April 16:
May 4:
The desert was in superbloom. Our UFO is a scarlet beehive or hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus coccineus, exploiting a crack in a huge hematitic concretion. There were many concretions on the hillside, each with its resident beehive. The yellow carpet is probably Fendler’s bladder pod: Physaria fendleri.
Two ponderosasr in a sandy bowl, both lightning-struck. One, a gray ghost; the other, twisted like a pretzel but still living, shelters a juniper in its embrace.
Sheer mesa, Cretaceous mudlands, lightning-blasted ponderosas. But what struck me were the sherds of a busted sixties coffee mug and an open safety pin.
“A juniper post can wear out two postholes.” And a juniper-branch fence can last centuries. This one, probably built by Navajo herders, once kept stock from crossing between mesas and lowlands.
Cabezón, one of the sacred mountains.
On raindrop-pecked sand, the subtle lunar crescent of an Archaic metate broken and abandoned a few thousand years ago.
About 130 million years between tides.
A little rock shelter in the sandstone where—maybe in the early 1900s judging from the state of the juniper—a Navajo sheepherder, a woodcutter, or an outlaw had augmented a natural cave with cut branches.
An Archaic mano, or hand grinding stone, begins its next few thousand years in the sand of a hearth. Time and weather have reduced the charcoal of ancient campfires to a shadow in the soil.
Under a juniper instead of a cork tree. Picked clean by coyotes and bleached by the desert sun.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 