Retrospective, Part IV (The Final Installment)

Here it is, the final installment of the Darcy Retrospective. These stray from the preserve a bit more than the last. My next series will be strictly of the preserve as we get closer to our move date, but enjoy these snaps of our girl in the meantime...

Darcy hides in a rockshelter in Quail Basin.

There were two of these cute snaps from the rehearsal dinner. Now you get the other one.

You didn't think you'd get out of this retrospective without Orville, did you?

Darcy and Liana show off Thomas-themed tattoos in North Carolina.

Darcy and Michael climb more rocks on the edge of the Granite Mountains.

Darcy rides the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland.

Darcy's first baseball game, complete with first Cracker Jacks.

Retrospective, Part III

No Darcy, but a great sunset as viewed to the east of Cima House.

Darcy in the snow at Cima.

A trip to the Quiet Canyon wouldn't be complete without a stop at the Echo Place.

My laundry line! I'm going to miss it so much! Darcy loves to play in the blowing laundry.

Oh, those weird, alien Joshua tree flowers. This year, found only at Cima House!!

The Cross In A Box On A Rock Goes To The Supreme Court

Here's Darcy climbing on the rocks across the road from the parking lot for the Teutonia Peak trail, one of the few official, maintained trails in Mojave National Preserve. The rocks and the parking lot are right on the side of Cima Road and the rocks -- and the box on top of them -- are clearly visible from the road in both directions and from the trail itself. The box covers up a cross that has been the center of a legal debate for a decade or more. The cross is claimed as a veterans' memorial by regional veterans' groups, but has been challenged as violating the separation of church and state because it is on public land, Mojave National Preserve to be exact.
A judge ordered the cross covered with the box while its fate is decided in court.

Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments about the Mojave cross. The article continues the myth that this is in a "remote" part of the preserve, which is far from the truth. It is 10 or 11 miles from the intersection with Interstate 15, on a paved road. Considering how few paved roads there are in the preserve and how much of the preserve requires miles of driving on dirt roads, this is hardly a remote part of the park. Mojave National Preserve is 1.6 million acres of land, with only three paved roads entering from the northern side. The cross is about 30 feet from one of three ways people can enter the park from a major interstate.

I have some sympathy for veterans who have visited the cross as a memorial over the decades and I could get behind a compromise solution that allowed some other kind of memorial (a flat plaque, for example) to be placed in the same spot. Without the cross. I've driven past the rocks when someone had (illegally) removed/destroyed the box. It's out of place in the middle of a national park property, especially because so much of the land around it is federally designated wilderness. It is a jarring sight and it is very visible from a distance, with or without the box.

I do hope that the Supreme Court decides that the cross be removed, both because I think it shouldn't be there and because of the larger question of religious symbols on public lands.

If you have the stomach for it, there's a video on YouTube about the cross from the "other side" of the argument. It's blatant propaganda as far as I'm concerned because it works very hard to make it seem like you have to drive across miles of salt flats and dirt roads to get to the cross (so how could anyone be offended by it?!), which couldn't be farther from the truth. It also carefully avoids mentioning Mojave National Preserve, describing the land only as "federal" public lands.

Let me just add that Michael is not going to see this post before it goes up on the blog. As an employee of the preserve, he has to be more careful with his opinion than I do with mine. My opinion does not represent Michael or any other employee of Mojave National Preserve.

Retrospective, Part II

Along with a retrospective of Darcy, the next two posts will be a tribute (mostly) to Mojave National Preserve. In a week, assuming that the movers actually come when we think they will, we'll be driving north to our new park. Enjoy the scenery as well as our ever-growing girl!

Early spring flowers, Razor Road (technically, just outside the Preserve).

Darcy's first trip to the "Quiet Canyon", officially named Banshee Canyon.

An early rock-climbing expedition off the Teutonia Peak trail.

On the trail to Eagle Rocks in the Midhills region.

Not at Mojave, but a classic camping breakfast on Darcy's first camping trip.

Darcy's first visit to Yosemite. Can't leave this out!

Darcy-as-butterfly hugging a Joshua tree near the old corral on Morningstar Mine Road.

The Creatures Of Cima

We see a lot of critters around Cima House, ranging from tiny red ants to coyotes to (finally!) deer. I take pictures of some of them. Not the ants, so much, but I thought I'd share a few pictures that were lying around. Our resident herd of cows was showing off their not-so-brightness in this first picture. They are standing around a spot that had been a small water hole. They were frequent visitors to the water, which is smart. However, this picture was taken two days after maintenance fixed the leaking pipe that had created the water hole and there was no more water. The cows were there for fifteen or twenty minutes anyway. Not so smart.

Here are some quail and a cottontail rabbit enjoying the damp (and therefore somewhat cool) earth left by the outlet from our swamp cooler. We've had up to three cottontails, a jackrabbit, and two families of quail there at a time, jockeying for position.

