“Foster her for two weeks,” she said. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “She doesn’t even bark,” she said. My friend Taura had been after me a couple weeks ea…

It’s been a preoccupied few weeks, as evidenced by the fact that this is the first Letter From the Desert since November 10. All is well with our house…

Fly over the place and it’s clear the land was created by an endless series of flash floods. One cataclysm after another laid down this broad alluvial …

This weekend I left the desert. I spent time watching things go up in flames. Some of the flames were literal. My homeland is on fire. Tens of thousand…

I am walking through the Hexie Mountains, a small range composed mainly of metamorphic rock in Joshua Tree National Park. The Hexies are perhaps a coup…

One of the most nuanced honors one can receive in this business of writing about the desert is to be compared to the late Edward Abbey, author of Deser…

Yesterday I sat, exhausted after a fast hike, at a little spot in the desert I will just call 34.111142, -116.255970, because that is where it was. For…

It is the end, perhaps, of my tenth summer in the desert. Daytime temperatures have dipped as far as the high seventies, and the nights are even colder…

I remember when I used to watch the mountains to the west. I would count the minutes as their shadow crept eastward along the valley floor. Nighthawks …

Yesterday, Saturday September 7, was California Biodiversity Day. That either means a lot to you or hardly anything at all. Biodiversity, or its long-f…

The dog and I walked out last night, well past dark. We pointed ourselves east. The stars overhead shone brilliantly, but on the horizon in front of us…

This past winter’s wealth of rain and snow in the Mojave were transmuted, as generally happens, into abundant flowering annual plants in the Mojave. An…