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.

The colors of the desert are subtle but there is plenty of color if you take time to look. Except sometimes it can be black or white. That is what you’ll find on the two ends of the Tularosa Basin in southern New Mexico. On the south end are sands of pure white gypsum covering 275 square miles and creeping northward with the prevailing winds. Towards the north end is a 44 mile tongue of lava field that poured southward down valley. These two disparate features are relative newcomers to a sprawling basin out of which no water flows to the ocean.

The sand is a product of this fact, the mountains ringing the basin are rich in gypsum from ancient uplifted seabeds and waters draining from them deposit the dissolved mineral in the low southern end. As the shallow lake formed by this runoff evaporates into a playa the deposits form soft crystals easily eroded by the strong winds, the resulting grains piling up into otherworldly bright white dunes. This process has been going on a mere 25,000 years. This is plenty of time however for plants and animals to adapt to a new landscape. Yucca plants try to outgrow the rising dunes by stretching their stems. Grasses have a quick life cycle, spreading their seed before being engulfed. A species of lizard has evolved from its darker cousins to a nearly white color that blends into the sand.

About 5000 years ago vents on the higher north end began extruding the lava that reached southward eventually covering 127 square miles. Cooling into a nearly black basalt it is the newest land to be found in the region. Still there are creatures that have adapted, including a similar lizard that in the ensuing years has become very dark skinned to blend into its contrary landscape.

There were surely people on hand to witness the birth of this black landscape, possibly during the early days of the white sands as well. No clues as to what this all might have meant to them remain. Their successors some millennia later left us cryptic messages in a spot nearly halfway between these contrasting landscapes. The Three Rivers Petroglyph site has an incredible amount of rock art, but again we can only speculate about the specific message. And folks speculate wildly from nonsense graffiti to evidence of extraterrestrial contact. What is clear from the hillside full of inscribed images is a commitment to art and a strong relationship to the landscape over generations.

Some time later the Apache made a stronghold here first against the furthest outpost of Spanish empire, then for raids on Mexican pioneers before the land was commandeered by the United States. American ranchers came next denuding the grassland, altering most of the basin into a creosote scrubland.

The most dramatic new edition is an increased radiation level. The first glowing plume of the atomic age was seen here on July 16, 1945 when frantic theory became awesome fact in the first mushroom cloud rising from the Trinity site on the basin’s northwest corner.

The contrasts are compelling. The ephemeral landscape of shifting white and the hardened river of black stone, two opposing features in a gesture of connection, their trajectories striving to meet somewhere in an inhospitable basin. A basin that has seen the pastoral hands of people living softly with the land and witnessed the blinding force of absolute will frighteningly manifested.