Only a clear desert sunset sky can be so seamless. A complex landscape of buttes and mesas with the Chisos Mountains beyond has become a sharp black silhouette but rising from that is a prefect gradient, the glowing horizon of pastel yellow bleeding incrementally upward into oranges and reds eventually becoming a deep electric blue. The colors deepen imperceptibly defying measurement and obscuring time; my eyes struggle to adjust with the growing twilight. Puncturing the tapestry are the first celestial lights, Venus tonight, with Mars not far behind and over her shoulder. The varieties of daytime birds that populate the scrub and evade view have ceased their chattering end of day crescendo leaving silence in the still air. It is so silent that I can hear the leathery wings of a single bat that is breaking the perfection of the skyline, erratically hunting tiny insect prey. Soon high chirps from his companions tell me that he’s not alone. Suddenly a whirl of barely audible wing beats rises from the creosote in front of me tracing a few odd loops before abruptly becoming an oblong rock in the gravel before me. A Poorwill has mottled feathers that make it hard to distinguish in the dim light it prefers to hunt in, taking quick fights after moths then alighting back to the ground. Straining my eyes to make out this rarely seen bird I manage to notice that a Kangaroo Rat has also chosen to venture out now that the darkness has thickened. Light brown with a white belly and large black eyes, it has strong, oversized back legs that carry it around unpredictably and a long tufted tail whips along behind. If the Poorwill hadn’t drawn my eyes the other little critter would have been just another soft mysterious noise rising from the dusk.

It’s a really great word, crepuscular. From the Latin word for twilight, it refers to those creatures that are active primarily at dawn and dusk. The word has an exotic, enigmatic sound that matches these transition times between light and dark, the shadowy zone between worlds. In the desert this can be an especially useful time to be active. The heat of the day can be unforgiving for most animals and a majority of them take advantage of the cooler nighttime temperatures, especially predators. A little fella like a Kangaroo Rat avoids the daytime raptors who have gone to bed well as the nocturnal snakes who may not yet have awakened by slipping into the in between time. The subtle changes in lighting provide venue for camouflage.

Wildlife doesn’t always conform to our labels though. I’ve seen owls awake at midday and like us, many diurnal creatures stay up late to finish their business. We humans clearly defy this categorization. Perhaps the coyote got his trickster reputation because of his refusal to conform to such labels. Generally considered a nocturnal animal they can be spotted at any hour, sometimes boldly making their presence known like the beautifully healthy one Rachael and I caught traipsing midday through the Presidio in San Francisco. These savvy animals also traverse the twilight period and we’ve heard their evening cackles on more evenings than not during our travels so far. Often deep into the night their yips and howls punctuate the darkness and on until the first hint of light in the east. I will never tire of this sound. At close range the disembodied laughing of coyote conversation on three sides of me does raise the hair on the back of my neck but it also ignites a primitive joy.

Rachael and I have been traveling through a world that has long since past and was much different from the one we all live in now. I don’t mean the rural cowboy world and down-home hospitality of West Texas. That world is alive and well and we were lucky enough to share Jell-O shots and a few beers at a tiny, small town pizza joint with some of these folks on Super Bowl Sunday. I’m thinking of a world that is much older and even more exotic.

From the Prehistoric Trackways in Las Cruces, to lakes formed in limestone sinkholes near Roswell and past the Guadalupe Mountains into the bootheel of Texas the landscape has been dominated by a biosphere that almost entirely died out a quarter billion years ago. Humans have already visited another planet. When paleontologists scratched into these layers of fossils they became the first visitors to a world full of strange creatures and plants, most of which have no relation to the one ones we share the planet with today. Scientists are still trying to pin down why, but at the end of this period as much as 90% of all species on Earth had been extinguished.

The Earth really has been any number of different planets over time and towards the end of the Permian period more than 250 million years ago, almost all land was bunched into the supercontinent Pangea. The ground I’m on now was down south of the equator and California wouldn’t even rise into existence for millions of years. This ground I’m on now actually spent much of its time submerged as a shallow sea, parts of which formed a reef composed of fanciful marine life. Unlike the coral reefs we are familiar with on Earth now, these reefs were built up by sponges and algae producing the building material for limestone and a rich organic layer that later became hydrocarbon. As the Earth shifted and the sea dried all this was deeply buried.

The puzzle pieces that form the Earth’s crust shifted around and parts of those reefs were pushed upward shedding the layers that had been covering them for ages and forming ridges and mountain ranges. In the meantime as surface water percolated into the rising limestone it mixed with the hydrocarbons creating sulfuric acid that carved elaborate caves and sinkholes. A new underground world was created. Later, a weak carbonic acid dripped into these caves creating, over hundreds of thousands of years, an infinite variety of mystifying shapes and formations in places like Carlsbad Caverns. Surface creatures found their way into these pitch-black regions evolving into sightless and colorless beasties. Sharing this space and extending much deeper under the earth are whole classes of extremophiles, microbes that live in places and in ways that we had thought impossible just a few decades ago, deriving energy without the sun using chemical processes. A whole fantastical ecosystem of bizarre creatures and shapes that could never be seen, unless an entrance was formed and someone was lucky enough to find it. It has recently been suggested that half of the Earth’s total biomass may exist deep underground and is nearly unknown to science.

