Our Window on Nature

With vision so sharp it equals that of a man with binoculars, a bighorn ram gazed down the mountain. In the open vistas favored by this species, keen eyesight far overshadows the need for acute hearing or sense of smell, so we were certain the animal eyed us long before we spotted him. Even so, he seemed more curious than alarmed.

We hiked up Truchas Peak in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains especially to see bighorn. As in any designated wilderness, if you want to visit the critters, you walk. Gradually, our eyes picked out several more bighorn, less visible against the rocks. Oh, for their surefootedness as they ambled down the almost-vertical slope. We couldn’t believe they were actually approaching us. Could it be that there were enough hikers along here to turn these wild, free creatures into panhandlers? Surely not.

(Read the rest …)

One of the Southwest’s most attractive plants, the Sacred Datura, is also one of its most deadly. Every now and then newspapers carry the grisly story of someone who, after experimenting with a species of Datura, wanders for days through desert delusions until brought down by the searing heat. While seeking heavenly visions, the user ignored the possibility that he might be creating his own physical hell. For along with the hallucinogens, this plant packs a payload capable of ending the search.

Otherwise known as thorn apple and Indian apple, the Sacred Datura is closely related to jimsonweed and is part of the nightshade clan, a worldwide plant family encompassing both reputable and notorious members. The most famous of these are tomatoes, eggplants, hot and sweet peppers, and potatoes. Of course, these plants were also considered poisonous in the past. Datura favors the less beloved branch of the nightshade family, the one implicated in murder, witchcraft, seductions, and orgies. (Read the rest …)

When we think of palm trees, we imagine tropical beaches and pineapples, and dancing girls shaking their hips to the rhythm of drums. Palms belong in Hawaii or Bali, or at least in the Florida Keys.

In California, however, native fan palms are surrounded by desert. Sound like a contradiction in terms? These California fan palm oases aren’t widespread, but rather are tiny pockets of vegetation, a carryover from a time when the entire area was blessed with a tropical climate.

Isolated though they are, you can still visit some of these palm oases on your next trip to the Southwest.

During the Miocene and Pliocene epochs, southern California, northern Baja, and western Arizona enjoyed warm and wet weather. Sunny skies still dominate those regions, but now water is limited to trickles and ponds. Beyond reach of the moisture, desert extends toward the horizon, giving life to a few mesquite trees, and patches of creosote bushes and bur sage. (Read the rest …)

When we were kids in school, it was common knowledge that California’s redwoods were both the world’s oldest and its tallest trees, and that the earliest of them sprouted at about the time Jesus Christ was born. Then some wise guy discovered bristlecone pines of twice that age growing atop the barren peaks of California’s White Mountains, and we had to revise our thinking about longevity.

Now another researcher from the Golden State has thrown us a curve. Dr. Frank C. Vasek of the University of California at Riverside claims to have found a new “oldest living organism on earth” growing in the Mojave desert — only this time, it’s a bush.

Travel through the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave deserts from Big Bend National Park to Joshua Tree National Monument, and the most common form of vegetation that you’ll find outside your window is the creosote. This bush thrives at below sea level in Death Valley. It grows where nothing else will, in the desiccated plains surrounding Yuma, where there is a miserly three inches of rainfall a year. Creosote even tolerates being buried by sand dunes, as long as it can grow fast enough to keep a few branches poking up through the sand. In short, this plant is a survivor.

It was at least 11,700 years ago that the American Southwest turned into a desert as we know it. The last Ice Age ended, the climate warmed and dried, and conditions were ready for new forms of vegetation. Creosote was the first plant to inhabit the desert terrain, and since the oldest creosote is estimated to be 11,700 years of age, we must have had deserts around for at least that long.

(That makes the oldest living creosote twice the age of the oldest bristlecone. Sound familiar?) (Read the rest …)

You can’t actually see the wind. It’s as invisible as sound waves or thermal energy. Yet wind manifests itself in tangible, sometimes startling ways.

The other day as we walked out on the desert we heard the sound of water swirling down a manhole. Well, that’s what it sounded like. We noticed pebbles tumbling almost at our feet, and bushes trembling and grasses bending — and yet we felt no movement. It was a desert whirlwind, acting upon things we could see.

Clouds speeding across the sky give more evidence of wind, and when we see two levels of clouds traveling in opposing directions we realize that winds aloft can blow from different points of the compass. Other times we watch clouds torn into fragments and strewn across the sky, all done by the wind. (Read the rest …)