Cedar Canyon Rd., July 31 2005

By Chris Clarke | Posted on May 18, 2009

Crossposted from Coyote Crossing

A month before, lightning strikes had sparked one of the worst fires in the East Mojave’s history. 71,000 acres burned in the course of a couple days.

My friend Matthew and I headed for the burn area to see it for ourselves.

The temperature was well into the triple digits, and we didn’t do much hiking. We looked around, explored about a quarter-square-mile of catastrophic burn. Incinerated Joshua trees still stood, black and tan spike mops.

One dead Joshua tree had bark peeling away in sheets. I pulled at a piece of bark and pink spores exploded out into the air from underneath.

The burn destroyed irreplaceable desert wilderness. I have been back a few times now, and while the land is still beautiful it is truncated. In one spot, what was once a sweet defile shaded by ancient junipers is now a sun-blasted bowl of standing charcoal and geology. On that day any return visits were well into the unforeseeable future, and we drove downslope a ways. I turned my back on the burn, not a little heartbroken, and regarded the broad sweep of Cima Dome to the north. Nothing had lain between the burned area and the world’s largest forest of Joshua trees but a two-lane road.

We would make camp that night atop the dome, watching electrical storms trail to the south and north. We would watch plumes of smoke from distant lightning fires. It was a milestone in my life, that afternoon, with the slow-dawning realization that my favorite place on earth would almost certainly burn some day. It has not yet done so, but it will. Invasive plants add unnatural fuel loads to once-barren desert, winter storms of increasing violence water the native desert vegetation and boost its growth, and the temperature each summer ratchets upward, drying plants out and boiling monsoon storms out of the ocean to spark their tinder.

This is the photo I took as the realization took root. We stood at the very fringes of the burn, a sharp line between intact and ruined vegetation right behind me, and looked up toward Teutonia Peak near the summit of the Dome. Lightning was flashing there, to what end we could not see.