We made the effort of hiking to “The Top of Texas” at Guadalupe Peak, climbing the reef with fossil evidence at our feet as we traveled millions of years per mile of steep trail. Surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert you have to use your imagination that this was once an equatorial sea. Our imaginations were overwhelmed the next day as we wandered the bowels of these mountains, fortunate enough to have the winding paths of Carlsbad Caverns nearly to ourselves. It was as if time didn’t exist and we literally lost a couple hours mesmerized by the elegant forms created drop by drop, one spec of calcified deposit at a time.

Exiting the caves into the fading daylight, looking for a place to sleep on the wide flat expanse of public land that spreads out to the East of the Guadalpues, yet another world revealed itself. This one was an industrialized landscape out of a dark science fiction imagination. Across the horizon were the flares of oil wells, pumpjacks working at those ancient hydrocarbons embedded in stone, the fracking boom in full effect. Having camped in this area in the mid 90’s I was expecting the clear unobstructed night skies that West Texas is famous for. Instead the air had a grim haze and the cumulative lights of hundreds of wells overwhelmed the Milky Way. Stopping in at the prestigious MacDonald Observatory a couple days later we learned that this new development is a severe issue for the astronomical research they do. I was struck at the far reaching the effects of our thirst for oil. We dig into the distant past for this resource pushing off the bulk of the consequences onto those in the future, forcing a top secret mélange of toxic ingredients into an ecosystem deep underground before we’ve have had any chance to learn anything about it while obscuring the vision of those who would teach us about the most distant mysterious worlds we have yet to see in the vastness of the universe.

Who knows what creatures we may never find because we didn’t care to look in the first place.

Commonly when folks talk about the desert the words formidable, harsh, dry and dull come into the conversation. And sure, it can those things but, the desert is also breathtakingly beautiful and I have the utmost respect for those that call the desert home. On a clear day in the desert the horizon is the only thing stopping your eyes from seeing further. Once one gets to know the desert it’s anything but dull. It’s a land of creative evolution. A desert is defined as a place that receives less than ten inches of water (on average) per year. So the birds, animals and plants had to adapt to get and store water as best as possible as soon as it comes and then make it last as long as possible. Birds, like the roadrunner, often only get water from what they eat. This is the same for the kangaroo rat who also doesn’t sweat in order to keep as much water as possible. Birds and animals are usually active at night when temperatures are cooler. This is also true many of the plants that call the desert home. In order for photosynthesis to take place plants need sun light, carbon dioxide and water. However, the sun is also very drying. Some plants wait until night to absorb carbon dioxide (CAM photosynthesis). They can also “idle” in that they can go for periods of time with no photosynthesis production during very dry times. Plants will have protective waxy leaves and some lean into the sun so as little as possible will be exposed during the day. Many of the plants employ roots that spread out along the desert floor so that when it rains they can soak up the water where it lands. Others have long roots deep into the ground or only grow by seasonal streams. The creosote bush has both deep roots and long shallow roots. The hard part for these plants is not necessarily waiting for the rains it’s protecting the stored water from thirsty predators. Shrubs, like creosote, tend to taste very bad and don’t get munched on unless animals are feeling pretty desperate. Other plants, a good many other plants, developed spikes, spines and claws. Walking through the desert there is no avoiding them try as we might. As your probably read poor Tim really got it good. After spending the last four weeks in the desert I have gotten my fair share of pokes, stabs and grabs. Even the trees have thorns. One fella we met back at our volunteer day at Saguaro mentioned how he could tell it was a mesquite tree that got him while walking in the dark by the way it stabbed him. Reading the Big Bend park paper a quote from an old rancher on the mesquite went like this “It’s the devil with roots. It scabs my cows, spooks my horses and gives little shade”. On a couple of our walks Tim could tell where I was simply by where the direction of my “ow f@*#!” was coming. Whether it was a cholla, a prickly or the very grabby cat’s claw shrub (also known as the wait-a-minute) poking at me. I thought I’d best this little sticky shrub by wearing jeans instead of hiking pants and all I managed to do was give it more to grab onto. Some yuccas have serrated leaves like a saw and agaves that have us both convinced that it kill ya if you landed on it. I also read that while spikes are an obvious protection against predation, some spikes are so thick they help shade the plant as well. Many barrel shaped cacti spikes squeeze together as the plant loses it’s water and so the spikes offer a thicker armor in a time of need.
This doesn’t really stop predation though, in fact the Javalina’s hard palate make prickly pear refreshing snack. Many birds can get between the spikes to both nibble away at and nest in a cactus. The cactus wren can even remove spikes as needed to be able to fly in and out of their home cholla with ease. Tim and I even saw a cow nipping at a cholla. For Native Americans living off the desert they not only ate many of the plants they used their fibers for weaving and sewing, roots for soap, saps for medicines, and flowers for teas. The Mescalero Apache take their name after a sweet, fibrous treat called mescal made from baking parry’s agave. They made a beer like drink from it and a liquor (fondly known as tequila now). When they weren’t eating or drinking from the plant they dipped their spears and arrowheads in its juices. The juices can cause extreme and immediate dermatitis. As long as there was a known water source the desert was a place of abundance for those willing to be intimate with its subtleties and appreciate its extremes.

Driving from the Mojave, to the Sonoran and now into the Chihuahuan deserts we’ve seen the sometimes slight and sometimes great differences. From low desert to high desert to up into the juniper and oak forests and back down again, even in winter, the desert is hardly dull and I’m a little sad we’ll be leaving it behind soon.