Getting Hot on the Playa

Ready to experience the desert? My husband was on Sunday, so we headed out to this huge playa about 45 miles from our house. We have plenty of playas closer to our house, but he wanted to go to this particular one because it is a wet playa year round. Not that you can tell by the photo above. In some years it does have water on it, but that water evaporates or seeps down into the soil. Most of the playas near us are wet in the winter and spring and dry out in the summer and have a hard enough surface that you can drive on it. 

Here's the sign next to the playa. It says "WARNING STOP!!! Lake Bed is NOT DRY! Proceeding past this sign will result in getting stuck. $500. minimum recovery fee will be charged to rescue your vehicle. [Bullet hole, bullet hole] Sheriff's Posse"

My husband on the surface is a hard-working rancher. Underneath he is a mad scientist with lots of crazy experiments to try out. His experiments are usually kind of fun, so Desert Boy and I went along for the ride. But when we got out of the truck it was 99 degrees. And once we stepped out onto the playa, with all those sun rays being reflected back to us, it was much hotter.

I trudged along behind, looking at the tracks on the playa. There were some deer and coyote tracks, but mostly there were car tracks--or ruts in some cases. Obviously not everyone heeded the sign's advice.

I found a clear example of this when I came across these boards. Someone had gotten stuck and used the boards to try to get extra traction. Hopefully it worked for them, otherwise they had a big towing bill to pay.

And these three wheel tracks? They were from Desert Boy's stroller. I wonder if anyone else will wander out on the playa and be puzzled by the strange tracks. You can barely make out my husband from here. I had really fallen behind. I don't do so well in hot weather.

Finally I caught up and Desert Boy seemed to be enjoying the view from his stroller. I had enough though, and I wheeled him back to the truck, where we turned on the air conditioner, ate chips, and watched my husband run (run!) from one location to another on the playa. I was praying I wouldn't have to go out and rescue him. If I did, I was hoping that I could load him in the stroller and wheel him back.

Forty-five minutes later my husband came back, beaming as he talked about soil properties and conductance and a bunch of stuff I didn't really understand. I asked him if the heat bothered him. He said no, he just worked up a good sweat and then the wind cooled him off as the sweat evaporated. I told him I could tell he had been sweating a lot due to his odor. He said it wasn't him, it was his clothes! Good golly. You're lucky that they haven't invented share-a-smell over the internet or you know that I'd be sharing the smell with you too. You're probably content with the pictures--the desert is really beautiful, especially when seen from a nice, cool climate.

Desert Destination: Scotty's Castle, Death Valley

It's been really hot lately, so today we're going to take a trip down memory lane to when I worked in the hottest place in North America, in Death Valley. Temperatures there can exceed 130 degrees Fahrenheit. This extremely hot temperature is for the valley bottom, part of which is below sea level. Much of the 3.2 million acre park is at higher elevations and thus is slightly cooler. Still, I wouldn't recommend a trip there this weekend; put this idea away for a fall or spring trip.

Scotty's Castle is located near the north end of the park. The mansion was built in the 1920s by a Chicago businessman, Walter Johnson, and his wife. They wanted a winter getaway in a dry climate, and during one trip to the area met Death Valley Scotty, a talkative scoundrel who convinced them to settle in that area. They spared no expense as they built a main building and several outbuildings on 2,500 acres. Springs provided an oasis with welcome shade and cooler temperatures.

The clock tower had state of the art features in it. Unfortunately they didn't get around to finishing the swimming pool in front of the castle. By the way, although the Johnsons called their property Death Valley Ranch, nearly everyone else called it Scotty's Castle, for after the Johnson's death, Scotty took it over for a time. The Johnsons never seemed to resent Scotty's presence but enjoyed his storytelling and company.

The tour guides dress up in 1930s clothing and give living history tours through the buildings, transporting you back in time. Yes, that's me, if you were wondering. It was winter and cool, so I wore a cape over my vintage clothing, including stockings with seams and a garter belt (not that I showed that off). My character was Abigail Fox, a spy looking for the gold mine that was rumored to be hidden within Scotty's Castle. I had a lot of fun with the character.

The house tours show the opulence and workmanship that was put in to every room. Here's a rattlesnake light fixture in the kitchen. Scotty loved making up stories about the house, so there were always plenty of tales to tell.

Here are some beautiful baskets made by the local Timbisha-Shoshone women. If you're ever out in Death Valley, I'd recommend taking the tour of Scotty's Castle. It is a strange experience out in the middle of the desert.


And one last shot, an overview of the castle grounds. You can see how stark the background looks, with sparse vegetation. But the palm trees in the foreground made the immediate area seem like a great getaway.

