Mojave National Preserve, part one

Wow, Mojave Desert National Preserve (Preserves are just like parks, except you can hunt on them) is probably, to date my favorite place and just about everyone in the family agrees. As the title suggests, there will be more than one post about this area. The variety of stunning vistas and scenery combined with a picture limit of 5 pictures per blog post, well, you do the math. After spending the evening between Death Valley, Parumph and arriving in Mojave at Tekopa, CA and availing ourselves to a wonderful triple sitting in the mineral hot pools, we arrived in Mojave early in the day. Once you are in the park midway, you are greeted by the sight of the dunes off in the distance. The dunes (our favorite part of this (so far) favorite park), cover about 45 square miles and are the remnants of an old lake bed from over fifty miles away. They are the largest by volume size in N. America, though at 'only' 600 plus feet high, they are not the highest in America. We stopped at Kelso Depot on our way to the dunes and availed ourselves of a little frontier style child care. I am thinking about having something similar welded to the back of the trailer for when the kids get too rowdy or start arguing (again). One of the nice things about Mojave is that you can park in designated areas for free. We were very fortunate to find a spot by a stand of Tamarisk trees (hard to kill non-native intruder species that take over any chance they can, but they sure were pretty and fast growing when they were planted oh so long ago with no concept of intruder species and local ecology diversity structure, but I digress). Included is a picture of the trailer more for a sense of scale for some of the pictures in later posts. Of course, what do kids do around nice sand? Well bury themselves of course! The sand was pretty nice and for the most part, rather fine and smooth, like beach sand, less the beach. Even in the desert and in miles of sand no less, there is an abundance of life. Many species of plants and some animals have evolved and adapted to the localized climate and conditions to the point they do not exist anywhere else in the park (or elsewhere for that matter). One of them is the Fringe Toe Lizard, whose namesake toes allow them to get up and scoot across the In another post I will have a picture of another lizard, in another part of the Mojave desert and it looks completely different relative to coloration. Well, all this was just the first day of a week in Mojave, so the next post will cover the dunes themselves (maybe 2 posts, we shall see)