This spider was on our bedroom ceiling as we were getting ready for bed one night. I took it's picture while Michael retrieved the spider-removal-kit. It lives, I assume, somewhere on the outside of Cima House now. A much better place for it. For scale, the strip going along the left hand side of the picture is the frame supporting the ceiling tiles. It was big. Very, very big.

This is not really a creature or at Cima House, but it's cute. We tried to meet up with some folks a couple weeks ago so Michael could go climbing. We didn't manage to find them, as there were some wires crossed about just where we were all supposed to meet, but we drove down a lot of dirt roads trying. I spotted this sweet bird's nest lodged in a cholla alongside the road and made Michael stop so I could take a picture. The construction was pretty impressive.

Mojave Preserve Updates

Part of Michael's job is to create/edit/write for/design the park newspaper twice a year. His third issue came out earlier this spring and it is a bit of a Glore-fest. I (was) volunteered to write an article about the wildflower season that made the first page. I also contributed one of the photos. Michael was the featured ranger for their series about the rangers' favorite places (and got me to take the accompanying picture of him). And, of course, Michael's hand was behind many other features in the paper as well. You can read all about it here.

Many of you may have already watched Michael's interview on YouTube. He got tired of waiting for me to post a link here, so sent out a mass email. But if you've missed my fast-talking husband's YouTube debut, you can check it out here.

More vacation photos will be forthcoming.

A Trip To The Dunes

Yesterday afternoon, we met Miles and Amy at Kelso Dunes for a little sand play. There are a couple good videos that I'll try to post at some point, but they take time to process. In the meantime, here are Darcy and Miles heading up a very small dune at their own pace/s.

Darcy thought the Dunes were a good place for few clothes and requested that her shirt go away. She's taking a short break here from running up and down the dunes, knocking over sand castles, and making sand angels.

Teutonia Peak

Rocks. To climb.

Rocks. To sit under and snack.

Yes, if there are rocks, Darcy and Michael will climb them. Always. We took a morning hike on the Teutonia Peak trail a couple weeks ago. Part of the motivation was a recent mountain lion sighting about half-way up the peak. It's a rocky, wonderful habitat for mountain lions and it's exciting that one has been seen up there. Not by us, of course. We saw some wildflowers and some cacti thinking about producing some flowers. We had a good time scrambling around rocks and hiking.

And when we got home, we were back with our own carpet of teeny tiny flowers. They really are visible in the picture. Or, they were before I uploaded it to Blogger. You can get a bigger picture by clicking on it and then you're looking for itty bitty purple blooms. They're everywhere, but not actually native. They were introduced a few hundred years ago by those dang traveling Europeans.

And, just in case you missed the wonderful news today -- the EPA has suspended almost all mountain-top mining permits while they study the damage the practice does to the surroudning environment and watersheds!! Our new president might not be doing everything absolutely right, but he's doing some good, good things. Also suspended today? The Bush rules allowing concealed guns in national parks.

The Flower Search Continues

Flower season, while not as spectacular as last year's so far, is upon us in force now. A couple weeks ago, we had reason to be in Baker and took advantage of the proximity to Rasor Road for some flower hunting. We didn't find many exciting displays, but the lupine out there were just about to pop into bloom.

Michael and Darcy climbed rocks, of course, as they do when rocks are there to be climbed. They didn't find any flowers up there, but Michael spied some flowers on rocks on the other side of the road and I scrambled up to take a closer look because they didn't look like something we'd seen before. Michael is in uniform because he had just given a talk about Mojave National Preserve in Baker earlier in the morning.

As, indeed, they were not. These are beautiful Mojave asters, which we did not see at all last year except in our flower guides. They are a really beautiful flower and this bunch was situated in a little rock crevice at full bloom.


I get to go do our taxes now, so y'all will have to wait for the next flower installation. It is Flower Hunt: Teutonia Peak. Your sneak preview: we really, really wanted to find the recently-spotted resident mountain lion, but didn't.

Flower Season Begins!

Welcome to Flower Season 2009! Darcy and I hiked from the post office back to our house the other day and our rewards were a fox or coyote jaw complete with teeth and a little fur on the chinny-chinny-chin and the first flowers of spring! These purple lovelies are a carrot family member called purple cymopterus. Apparently, there's no common name for them. There are two plants hanging out together, but I can't find more, even though I've tried.

Darcy and Michael took their own hike a week ago to the "Quiet Canyon" (Darcy's name), aka Banshee Canyon (the name that appears on maps). This is the land of holes in rocks and the place where the echoes live, so Darcy loves it. Anywhere she can play with rocks and dirt is a good place for her.

Stay tuned for more spring pictures of Darcy exploring the Mojave and flowers popping up everywhere!

Dark As A Dungeon

We recently went to hike around one of the many abandoned mine sites in Mojave National Preserve. I believe this one is Evening Star Mine. There are multiple mine shafts, a few old buildings, and a lot of Joshua trees. And a big rock that smacked the bottom of our car.

