This past June, I met my brother (Jamie) and an old Army friend of his (Matt) at the Mojave National Preserve, which is situated between the California cities of Barstow and Needles and just north of Interstate 40. We camped for three nights and before we departed, since I hadn’t kept a journal during the trip, I quickly jotted down the summary below so that when it came time to write an article about our experience I would have something to jog my memory.

 “Perhaps the best thing about the formidable desert heat is that it allows one to distill life to its most basic elements. To wit: predawn, when you awake, you know that this is going to be the coolest time of day to do anything, especially anything physical, so, if you want to get something done, do it within those first few hours of light. Usually our earliest morning activities included nothing more than watching birds while drinking coffee, eating breakfast, and taking a short hike. Then, from approximately 9AM until the sun goes down you have two choices: see the scenery from the air-conditioned interior of your truck while you four-wheel drive along lonely dirt roads deep within the Preserve (hoping, all the while, that your truck doesn’t break down since things could get very dicey in such a situation), or, find some shade and do nothing more taxing than reading a book. Come evening, you are released from the bondage imposed by the merciless sun, and you prepare your dinner while watching birds and reveling in the desert landscape with its evolving hues and shadows. By night time, you are ready for action: once again the kind of action that stems from driving roads but now, at night, hoping to find snakes and lizards. Why? Well, for the sheer joy of seeing life in a superficially dead world.”

 If one considered only the physical aspects of our trip, other than expounding on the species we saw and offering a bit more detailed description of the unusual desert scenery, the above summary would suffice for this month’s article. But, if I did that, my article would be very short. More importantly, such a summary would also be an inadequate account of our trip because it would leave out a significant component of our three days and nights in the Mojave Desert: our evening conversations.

 I’ve always found conversations with my brother to be both interesting and enjoyable. He is a fellow career biologist so we generally have many things to yak about. Just the different places we’ve recently been and the various critters we’ve seen usually takes up the first half hour of any given phone chat (my brother lives in California, near the Oregon border, so we have many more phone conversations than we do face-to-face parleys). In addition to many aspects of science and nature, we also share other interests such as music, books, and movies.

 And regarding my brother’s Army bud, well, I had never met Matt until this trip but he struck me as a kindred soul, both with my brother and therefore, not surprisingly, with me. Matt teaches Physics at the University of Washington and has as his special interest, astrophysics. Now while I love star-gazing as much as the next person, the idea of combining something as mentally demanding as Physics (which I got a “D” in when I had to take it as a college sophomore) with something as remote and seemingly unfathomable as the universe, well, that just sounds like dullsville. But Matt is a gifted communicator and, for the first time since seeing Carl Sagan on the Tonight Show, I did enjoy listening to someone’s passion for the Cosmos.

 We had timed our arrival at the “Hole-in-the-Wall” campground (our first night’s camp at the Preserve) such that we were unloading our vehicles as an egg yolk sun was just beginning to melt below the tall, rocky, mountains a mere mile from camp. We spent most of the remaining time prior to darkness exploring the land around camp watching desert birds and examining critter tracks in the sand.

 Because the day’s drive to our rendezvous had been long for each of us (we came from 3 different directions), we opted not to rush off to “road-ride.” For the uninitiated, “road-riding” is the method many desertland herpetologists use for maximizing efficiency in their quest for observations of lizards and snakes (the two dominant groups of herps found in hot, dry country). Instead, we busied ourselves with setting up a sunshade canopy for daytime use, preparing an improvised kitchen on the Preserve-provided picnic table, and finding the perfect patch of ground on which to place one’s cot (not only does a cot site need to be level and offer an unimpeded view of the stars, but it must also be as far as practical from those who might snore loudly all through the night).

 By the time we had set up camp and eaten dinner, nobody really felt like getting behind the wheel again, so we chose instead to watch the sky fill first with nighthawks; then with bats; and finally with nothing but blackness, pin-pricked by countless stars and the occasional streaking meteor. Eventually we grew tired of standing and figured that about now, the herps might be adjusting to the cooling evening temperatures by finding, and lingering upon, the warmer Preserve roads.

 The three of us piled into my brother’s vehicle and followed a main road for about twenty miles; moving at a rate of 10-15mph so that we had a reasonable chance of seeing even the smaller species of lizards. Alas, we didn’t encounter any herps on our drive although we did see plenty of kangaroo rats, jack-rabbits, and poorwills as they quickly escaped the shine of the vehicle’s headlights. Dejected at the total absence of herps, we eventually turned around and headed back to camp.

 When we arrived at camp, the night air had cooled enough to justify having a small campfire. We stood around the campfire for about an hour and it felt good to not be sitting. But we were all tired from the day’s drive to the Preserve so by 11PM we called it a night. By the time I settled into my cot and was about to close my eyes on the stars above, a gentle breeze was kicking up. Before very long though, the breeze became a wind and then soon turned into a howling gale – a regular Harmattan.

 It was a long and mostly sleepless night and when I finally arose, well before sunrise, the wind had finally died down. I donned my headlamp and walked to our “kitchen” and boiled a small pot of water for coffee. When it got light enough to see, I noticed that my brother was up and in the dim light was inspecting his shade shelter and soon walked over to tell me that one pole had cracked in half during the windstorm and suggested that we’d have a hard time maintaining the canopy’s usefulness now.

 Despite our gloomy thoughts about a camp with no shade, we watched the eastern sky transform from violet on through the rest of Mr. Ib G. Yor (the reverse of the better known Mr. Roy G. Biv, or, the acronym to help recall the dominate colors of the spectrum). When the sun finally broached the horizon, it seemed friendly enough, but we all knew that within a few hours it would assume a positively lethal intensity.

 The three of us finished our coffees and took a short stroll to watch the desert birds flit from one yucca to the next. Most of the birds we saw were Black-throated Sparrows and Ash-throated Flycatchers but near and far we could hear thrashers and Cactus Wrens. I hadn’t been to the Mojave in several years and had forgotten that Cactus Wrens occurred in Joshua tree habitat. The wren’s call had always struck me as perfectly suited for the arid lands as it somehow seems to have a sound that is hot and dry; rather like someone taking a piece of sheet metal, holding it along its edges, and flexing it back and forth so that it makes a wobbling, metallic “waka jawaka” sound.

 Before it got too hot, we returned to camp and had breakfast and then, Jamie and Matt decided to drive north about 30 minutes and check out another campsite that was higher in elevation and that might have enough pinyon and juniper trees to provide us with shade all through the day. Even though there was little likelihood we would have other campers show up at Hole-in-the-Wall, I opted to stay back and keep an eye on our stuff. I had started a good book just prior to the trip and knew that it would keep me happily entertained while they were away scouting the other potential campsite.

 In the second and final part of this story, I will wrap up the remaining two days we camped at Mojave National Preserve. Although the desert heat did make us feel a little bit like we were situated on the Sun’s very own anvil, the beauty of the land was extraordinary and the plant and animal life, though sparse, was amazing.