on to try and find the water holes as early as possible. ”

“ The monument is the junction of two physiographic ecoregions: the Mojave Desert and the Colorado Plateau. Individually, these regions contain ecosystems extreme to each other, ranging from stark, arid desert to complex, dramatic higher elevation plateaus, tributaries, and rims of the Grand Canyon. The western margin of the Shivwits Plateau marks the boundary between the Sonoran/Mojave/Great Basin floristic provinces to the west and south, and the Colorado Plateau province to the northeast. ”

“ Its habitat lies in the volcanic regions of the Mojave Desert. This plant is rather peculiar in its growth, thriving on poisonous volcanic soils, where no other form of plant life can exist. The Indians of the desert regions used the plant as a physic, and it outranks Rhamnus californica in this respect. The mission friars overlooked this plant for the reason that none of them ventured that far into the desert, valuing their lives above everything else. ”

“ CURIOUS PLANTS WHICH LIVE IN THE DESERT
In the mystic mid-region grows vegetation as weird and wonderful as the region which it inhabits. The Mojave yucca (clistoyucca arborescens) is a strange freak of vegetation found nowhere else in the world. The palo-verde stands grim and sentinel-like, along the banks of the Colorado River which skirts the deserts, an evergreen but leafless tree with curious branches which cross and recross each other, forming a perfect network of green vegetation. ”

“ As soon as a turn in the road hid Beatty the silence closed around us. The crisp, clear air made our blood tingle. We walked the first few miles while the Worrier drove. The sun, the wind, and the scarred old mountains became the only important things in the world. We were committed to sunrise and sunset, rocks and brush were to be our companions, lonely springs were to keep us alive, the roots of the greasewood were to warm us, all our possessions were contained in one frail wagon. In half an hour the desert claimed us. The sun that loves the desert clothed it in colored garments. ”

“ It has, in these modern times, led rather than followed civilization. In the new West it usually is, first the printing-press, then the town.
One of the most peculiar phases of journalism is found in the desert region of California. There are, in the two great deserts of the State, four weekly papers, two in each desert. In the Mojave Desert are the Randsburg Miner, published in the gold-mining town of Randsburg, in the northern part of the desert, and the Needles' Eye, issued from the town of Needles on the eastern confines of the sandy waste. ”

“ The Navajo Indian Reservation is crossed, Arizona entered and traversed, and at the Flagstaff Station is the Lowell Observatory, and here the nearest route is taken to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. There rises to the northward the huge San Francisco Mountain, a fine extinct volcano, while off to the southwest are the great United Verde Copper Mines, among the largest in the world, and the town of Prescott, in a rich mineral region. The Colorado River is crossed into California, and then the railway traverses the wide Mojave Desert towards the Pacific coast. ”

“ We felt we could cope with most calamities, but already, coming through the Joshua palms, we had sensed the size and emptiness of Mojave. At least until we were a little better acquainted with the strange land where even the plants seemed weird, we needed the reassurance of a very definite ribbon of road ahead. We decided to go to Randsburg, then to Ballarat and try to get into Death Valley from there. The druggist doubted if we could get into the valley at all. ”

“ One of the uses of a shovel, which we found out on that day, is to cut down the banks of washes that are too high and steep for a car to cross.
Most of the mountains of the Mojave are separate masses rather than continuous ranges. Between them the mesas curve, sometimes falling into deep valleys. Instead of foothills, long gradual slopes always lead up to the rock battlements, the result of the wearing down of countless ages, the wide foundations that give the ancient mountains an appearance of great repose. They are solid and everlasting. ”