INTRODUCTION
Within these pages are many mysteries of the desert. Some are cruel and terrible, others sublime, and a persistent few remain inexplicable by our current metrics of understanding.
Desert is wilderness stripped bare, and when left alone is creation in perfection. The landscape is vast and visible, the geology raw and exposed, the plants and animals in ideal proportion. Fresh water is generally in limited supply, but that has never stopped life from thriving in lands of little rain.
Our own species has always been fond of these harsh, arid places. The first civilizations rose up from desert sands: Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley. The wilderness of antiquity was wild desert. And that’s where our philosophers and prophets went to meditate on mountaintops, to abandon society for a while and sleep under the stars or within limestone caves.
There were many river-valley civilizations in the North American desert, too, before our current mess of outlet malls and cell towers and interstates: the Hohokam in the Salt River Valley, beneath modern Phoenix; the ancient Pueblo culture of the Four Corners. The Taos Pueblo is a rare unbroken link to those varied pasts. Despite the plastic letters on the gas stations and the same banal television programming beamed or streamed into every home, Taos is more or less as it was when Hernando de Alvarado arrived some five centuries ago, and as it had been centuries earlier, when the Roman church was still struggling to Christianize the diverse peoples of Europe.
Through a combination of accident and intent, much of the American desert remains mostly intact, mostly wild. The accident was in the claiming of so much American territory by the U.S. federal government in the mid-1800s, actions taken to prevent competing claims and occupation by Spain, Mexico, France, England, Russia, all our old imperial rivals. Places with surface water attracted settlers, despite the heat and sandstorms and scorpions, while the vast walls of mountains and expanses of dry lakes and valleys were spared much permanent development. This was followed by dramatic efforts to preserve and protect these desert ecosystems as national parks and monuments and federally designated wilderness, actions inspired by the nature mystics of American transcendentalism. In the twenty-first century, conservationists aim to save what they can of entire ecosystems, and not just photogenic islands of flora and fauna surrounded by industrial mining and eroded cattle range. Even without the dense forests we associate with the crucial storage of carbon on this planet, wild desert forms an immense “carbon sink” over a third of our planet’s landmass, from the ancient aquifers beneath the parched surface to the vast networks of microbiotic crust that bind the desert together.
This is a simplified explanation to a complex question—Why is so much of the American desert held in public trust?—and is not intended to negate the intentional horrors visited upon indigenous cultures, the wide-scale extermination of desert species, or the determined efforts today by humanity-hating fanatics to reverse our limited protections of this earthly paradise.
When you are in the great desert wilderness, you must carry some understanding of why it’s still that way, why it’s so contrary to the numbing sprawl of our current civilization. It’s the way it is because people spent lifetimes fighting to keep it that way, suffering more defeats than victories, because when you love a place that is what you do.
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If this landscape affects your soul in this manner, you may have no choice but to join the noble and holy effort. We could use the help, whether you become a park ranger or join the Green New Deal conservation corps or volunteer a couple of times per year to clean up a nature preserve or lead schoolkids on backcountry hiking trips.
You might even need to become an outlaw, a hero. We are not so far away from the old times of adventure, of great deeds. Do not fall into the trap of anxiety and emptiness. There is purpose waiting out here, for anyone who comes in honest pursuit of it.
A revelation in the desert is available, in our time. It may fit a practice or theology you bring along with your water and walking stick and beer cans and yoga mat, or it may shatter your psyche entirely. Both are worth the effort, worth the trouble, worth going where few others travel, worth leaving behind the dull comforts of tourist resorts and constant connection. Some people see the face of God (whoever she is) blasting light beams into their brains on the desert highway. Some people fall off a boulder and spend days wondering if they’ll live or die (it’s always one or the other). I have witnessed pure wild joy on a fellow human’s face simply because there was no telephone signal available, no electronic-map display to show the nearest cluster of coffee and hamburger chains. Freedom, finally.
