Tag Archives: desert

A Tree Grows In Arches

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It’s Spring and a young man’s fancy lightly turns to …. the Southwest. Well an old man’s thoughts turn to the Southwest, anyway. There’s more than one kind of love you know. It’s still cold at night and nippy during the day here in the mountains of Northern Colorado but you can tell we’ve turned a corner. Sure we’re still going to get some snow and it’ll be cold for a short while but nothing like the soul-numbing cold of deep winter.

Right now the conditions are almost perfect for visiting the Southwest. It’s warm enough during the day that you don’t need a jacket but not the skin block sneering, turn you bright scarlet heat you find mid-summer. The desert is waking up. Trees are budding out, some of the earlier wildflowers are poking their little noses out of the ground. Animals are more visible as they go about getting nests ready for having their young. The rangers are nice because they haven’t seen all that many people yet and the oppressive clouds of tourists are still a month or so away so they’re not as quick to shoot you in the leg if you happen to stray of the trail a wee bit.

And the light. The light of early Spring in the afternoon when the sun is just considering going behind the mountains is as gorgeous as any place you will find in the world. If you pay attention and don’t forget to click the shutter you can sometimes stumble upon a scene like this. After you get the picture it’s ok to just stand there and let this experience fill your soul until it is not only brimming over but saturated to the point where you will remember it forever. It is time to fire up the Bokeh Maru, load the camera gear, and point it south, no roadmaps needed. Just follow the color. When you think it can’t get any better than this you’re there. Enjoy.

Slim Picken’s

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The horse herd in Monument Valley never has it very good even when things are at their best. This is dry country. A desert actually and what grows here, grows fast, does it’s thing, then disappears. There are some plants that hang around longer but they’re slim pickings at best. The horses have to cover a lot of ground to get a little bit of food and even farther to find water.

The mares with colts have a particular difficult time as their milk supply is directly connected to how much they eat. A colts appetite doesn’t care how that all works. There just better be milk there when its hungry. And it’s hungry all the time.

These are full-blooded Navajo ponies and are the product of many years of experience living where there are tough conditions. Fending for themselves is ingrained into their nature. They’ll make out just fine. The late afternoon sun is a welcome respite from the heat of the day. This bunch is headed to the shadows below the butte where they’ll rest up and enjoy the relative coolness here in Monument valley.

Anasazi Garden

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When many people think of the desert the first image that comes to mind is the Great Sahara desert, or perhaps the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, or the Great Sand Dunes of the Southwestern United states, or even your back yard if you don’t water it. A place barren and inhospitable to life. A place where nothing grows and you dare not venture far from water lest you perish. Which is a pretty easy thing to do if you’re standing out there in the noon day sun with no hat, which we would hasten to add you shouldn’t do, even if you are English and that comes natural to you. We’ve noticed that whenever we’re trapped in the desert and near death we always have a vision of Joe Cocker in his bright red English soldiers jacket singing “With a Little Help From My Friends” marching on before us. This always saves us and we make it back to civilization in one piece, thirsty but alive, but then we’re experts and trained for this kind of thing. But that’s just us, your mileage may vary.

But if you are somewhere like Johns canyon, Utah and its early morning you’ll see something entirely different. A desert garden literally brimming with life. It may be different than what you’re used to thinking of how a garden should be, but then you’re in a different place than you would normally be. As you journey through the canyons you will see small gardens tucked away in every nook and cranny, one after the other until you realize that this is a veritable oasis in the middle of a desolate land.

We are always struck by how similar in feel these desert gardens are to Japanese gardens, which couldn’t be more opposite in nature. The Japanese garden being lush and green with carefully manicured plants, with small trickling streams feeding into water-lily filled ponds, compared to this dry desert garden with its carefully chosen plants, tucked in amongst the boulders, placed just so to take advantage of what ever moisture may be sent its way. The color palette of this garden with its earth tones and giant boulders selected for their color and texture and positioned to fill the space but not overwhelm it is the same in feel if not color, as you find in the perfect temple gardens of Kyoto.

Sometimes we think, that is the experts in our botanical department who are paid to think about these things, think, that there must have been an early visitation to this land by wandering Samurai gardeners who traveled the world spreading their knowledge of how to make a perfect garden where one couldn’t possibly be, teaching people like the Anasazi how to have beauty in their lives in an inhospitable place. A group of Ninja gardening warriors, as it were, dedicated to creating beauty in even the most unreceptive, belligerent landscapes. Or not. But it’s as good a reason as any for the gardens being there.

