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Every winter I try to make a trip to the deserts in Southern California. Since my winters
in Northern California are marked by rain and the dark, moody and brooding seasonal despair
of redwood-lined canyons, the temporary week-long migration south is fueled by a desire for
dryness, light, wide-open vistas, and the aesthetic delight of the desert experience.
Deserts have a bad rap in America. And it so happens that Death Valley has one of the worst
reputations, though it is one of my favorite places in this country and I have been to a
majority of our national parks and monuments.
The name itself evokes white-bleached skeletons lining the old borax mule-team trails, the
remains of foolhardy miners, pioneers, and wayward fortune-seekers. But the deaths that
putatively haunted this area were more the result of journalistic embellishment than rooted
in reality. The name stuck, the legend grew.
While Death Valley, which sits astride the lowest point in the United States, gets beastly
hot in the summer, with temperatures merrily dancing off the charts, the region is a
wonderland of vistas, canyons, mountains, dunes, old mines, and rock formations. The place
abounds in wildlife, from the desert flowers that colorfully decorate the region in early
spring, to the pupfish that try to survive in the brackish tide pools of Badwater, to the
coyotes, jackrabbits, and bobcats hiding out near Zabriskie Point.
Visitors to Death Valley also have access to civilized amenities such as a golf course at
Furnace Creek and a stately and elegant hotel, the Furnace Creek Inn, which offers
four-star dining.
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Desert-Bound |
For information on Joshua Tree, go to www.areaparks.com or write: Joshua Tree National Park,
74485 National Park Drive, Twentynine Palms, CA 92277.
For Death Valley, go to www.nps.gov/deva. For information about Furnace Creek Inn & Ranch
Resort: Highway 190, P.O. Box 1, Death Valley, California 92328. For on-site
reservations call (760) 786-2345. For central reservations call (800) 236-7916. |
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The ideal time to visit here is between November and April. Which I have done on several
occasions, and here is where irony enters: Two of those times I visited Death Valley it
rained. Go figure.
The tourist crowds are thin, which is always fine by my misanthropic, Edward Abbey
standards, and though it is only a two- to three-hour drive from Las Vegas, vacationers
prefer slot machines to a slot canyon, a roulette wheel to a dry river bed.
In addition to Death Valley, I have hiked, climbed, and mountain biked in Joshua Tree and
Anza-Borrego parks, each with their own geological and historical lineage. Unlike the
crowded ski slopes in Tahoe, these California destinations offer plenty of room to stretch
the mind, eye, and heart. When I find myself desert-bound, I seem to be pre-occupied with
the wide chasm between human time and geologic time, between our finite, corporeal
presence on the planet and the Earth’s casual indifference to human chronological
markers such as days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia.
I will sit on a sun-warmed rock in some dry, sandy canyon with patches of beavertail cacti
nestled in the crags and, looking up at the wind-eroded and water-carved canyon walls, I am
mentally transported to a spiritual place beyond the confines of time and space. It is as
if I am suspended in an out-of-body experience. I focus on the timeworn question: Why are
we here? I am that speck of sand, just another meaningless mote in the maw of the universe.
Then I look down at my feet and I see a stinkbug making its laborious journey across a few
feet of ground, and I am awe of its single-minded purposefulness. It has a job to do and it
won’t relent until it has completed its task. Self-determination, will power and
destiny are not just human traits, but shared by almost all living creatures.
The desert is where I find my secular religion, where I come to terms with my place in the
universe. The desert is a sacred place, replete with the quiet, hushed reverence found in
the cathedral, church, mosque, or temple. Should it come as any surprise that Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam all were born in the wilderness folds of the desert? The desert
can spiritually cleanse you with its manifold surprises and stark, unforgiving beauty.
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