Desert: The High Mojave

On a recent visit home to see family, I took a two-night trip with my mom to explore Joshua Tree National Park and its environs. Based out of Twentynine Palms, a sleepy Californian desert town with a nearby Marine training camp, we spent two days and two nights getting to know the park.

On the first day, we leave East Los Angeles in the morning and arrive at Twentynine Palms around noon. After a break at our hotel and a brief stop at the Oasis of Mara visitor center, we proceed into the high desert. We spend some time walking around the northern portion of the Jumbo Rocks area in the mid-afternoon.  A front of cumulonimbus clouds emerges out of the Coachella Valley and sweeps toward the desert - harbinger of a truly rare Mojave thunderstorm. We proceed west through the park, driving past Juniper Flats to the roadside overlook of Keys View, which is perched at the crest of the Little San Bernandino Mountains. There, I photograph a lone juniper on the mountaintop, and set up for a short-lived timelapse before advancing rain and distant lightning strikes force us off the mountaintop. We drive back down to the flatlands, through a brief and miraculous downpour that soaks the desert roads, and eat a dinner of pot roast and mashed potatoes at the Denny’s Restaurant in town.

On the second day, we wake early and drive to the southeastern portion of the park, where the Joshua forests, piñon pines, and granite terraces of the high Mojave give way to the creosote, ocotillo, and cacti of the Colorado Desert. Halfway to the southern entrance of the park, the road is lined for miles by cholla cactus, whose sinister barbs deploy at the slightest touch and are virtually impossible to remove. Standing amidst this desert garden, we watch the sun rise over the Pinto Mountains and the sandy wasteland below them. We then take a brief hike to see Arch Rock at the White Tank campground before returning to the hotel to rest and escape the mid-day sun.

In the late afternoon, we return to the high desert and drive to the western portion of the park, which, on account of its incredible granite formations, is called the Wonderland of Rocks. We walk the mile-long loop through a narrow valley path to Barker Dam, which has very little to do after a long and dry summer in Southern California. Afterward, we park at the Hall of Horrors for sunset. I wander off to explore the rock formations that give the area its name, and eventually boulder a short way up a rock wall to shoot sunset over the valley.

After dinner back at our hotel room, we return to the desert one last time, after sundown, to photograph the galactic core as it rises to the west. We proceed to the parking lot beside Cap Rock, which we drove past the day before, and which has a shapely Joshua tree standing just across the road from the parking lot - easily accessible in the pitch black of the desert night. Sitting in the soft dirt, I coach my mom through her first astrophotography session, and we take long exposures of the tree silhouetted by the stars - with the faint glow of Palm Springs lighting the horizon. The next day, we sleep in and have breakfast at the hotel before driving back to East Los Angeles, arriving at home shortly after noon.

Day 1: Yellowstone

On May 22nd, a day and a half into (formally) married life, Jane and I are taking off from Salt Lake City. A smoothie in hand, I watch as we lift over the  Utah salt flats and the snow-covered peaks of the Wasatch Mountains, on a northbound course over the rolling basin-and-range topography of the Mountain West. We ease into our descent in less than an hour, coming down over green grasslands streaked with glacial potholes and gravelly moraine deposits - the windblown, prairie-sweet landscape of central Wyoming. Cody Regional Airport, where we disembark, is a one-room terminal plastered in landscape photography and cautionary advice pertaining to bears. "Welcome to Grizzly Country," the entrance proclaims. Jane and I grab our backpacks and head out to the rental car lot; the air of mid-spring Wyoming is cool and crisp, a welcome change from the sun-soaked suburbs of Southern California. We find our olive-tinted Subaru Outback and make our way into town.

Cody is a wrangler's town. Main Street is lined with stores selling souvenir cowboy hats, actual cowboy hats, hunting rifles, Yellowstone paraphernalia, and the odd massage parlour. The biggest building in town is the rodeo, a massive amphitheatre with a dirt parking lot that hosts a crew of pickup trucks at any time of day or night. We drive west to the edge of town, where we make our now-traditional start-of-the-trip grocery store run at the Cody Walmart, which is laid out identically to the Walmart  in Golden Ring Plaza on the Route 40 in Baltimore (familiarity is an under-rated and pleasant thing in our travels). We make away with a stack of pepperoni bread, a box of chocolate donuts, a bag of tangerines, a rainbow of juice boxes, trail mix, an assortment of other fresh fruit, and a can of Pringles for good measure. Continuing our sight-seeing, we pop across the street and grab lunch at Arby's, where the menu includes a roast beef sandwich stacked with barbeque brisket, grilled pork belly, and onion rings. Fast food is, quite simply, on another level here in cattle country.

After lunch, we're finally underway on a 50-mile drive through the Absaroka Range to the East Entrance of Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone itself is situated on an high plateau encircled by mountains. The outline of the old volcano's caldera is still quite apparent from several high points in the park, and the emotional experience of being there occupies a strange middle ground between visiting an amusement park (droves of tourists, themed restaurant menus, gift shops, carefully curated attractions) and sheltering inside a miles-wide geologic blast zone that could devastate the North American continent at any moment. As we drive (as is key in these moments of the trip), Jane falls asleep. We wind alongside rivers and sagebrush-covered canyons in the Wapiti Valley, climbing into the mountains ahead of us through light, passing showers.

In the mid-afternoon, we drive past the frozen surface of Sylvan Lake and over the mountain pass beneath Avalanche Peak, finally laying eyes on Yellowstone Lake, a massive sheet of blue in the caldera below us.  We pause at the overlook on top of Lake Butte, a granite stack close to the eastern shore of the lake, which provides fantastic westward views across the Yellowstone watershed and to the Tetons in the south. Afterward, we continue northwest along the lakeshore, passing through the campsite and general store at Fishing Bridge along the way.  By the roadside near Indian Pond, we catch our first glimpse of the American bison, grazing contentedly at the marsh grass,  its shaggy brown mane flecked with snow.

At the Yellowstone Lake Hotel, Jane waits in the car while I grab the keys to our cabin for the next five nights, a single-room, pastel-yellow affair romantically flanked by snowbanks in the parking lot. We unload our gear and our bags of food, which far outnumber our actual luggage at this point. "Honeymooooning," I croon at Jane while snacking on a potato chip. "Honeymooooning," she croons back as she throws her sweaty socks onto the windowsill. In the early evening, we walk down to the general store beside the lake in our sandals. As the sun disappears, the snow-capped Absarokas, across the water to our east, are bathed in a rosy glow of pinks and purples. We go to sleep early, with - for the first time in a long time - absolutely nowhere to be the next day, or the next day, or the day after that.