12-19-13 - Joshua Tree

Last night, I woke up to a strange sound, wild and yet familiar. It was a high chattering punctuated by excited yelps. I sat bolt upright in bed with excitement. Coyotes! I hadn't heard them since I was a little girl. My parents' house is on the edge of a massive tree farm where a pack used to live. They'd sing all night and drive the dogs crazy. I always loved the sound. These little fellows were within 10 feet of the van from the sound of it. We heard them a couple times throughout the night, making their rounds and investigating the strangers that had appeared in the middle of their territory. I walked outside to see if I could catch any glimpse of them but they had already moved on. The full moon shone down as bright as a streetlamp, casting clear shadows on the ground and giving the world an eerie, surreal feeling.

By the time we woke up the sun was fully risen and had begun chasing off the chill of night. My GPS read 3,200 feet, quite a gain from our mainly sea level adventures. We sliced up another of the grapefruit from the Salton Sea campsite. I stared out at the scrub brush, savoring the sun and sweet juice of the fruit. A movement caught my eye, a patch of brown moving against the sea of sand, yucca, and dead grass. I just managed to catch a glimpse of a bushy tail and four little legs. I pressed my nose up to the glass, thrilled. Not 10 yards out, a beautiful little coyote came in to view. He was a lovely soft scrub brown, mottled with gray and black, with delicate little paws that he floated on light as air. He stopped to sniff at a bush that Jax had staked out as his own, then suddenly threw both ears upright and stared directly at us. We met each others' gazes for a few fearless seconds, then he unhurriedly went on his way, clearly unconcerned by our bumbling presence in his endless, inhospitable home.

Charlie out in the big nowhere.

Our campsite is in Joshua Tree National Park, back on a Jeep trail. There's not a soul here but us and the coyotes. This is my first experience with a real desert, and it's truly lovely. We are parked on a flat dish filled with low-growing brush, dead grass, and yucca. In all directions we are ringed by dry, tan mountains made of crumbled rock and held together by more brush. The sky is flawless blue. Although it got slightly cold last night, temperatures here rise quickly and by 9 o'clock it's a comfortable 70 degrees.

I've been fighting off a cold, but it's nothing like in Washington. There, soggy days drag in to wet weeks, a constant damp drizzle that gets into your bones and slows the healing process to a miserable crawl. Here it's bone dry, warm, and I have unlimited sunshine and fresh grapefruit. Normally colds annihilate me, but here I'm already almost completely better three days later.

We should make Arizona today, we've had a tip from a couple people that Sedona is a great place to check out.