Out here, beyond the robotic grip of a civilization in disarray and despair, I promise you will feel human again, if only for a little while. Should this experience of old wonder appeal to you, then you will be back as often as possible, and you may have no choice but to call the desert home. And if it’s home, you have no choice but to defend it.
There’s nothing more fun than a purpose in life.
TRY NOT TO DIE
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, wasn’t the plan at all. The plan was to get out of town for a few days and explore the desert. Fill up the Instagram feed with abandoned gas stations and cracked asphalt two-lanes snaking through forests of Joshua trees. Beers at a roadhouse, impulse buys at a boutique on Highway 62, a night under the stars from the safety of an Airbnb hot tub or campfire ring.
And now it’s a late summer day, well over a hundred degrees, not a stylish swimming pool or outdoor cocktail bar in sight. You’ve been sitting in the car, the doors flung open, the burning air wrapped around you, suffocating and dense and so very dry. An empty cardboard coffee cup in the drink holder. An empty plastic water bottle crumpled under the seat. It is midday. Which means, in seven or eight hours the ball of orange fire in the sky will finally sink behind the mountains and the temperature will sink down to ninety-five degrees or so, if you’re lucky.
Something gave out, the gas in the tank or the city tires or the transmission or maybe the rear axle, snapped in two by a boulder partially buried in the sand on this godforsaken dirt road you never meant to be on, never consciously chose to take at all. The voice of the navigation robot was as sure as ever: “Turn right at the gas station,” even though there was little left of that particular gas station, and the road itself was forlorn and untroubled by recent tire tracks. There was something you were headed for, an art exhibit on the open desert, a historic mining site, a location from a television show you remembered, a sweeping view of the national monument. It doesn’t matter now. Unless you write it down, nobody will ever know why you wound up dead on a rough sandy track that could charitably be called a jeep trail.
Even if they find your remains, which might not happen for years, your personal story will not be told. Maybe there will be a local news article somewhere. “Human Remains Found Hours from Nearest Settlement,” that kind of thing. If anybody remembers you, maybe they’ll clip it out of the newspaper, bookmark the website page. You had so much life left to live, so many things you never got around to doing. And now all you’re going to do is become a sunbaked skeleton picked over by vultures and ants, one bony hand stretched out ahead. Maybe at the end, you thought you were almost home.
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The Mojave Desert covers much of Southern California and a bit of the neighboring states: southern Nevada, the Arizona strip, the bottom corner of Utah. Before this dried-out expanse of burnt-chocolate mountains and blinding playas and lonely roads became beautiful in the eyes of the beautiful people, it was something to endure on the way to Las Vegas or the Colorado River, or something to survive on the way to whatever was luring you to the West Coast.
There were always desert rats, always the antisocial sort who looked at this punishing landscape and felt at home. The romantics, the people who required a weird backdrop to fit their personal movie. But there were never enough of them to fill many hotel rooms or vacation rentals. And so the desert was mostly ignored, unless the steady jobs of the Los Angeles Basin were in commuting distance. Unless a corporation gets ahold of some government desert land to use for giant solar towers or windmills or a gold mine or some insane scheme to pump the groundwater from the Mojave to Orange County, the desert interior consists of unfenced national parks and national monuments, with no-unauthorized-entry military bases and massive blocks of nearly untouched wilderness filling the map between the Sierra Nevada, Las Vegas, and the urban sprawl of Southern California.
Luckily for those who love this wild desert in its natural state, over the past hundred years a few visionaries were able to set aside much of this landscape as an immense desert preserve that rivals anything on Earth in size; only the vast Namibian desert preserve on the southwestern edge of the African continent is larger than the ten million protected acres of the Great Mojave Wilderness, from the tip of Death Valley National Park to San Gorgonio, within the new Sand to Snow National Monument.
