Mexico's Chihuahuan and Sonoran Deserts

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Outside Traveler Winter 2005

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Mexico's Chihuahuan and Sonoran Deserts
The Secrets Life of Deserts
In these grand landscapes, there's hidden vitality and subtle beauty. Find adventure and renewal—not to mention some tasty tequila—at five fine oases in the Southwest and Mexico.

By Kent Black


	Welcome refuge at Hacienta de los Santos, in Alamos, Mexico.

TWELVE YEARS ago, I set out to write a book. Because I'm as easily distracted as a cat on a tuna boat, I needed a remote location, one so uninteresting and empty that I would be glued to my project. Fortuitously, I was offered a winter house-sit in Palm Springs. Perfect. What could be less distracting than the brown, lifeless monotony of this stretch of the northern Sonoran?

After two weeks of extreme productivity, I felt a bit itchy, so I hiked a canyon at the south end of town. That hourlong leg stretch turned into a five-hour exploration. Then I returned for a full day's hike, and within a week I was doing overnights in 600,000-acre Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, some 44 miles south of Palm Springs. At first my interest was ecological: How did the giant Washingtonia palms survive the disappearance of the lakes and streams? Were the springs, creeks, and wildflowers anomalies? How did the deer and bighorn sheep thrive? How did anything thrive?

My interest turned into fascination as I explored the badlands, oases, and riparian canyons of Anza-Borrego, the largest desert state park in the United States. I learned to see beyond the monochrome. If you stop to look closely, the desert reveals a surprising diversity of animal life: Owls nest in hollow cactuses, coyotes and large lizards called

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chuckwallas roam, and all sorts of birds—from ravens and hawks to roadrunners and quail—emerge.

In the early morning and early evening, I stood on small promontories and watched as the light painted distant flatlands and mountains shades of red and gold. I discovered the desert night in a natural stone amphitheater several miles up Palm Springs' Tahquitz Canyon, where I had the sensation that I was pressed against a sky crowded with stars. Everything about the desert was a revelation, even the way it smelled. When a brief shower sprinkled the land, each plant jumped to life. The sage and mesquite—and even the earth itself—released intense perfumes. I realized that survival in such extreme conditions gave everything a special quality, an intense beauty.

Not surprisingly, I fell in love, and a couple of years later I moved to the high desert of northern New Mexico. I've explored the great deserts of Mexico, California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and my own state, and I've uncovered a truth I would have scoffed at before: One desert ecosystem feels as different from another as, say, Maine does from Florida.

My latest sojourn bridged the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts in Mexico. I hiked in Copper Canyon—a 23,000-square-mile network of chasms so huge you could drop two Grand Canyons inside it. The three-day foray broke my big rule about desert hiking: Stick to winter and spring. Ignoring recommendations, I trekked in summer from the town of Guachochi, amid ponderosa pines at 7,000 feet, plunged through subtropics (ferns, palms, and military macaws) to the Chihuahuan Desert (blue-green agave, prickly pear, sotol cactuses, scrub oak, and manzanita) 3,000 feet below. After enduring 100-plus-degree heat at the bottom and a grueling, shadeless 4,000-foot ascent to the top of Sinforosa Canyon, I was more than ready for an oasis.

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