A Dry Topic

When I first made my way into the North American west back in the summer of 2008, what impressed me most about the journey was not the impressive vistas or dramatic landscapes.  I was captivated by the desert.  While I had been looking forward to getting through miles of cornfields and surrounding myself in the grandeur of the Rockies, I knew that more flat and dry landscapes were in store for me after all too brief of a taste of the mountains.  However, that trip forever changed many of my perspectives on landscapes and the so-called backwater areas of the continent.

While I did find that the portion of the journey passed far too quickly through the high-altitude spruce-fir forests of the mountains, the High Plains and the deserts of the Colorado Plateau, the two arid frames which bind the mountains, had a charm all their own.  While people such as myself are derided as hopelessly naive of the truth of the matter (you know, us types who love looking at the desert from an air-conditioned home or car), I would have to comment that my fascination of the western dry lands stems not from an appreciation of the exposed geology or blue skies.  Rather, I was taken in by how much life manages to find a way to not only exist, but positively thrive in such a hostile environment.

I-70, Mojave National Preserve.  

To many, a place such as the Mojave is a collection of sand, rocks, strange plants, and insanely high temperatures.  To me it is a wonderful world of those things blended together in something of a divine masterpiece.  To this day, much of the west remains open and free, not yet covered in strip malls or even farms.  While I do not necessarily decry most of what civilization has managed to achieve and build, there is nothing like seeing our world as it has been shaped through years of work without our "improvements".  The desert is still a great frontier where we can encounter a little bit of nature that presents us with enough challenges to not have paved it over.  Tomorrow we will return east and take a look at something where this is still the case among the industrialized and settled eastern part of North America.