Most Mojave visitors stay close to Joshua Tree National Park, and especially to its well-traveled sightseeing spots and tourist traps. If you get a flat tire or a dead battery on the Park Boulevard loop between Twentynine Palms and the unincorporated village of Joshua Tree, a friendly ranger will come along before long. And if your Airbnb turns out to be a lightly redecorated meth shack without a working toilet, you can always drive to a motel.
Get lost on a remote trail or break down off the highway and you’re going to have a very different experience. Maybe you’ll survive, and maybe you’ll become part of our rich history of lost tourists. We add a few names to this roster every summer. If the names are known, anyway.
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Maybe you’re not ready to be on this list of people the Mojave chewed up and spit out. Maybe you have plans, plans that require coming home without the aid of a black vinyl body bag. The good news is that the Gospel of Desert Survival is short, simple, and easy to remember.
I. Water, and lots of it. Maybe you can dig up some sandy alkaline water from the damp edge of a wash, if you’re lucky enough to be there just after a good soaking. Which is unlikely. Maybe you can build a “solar still” if you happen to drive around with science-project supplies. Or maybe you can bash open a barrel cactus, but it’s best to leave that to the bighorn sheep, who don’t get sick from the bitter mush within. Why not just carry plenty of water and not worry about your Eagle Scout technique? When you’re at the grocery store buying whiskey and marshmallows for the campfire, fill up the extra space in the shopping cart with cheap plastic jugs of water. Ten dollars’ worth of gallon-jug water in the trunk can significantly raise the odds of surviving your Mojave ordeal. (Please recycle the plastic jugs once you’re rescued.)
II. Don’t waste that phone charge! Of course you’ve got a car charger for your phone. Before a day hike or backcountry adventure, make sure that thing is charged up and don’t run it down looking at Instagram or whatever. You’re already in the scenic desert. While there are plenty of remote spots without any cell coverage, in much of the Mojave you can get a cell signal, even if you’ve got to walk up a hill first. Don’t try this at high noon!
III. Don’t walk in the heat of the day. If it’s already hot when you start your day hike, it’s going to be unbearable on the way back—especially at Amboy Crater, in Mojave Trails National Monument, where four day-hikers have perished since 2017. In the summer heat, dawn and dusk are the only times you want to be headed out for an easy walk. And if you’re stuck with your car somewhere, it’s best to stay put rather than walk into that inferno.
IV. A broken-down car is your friend. Your vehicle can be seen from a distance. It’s bigger than you are, the glass and mirrors reflect light, and it’s probably already on some kind of road or trail. Stay on the shady side when the sun’s beating down.
V. Call for help before it’s too late. When an Orange County couple got lost on a midday walk around Amboy Crater in August 2017, Kathie Barber managed to call 911. But Barber and her partner, Gen Miake, were already dead when the sheriff’s helicopter found them.
VI. Watch where you step and where you reach. The best way to avoid a rattlesnake bite is to avoid stepping on a rattlesnake. To avoid black widow bites and scorpion stings, don’t put your hands where you can’t see. And leave those old army surplus snakebite kits at home; doctors say slicing up your flesh with a razor blade does far more harm than good. Just get to any desert hospital where antivenom is available.
VII. Flash floods kill. The most reliable way to die in the desert is to drive your car into floodwaters blocking a roadway. This is as deadly in downtown Palm Springs as in the Mojave Wilderness. And no matter how comfortable that shady wash looks on a hot summer day in monsoon season, remember that churning torrents of mud, boulders, dead cows, and floodwaters can come rolling down from dozens of miles away.
VIII. Check the condition of your car, your rental RV, whatever you’re relying on to get you back to civilization. Make sure your tires are evenly inflated and have enough tread for a road trip. Is your spare tire functional? Enough coolant in the reservoir? How about engine oil? And don’t forget the full tank of gas! Service stations are few and far between.
IX. Tell someone who cares. Heading off to the desert wilds? Text the people who care whether you live or die. And tell the desk staff at your hotel, or your vacation-rental host, or the rangers at your campground. Sign the trail registers. Leave a note on the dashboard if you’re heading away from your vehicle. The more clues for rescuers, the more likely they’ll find you while you’re still breathing.