A UFO Makes an Appearance

I was out one evening and saw this strange light in the sky. It was saucer-shaped, and it immediately made me think of UFOs. I kept watching to see what it would do...

...and as this picture shows, the light was moving towards the earth. We have beautiful, clear skies out here in the desert, plus many of good landing zones for UFOs, so whenever I see strange lights in the sky, I wonder who's coming in for a visit.

In this final picture, you can see a point of light on the ground. I think some of them made it down safely while the mother ship is still in the air. I haven't noticed any aliens around lately, but sometimes I think it takes time to assimilate into the local population. I'll be sure to let you know if something (or someone) odd pops up.

A Change in View

We don't see a lot of water out in the desert, so when we do find it, it really catches our eye. Here's a peaceful stream on the valley bottom, meandering through the sagebrush and meadows. This is how I usually see this stream, a small section at a time. But once in awhile, I have the opportunity to go up in a small airplane and see things from a different perspective.

Here's part of the same stream from the air. Now I can see that it meanders much more than it looked like from the ground. I love looking at meandering streams, thinking about how the water moves one way and then the next.

From a bit further away, you can see that this is quite an extensive stream complex. Some of the water helps feed wet meadows. Those little black dots are cows grazing on the meadows. We're too far away to see the many birds that also use the meadows, like Great Blue Herons, Mallards, Long-billed Curlews, Killdeer, and Egrets.

Finally we can see a tree along the stream. It's a Russian olive tree, which is nonnative, but nevertheless it sure breaks up the scenery. It appears that the natural riparian (streamside) vegetation for this stream is small plants. No saplings are growing anywhere. Still the stream provides a home to five native fish species that have been around for thousands of years since a Pleistocene lake was part of this desert. The stream is quite productive, and obviously the fish and other aquatic organisms have evolved to deal with the lack of shade from trees.

I like the deep bends in the stream. Because it is primarily spring-fed, it doesn't experience large floods and thus the water keeps moving at about the same height and speed year after year. Therefore it is different from rivers that do have flooding that cuts through weak sections of soil to create oxbows (u-shaped sections of water cut off from the main stream). This stream sort of reminds me of my life, moving through all sorts of twists and turns, but keeps chugging on.

Interesting Beetles

I think insects are cool--as long as they're not in my house or biting me! Recently I saw a couple interesting looking ones. Before you go "Blah, insects," keep in mind that insects make up something like 95% of the species on this earth. And yet we don't know much about them. Sure, grizzly bears, whales, and elephants might be more charismatic, but let's face it, I'm not in a good place to take photos of them. So we're stuck with insects today, in particular two beetles.

I was on a picnic when this black beetle with the long antennae landed on one of my nieces. I wanted to get a closer look, so I transferred it to my leg. After a little research, it turns out that it's in the Family Cerambycidae, Longhorn beetles. This is a huge family, with over 20,000 identified species. Goodness gracious, did I have any hope of identifying it? Fortunately, those long antennae help distinguish it, along with the black body and white markings.

According to one posting I found on the internet, that little white v-marking, the scuttelum, between the head and thorax is a distinguishing mark for the white-spotted sawyer, Monochamus scutellatus. 

The white-spotted sawyer didn't stay still for long, but jumped onto my plate. It's preferred food isn't fruit salad, but rather conifers. Adults will eat needles and small twigs, while the larvae bore into the wood and create galleries under the bark. If one larvae gets too close to another, it will get eaten--they are cannibals! (See insects can be pretty interesting!)

Okay, onto our second insect. While I was hanging up laundry I heard a strange buzzing and saw this insect on some fabric on the ground. It was nearly two inches long and appeared to be stuck. Henry took great interest in it and I had to keep him from eating it. 

It was only after I had moved it to the grass that I realized it was a beetle. I tend to forget that beetles have wings. This particular beetle with its distinct markings made it relatively easy to identify as a member of the Family Scarabaeidae, or a Scarab beetle. This is another huge family, with about 30,000 members. Some scarab beetles were considered sacred in ancient Egypt, while the Japanese beetle is considered a pest in the United States. 

This particular scarab beetle appears to be a ten-lined June beetle, Polyphylla decemlineata. The straight reddish brown antennae indicate that it's a female, while the males have curved or fanlike antennae.

This species feeds on the roots of various plants as larvae and on pine needles and leaves as adults. Many species of scarab beetles are great recyclers, feeding on dung (scat), and thus are known as dung beetles.

Okay, that ends today's lesson on beetles. I bet you feel smarter! I'll be on the lookout for more interesting material to help enrich your life. Any requests?