Descriptive Essay: Mojave Desert Land

We are walking across a sandy desert valley on a sunny winter day. Creosote bushes sway in the gentle breeze. The nearby mountains beckon, but our immediate objective is an intangible point on the ground ahead of us. Or maybe just to our left. The GPS tablet’s direction has suddenly shifted. There is no monument or mark on the ground, nothing to impart any significance to this point or even to show evidence of a previous survey, but we finally settle on a location. Looking southwest, we match our view with a two-year-old photo, create a GPS waypoint, and snap a picture of our own. It looks like not much has changed in two years. Are we geocaching? Looking for buried treasure? Prospecting? No. My companion and I, both volunteer land monitors for the Mojave Desert Land Trust, have just located the northeast corner of a mile-square parcel belonging to MDLT. After setting the southeast corner as our next destination and noting that this point will take us into the mountains, we take quick swigs from our canteens and resume walking.
The Cady Mountains have always been a little off the beaten track. Located in the center of the Mojave Desert east of Barstow, the Cadys have

The footing is sandy, and individual watercourses become more apparent as we get closer to the mountains. The vegetation is mostly creosote bushes between waist and shoulder high, and spaced far enough apart that walking is easy. It suddenly occurs to me that this is some of the most pristine desert I have ever seen. There are no signs of man: no trails, roads, or vehicle tracks, no bottle caps, no old fence posts. Though we see no animals other than a few birds that fly at our approach, there are many tracks of birds and small mammals winding through the brush. There are also some larger tracks, but they are old and faint, and it is difficult to decide what made them. Desert bighorn sheep, perhaps, but we decide deer are more