(Catas)trophic cascades dominate most global ecosystems these days. With an apex predator: the highly adaptable human. Here in the desert, there seems to be a local balance, but it is impossible to make any determination from cursory observation. With the air often filled with supersonic overflights that leave a roaring flux of sound that spreads over the entire space: top gun dog fights.
Sitting, eating dinner and suddenly, about 50 meters away, a red-tail explodes from the air and almost nails a dove. Not clear how the dove escaped, or why the hawk didn’t pursue the prey. Could be that once the surprise element is gone for the hawk, the dove is a more agile bush flyer, where the hawk is best at clear-air dive-bombing ambushes.
Today I cycle a few miles further in, towards the Arrastra Mountains Wilderness area, intersecting a small corner of it. It encompasses a huge area of hard-core desert landscape. I come across an automatic 600-watt solar panel unit connected to a well in the dry wash, there is a 300-meter-long steel pipe connected to two water tanks and a water trough. There is also a broken Aeromotor windmill pump set over a concrete holding tank that is still filled with water.
Discover a large area where there are numerous fragments of botryoidal quartz, some with crystal vugs, but mostly with characteristic milky-white-to-clear amorphous silica in those organic forms. From a high-point near the water tanks, I can see on down the valley towards Alamo Lake, about 20 miles away. Distance is relative. Crossing this area on foot would be, literally, hell during six months of the year, and chilling the other six. Either way, unless you carried water, or made caches, or knew for sure where the tanks and springs were, and whether they were full, you would die.
Back to base and then, after a small lunch, to an overland steep climb to a resistant outcrop with what appears to be a cave. Always expecting to see/hear a rattler, but aside from an over-sized lizard, and the scattering of birds, nothing is confronted. Deer tracks in the dry mud of an arroyo, very small. Why be here when they can be in the ponderosa only a few tens of miles away. Although, for the moment, the desert floor is green. Period. Bright green vegetation everywhere. Along with the psychedelic splashes of blooming things. I can’t recall being in the desert at this time of year. Usually I’ve been elsewhere, teaching. Middle of the end of the semester. Or so. (more images)
VERY small guilty feelings about not being in a ‘regular’ job in the moment.
… nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see.