X. Don’t go rock climbing alone. Crawling up boulders has become a popular pastime, despite the well-established effects of gravity and routine deaths and critical injuries from falls. In May 2018, the New Zealander Claire Nelson fell fifteen feet from a boulder in Joshua Tree National Park and spent four terrifying days on the ground with a shattered hip before rescuers went looking for her. If you must try rock climbing, do so with a buddy.
XI. But choose your buddy carefully. In the sweltering summer of 2017, twenty-year-old Rachel Nguyen went to Joshua Tree to celebrate her birthday with her ex-boyfriend Joseph Orbeso, twenty-one. Just two miles from the Maze Loop parking lot, where their vehicle was found, Orbeso shot his ex through the skull with his .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, which he carried loaded on a short day hike in a national park. Then he turned the gun on himself.
XII. And finally, if all else fails and your time is at hand, know that most people relax at the end. Find a place to sit down, in the shade, if there’s any shade. None of us live forever. And not enough of us get the time to sit alone in the quiet wilderness and contemplate our own existence and our place in the world.
THE KNOWN UNKNOWN: TALES OF YUCCA MAN
The story you’ll hear most often goes like this: There’s a young marine on guard duty in some far-off corner of the massive Twentynine Palms desert training base. He hears an awful sound in the dark, something like a growl. Then, the breathing, coming from one side of his lonesome little guard booth and now from the other.
It’s circling him.
He steps out into the dark, his sidearm drawn. There it stands: eight feet tall, an unbearable stench, the eyes glowing like red coals.
Sometimes, the marine is knocked unconscious by the shaggy-haired beast and found hours later by the next shift. One version occurs at the old rifle range, where the watchman—also armed, with a rifle—wakes from the assault to find his weapon bent in half.
Since the 1970s, when the Mojave Desert base expanded from a primitive World War II encampment, there have been regular reports of new recruits terrorized by both the Yucca Man and pranksters inspired by the tales. But most sightings of the spectral creature come from campers and hikers at Joshua Tree National Park. Tents have been opened in the night by stinking monstrosities, and there is an occasional large footprint or blurry photograph submitted as evidence. A snapshot from the Hidden Valley campground has made the rounds for a decade now; the figure bounding over the boulders looks much like the iconic Bigfoot from the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967.
Since the 1960s, when tales of Yucca Man and his desert cohorts were commonly reported by Southern California newspapers and television stations, amateur “cryptozoologists” and Bigfoot researchers have analyzed the blurry pictures and measured the prints in the sand, all in the effort to document a flesh-and-blood creature they believe exists alongside everyday mammals such as bears, coyotes, and humans.
But the Indians who lived in California long before European colonization considered these creatures to be supernatural entities, with names that often translated to “hairy devils.” The people took care to avoid the gloomy spots where the devils were often seen.
The Tongva living around the Santa Ana River called the devils’ hideout east of the river’s source in the San Bernardino Mountains the “Camp of the Takwis,” pronounced like “Tahquitz,” the desert monster known to the Cahuilla of Agua Caliente.
According to John Reed Swanton’s The Indian Tribes of North America, “Takwis” also survives as a site name at the head of the Santa Margarita River, at Temecula Creek. Throughout Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, you’ll see it spelled “Tahquitz”—the angry specter’s unhappy home in the region is the cursed Tahquitz Canyon, just off Highway 111 in Palm Springs.
Sometimes the Takwis or Tahquitz played a role in creation stories, as in Cahuilla culture. Other times the creature was an omen, or simply something weird in the wilderness that should be avoided. To the Cahuilla, the Tahquitz could be the “original shaman” and a murderous monstrosity that collected victims from Tahquitz Rock (also known as Lily Rock). “Tahquitz has also been said to manifest as a large green fireball moving through the night sky,” according to the Weird California travel guide.
Copyright © 2020 by Ken Layne