That awkward moment when your favorite campsite makes Fox News, again

You know what I hate? I hate when Fox News notices my favorite slightly secluded campsite in the Mojave Desert.  They attract pest organisms. There you’ll be sitting quietly among the Joshua trees, enjoying the company of Mojave green rattlesnakes and tarantulas and kissing bugs and other such perfectly honorable animals, and then suddenly a chill wind will blow up the back or your shirt as the television news trucks arrive and some putrescent individual like Sean Hannity steps out into the sunlight, pasty and blinking and malignant. You can actually feel the cacti wither in revulsion.

It happened again this weekend.

Since October 1997 I’ve spent probably more than a hundred cumulative nights camping at a little spot about a quarter mile off the pavement at Cima Dome, a large rise in the Mojave National Preserve. It’s a great place, generally pretty quiet aside from wind  and cactus wrens. It’s comfortable in the summer, cooler than much of the surrounding desert  at around 5,500 feet /1650 meters in elevation. My friend Matthew and I camped there during a heatwave in August 2005, watching thunderstorms, and it actually got down to 90°F or so at night, cold enough that we left after a couple days for  Death Valley, where it was a slightly less chilly 117°F on the valley floor. It’s not a bad place for desert winter camping, either, with only occasional snow, and plenty of dark sky to watch the Hunter and his Dog chase the Bull across the night sky.

That’s not what started me going there, mind. The thing that recommended Cima Dome as a place I wanted to visit back in 1997 is that fact that it’s home to the world’s most extensive forest of Joshua trees.

And as a large swath of Joshua tree forest that is protected from most further disruption and dismemberment by the National Park Service , the landscape of Cima Dome turns out to be a great place to watch the mid-elevation California Mojave Desert ecosystem at work. It’s a beautiful, diverse landscape in which I see something new each time I visit.

Where does Fox News come into this? In 1934 a local miner, John Riley Bembrey, put up a cross atop Sunrise Rock as a memorial to World War 1 vets. A lot of shell-shocked, lung-damaged veterans had come to this part of the Mojave to try to put themselves back together after they’d seen Paree, and phosgene. Riley was a medic in the war, and his memorial meant a lot to him. When he died in the 1980s he asked local John Sandoz to keep the memorial going. John and his wife Wanda have since repaired and replaced the cross a few times.

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