Desert Daze – A Southwest Adventure (I)

Part One: Introduction

I just spent 16 days freezing in the desert. Freezing in the desert, you say? But, the desert’s a warm place, an escape from the cold north this time of year, you protest. Nevertheless, it’s true, with one brief exception that I’ll get into later, I spent most of my time bundled up in the high desert, where temperatures struggled to reach highs in the 40’s and often hovered between zero and ten above at night - and me, camping in an uninsulated van.

Why on earth would I do that? Because I’m a little crazy? No doubt. But, that aside, I do it for one reason: to truly connect with the wilderness. Oh sure, there’s wilderness in the Southwest at all times of the year, but it just feels so much wilder when there’s no one around, no one on the roads, no one on the trails and no tourists demanding ‘services’, in the tiny, out-of-the-way towns that swell to several times their permanent populations during the summer. Nothing smashes the perception of wild more than finding oneself stuck behind a string of behemoth RVs, those ridiculous homes on wheels (let’s go bag us some nature, dear!), crawling up some remote, winding mountain road.

For similar reasons, I mostly avoid the National Parks (Edward Abbey: “The National Park-ing lots.”) on these adventures. The Disney-esque, automobile-oriented, theme park atmosphere fostered at most of these parks, as beautiful as they are, prevents me from truly connecting – and those connections are the very essence of my work. We human beings have a tendency to love the best places to death, chasing away the very spirit that originally attracted us until we wonder ‘What happened?’

As Edward Abbey said in Desert Solitaire: "Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself." I couldn’t agree more. Therefore, I go and freeze my ass off. And couldn’t be happier. I let my legs and intuition carry me to new places, perspectives and impressions. It is my hope that the words and images that follow can convey even a small part of the magic I felt so often during those sixteen wonderful daze...

Soon – ‘Desert Daze – A Southwest Adventure’ - Part Two