Michael and Darcy explored some of the infrastructure while I took pictures. I did not see it happen, but Michael carried Darcy up the first flight of stairs and said they were pretty solid, all things considered. I'm glad I didn't see it.

I know nothing about mining, really, but I assume this was a chute for loading up -- buckets? barrels? carts? -- of ore.

This mine shaft was particularly deep. Michael was demonstrating this fact to Darcy by dropping rocks down the shaft to hear when they hit. We had a difference of opinion about whether we could see the bottom, or if we were just seeing a debris pile being held by fallen beams. Either way, this is deep.

I can't really imagine going to work every day by climbing down ladders into the ground. I know that they were no doubt more stable when they were in use, but even so, it would be a depressing start to a work day.

Michael recently started reading a book about the history of Cima that he really brought home for me, but I've been ignoring it in favor of fiction for a few weeks. It turns out that we don't really live in Cima. We live in a "residential suburb" of Cima called Hockersville. Four families had homesteaded four quandrants that meet at the corner of "our" property where there is a sort of intersection of two dirt roads. They all built their houses on the corners so they would form a small community and the Hockers (two brothers) owned two of the four quadrants, so they were honored with the name. All but our quadrant were still owned by descendents when the book was written and at least two still are, we think.

Three houses are still there (although I think the one on our property was a replacement for one that burned, but I can't remember who told me that) and there's a roof that may be the remnant of the fourth, so I might try to put together a photographic essay about modern day Hockersville.

"We Have Forks With Tines On Them!"

Specifically, Michael and I had forks with three tines, and Darcy had a fork with four tines. She counted all of them after asking what they (the tines) were called.

In other words, her vocabulary continues to grow quickly. As do her culinary borders. Tonight was baked tofu with a broccoli/mushroom/zucchini/noodle stirfry. About half-way through, she asked to eat "mama's zucchini" because hers was all gone. The spice level of both was moderate and she ate it up. It's a good feeling.

And in other news, we have new friends! Who live in the preserve! And have an almost-toddler! They live about twenty minutes south of Kelso Depot and work for the research center there. They walked into the Depot and asked to meet Michael last week because they had heard there was a couple with a toddler there. They followed up quickly with a dinner invite, which we had to decline because Michael was under the weather.

I asked Amy to come with us to a toddler playgroup in Vegas yesterday and we had a great time despite some teething crankiness. They stayed to play for a while when we got back to Cima and stopped in to see Michael today, inviting us out to their place over the weekend.

It's very, very nice. We seem to have a lot in common, besides small children and talked pretty much non-stop during the drive.

We're Living in The Wild, Wild West

So, there was a train robbery a few miles from our house on Saturday. We treated it as more or less a joke at first because, really, who expects train robberies in this day and age? It seemed less funny a few hours later when we had a phone message from one of the Park's law enforcement rangers saying that we should make sure our doors were locked because there were still some suspects unaccounted for. It seemed MUCH less funny the next day when a teenager involved in the robbery was found dead in the desert.

I have more photos coming soon, I promise. Photoshop was being mean to me earlier today or there would already be a picture of our rabbit-wrangling girl on her trusty steed.

Flowers, Everywhere We Look, Flowers

Ok, so there has been some prodding recently for some new photos and an update. We've been silent because we spend all our free time (well, I do, Michael sometimes thinks it's more of the stuff he does at work) looking at flowers. And hosting guests and doing some traveling, I should add, but flowers really have taken over our lives (and our hard drive).

So here are some lovely flowers. (Clicking on a picture gets you a larger image.)



Michael received an email a few weeks back saying that Devil's Playground was in a once in a lifetime state of bloom. We were lucky enough to get out there a few days later -- it was breathtaking! Dune evening primroses as far as the eye could see in all directions, with lots of prickly poppies, sunflower-family yellow flowers, hairy sand verbena, desert needles, and so many other flowers mixed in. The primroses, however, were the stars of this show, flowering in enormous mounds and double rings (top photo).


After a lot of driving (we might have bitten off a little more than we should have) we stopped for a picnic lunch at some well-known (to us) rocks. Darcy is all smiles because she's eating her very first PB and J. She also loves rocks, so was happy even before she discovered the glorious presence of jelly.

The flower season moves from lower to higher elevations here, and different flowers show up in the varied ecosystems that make up the Preserve. The following pictures are of the yucca and cactus family blooms, which are spectacular.

Joshua Trees in bloom

Up close and personal with a banana yucca

Beavertail cactus on Zyzzyx road

Claret cup cactus among the Joshua trees

Darcy will do anything for some more flower sightings...her first solo* rock climb.

And she's rewarded! With cliff roses, Palmer's penstemon, and rattlesnake weed (in that order). The rattlesnake weed fooled us -- it looks huge in the pictures in the guidebooks; we were expecting something ten times that size at least!




All that flower hunting and rock climbing and walking does wear a girl out, though. Even the coolest shades in the world can't keep this one awake...

*Solo as in, Daddy's hand is just out of the picture by an inch. Don't call child protective services just yet!