Our First-strike gardeners here at *The Institute’s World-wide Center for Horticultural Research and truck farm have been collecting gardens just like this one and transporting them root and twig, back to our Botanical center completely intact, where our own hybrid gardeners keep and protect them for posterity. We have gardens similar in size and scope to this one that we have found throughout the world and brought back here to the Institute for safe keeping and our own personal viewing pleasure. Sometimes we let the public view them but not very often. You actually have to have some kind of pull to get in. If you’re interested write us and include your bio and an 11,000 word essay on why we should even let you in the front door and we’ll get back to you if you qualify. Thank you in advance for your interest.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Spring Rain

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Monument valley is normally a hot, dry, dusty place. A desert. You need to carry water as you trek across it lest they find your poor coyote chewed bones spread across the dunes. But in the Spring things can change dramatically as you see here. Storms come rolling in out of the Baja and dump a huge amount of water on land that is ill-equipped to hold it.

As the rain hits it begins to run off the land filling the arroyos and washes to capacity, picking up sand and small rocks, tearing along in a ferocious torrent until it begins to move the larger boulders and other debris along with it. A short distance away there is a famous slot canyon called Antelope canyon where you can see full-sized tree trunks lodged 50′ up in the crevices of the canyon walls, placed there by water from a storm just like this one raging through it.

This day the storm was one of the milder ones. There was rain but it didn’t last that long. There was runoff but it was manageable. Fog and low-lying clouds obscured the buttes and towers giving the observer a  very different picture of Monument Valley. No stagecoaches tearing along the road in front of the Mittens and Mitchell butte today. And if there was you wouldn’t have been able to see it as the visibility was practically zero down at ground level.

This was a day of looking at the valley from a distance. There was no admittance into the valley as the roads inside are made up of sand and clay and turn into a quagmire as soon as water touches them. Driving on them without four-wheel drive was next to impossible and pretty close to impossible with it, as the muck sticks to your tires and will soon fill up your wheel wells with a solid granite-like mixture you have to dig out with a small spade.

This condition doesn’t last very long because as soon as the sun comes out it dries everything up and the road returns to its near concrete-like state. This is a strangely beautiful time to view the valley, one not seen all that often. The mammoth rock formations appear out of the fog like huge ships passing by in the strange muted light, soundlessly, leaving no wake. Every sound carries across great distances. You can hear the final streams of water falling down the stream beds, rocks striking each other until they come to a new resting place. There seems to be a dearth of bird calls, the ravens quiet until the fog begins to thin and drift away. Then they call out in single note if you can call a ravens call a note, it’s more like a raspy croak, checking on each other to see how they fared through the storm.

The weather is changing despite the denials of some of our leaders and it is uncertain what the future will bring. There is a drought going on out on the west coast and since many of these desert storms begin there the question is will we see rain in the desert in the spring. I believe I’m just going to go and see for myself. Come on along if you want.

3 O’Clock

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Time passes differently in the desert. It conforms somewhat to our notion of how time should behave. It gets light in the morning and dark at night, and high noon is roughly what shows on the face of your Rolex when both hands point straight up, but it doesn’t feel the same. And as you know if you’ve ever spent time alone somewhere like this desert at Coral Pink Sands Dunes State Park, time is as much a feeling as it is the passage of seconds and minutes.

You can come here with your time if you want. The dunes don’t care. Have your schedules on your smart phone set to tell you how long you can stay, how long before you have  to go if you want to make it to Zion before the afternoon rush for rooms begins. But be careful when you step out onto the sands here. Watch out for the fact that the hands on your watch may move but the passage of time here on the dunes doesn’t always agree. Finding a place to sit where you can watch the winds sculpt the dunes into new shapes, erasing footprints, sharpening the edges of the dune tops until they look as is they could shear the wind in half, or slice little eddies off the breezes to form new ripples down the face of the sand. That’s when you notice that the 15 minutes you thought you were spending has actually been an hour and a half. The desert is showing you how time works here. It’s not your watch that’s at fault. It’ll work just fine when you get back to people places and that time takes over again.

Forget also about making it the 45 miles from here to Zion in time. You’ve been caught by desert time. Sitting there watching the sand change color from a yellowish-tan to a rich, deep coral as the sun moves across the shifting dunes, listening to the low moan of the winds as they scrub across the dune tops, feeling as much as hearing the low humming that comes from the movement of untold billions of sand crystals rubbing together, as the wind slowly but surely pushes the dunes along, moving these massive collections of sand some fifty feet a year. Sitting there you’ve been moved with them, not very far, a short journey actually, but as a new part of the desert you’ve been added to the structure and affected by it, unaware that your presence has been noted and taken into account. You’re on desert time now.

It’s time to put your smart phone away, pull your sleeves down over that watch and tune into desert time. Make other arrangements in your mind as schedules don’t work well here in the desert. But it’ll work just fine if you let it happen and don’t fight it. It will still get light in the morning and dark again the evening, noon will come and go just like always, it’ll just feel differently is all. Once you understand how that works you’ll find its a pretty good system. If you need to know things like hours and so on, the desert will tell you. As you can see by the image above it’s three o’clock. Now that you know that, does it make a difference?