Desert Hopping

We had a wonderful day and a half of rest here in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.  In just a little while now, as soon as the morning dawns, we’ll be on the road again. A fantastic full moon currently lights up the desert sky and nowhere have I ever seen more stars than in this desert’s sky. We stayed at Organ Pipe last February and I promised myself I would return for a longer stay the next time around.  I have kept that promise now and I’m so grateful it has been possible, for in the words of Robert Grellet, “I shall not pass this way again.”  

Like Big Bend National Park in Texas and many of the other National Parks, Organ Pipe is some 75 to 100 miles “out-of-the-way” which is why I suspect I shall not come to visit  here again. The fact that these parks and monuments are out-of-the-way is probably a major reason such American showcases have survived. Under the present political climate our parks and monuments are being threatened and I hope you will do all you can to keep them protected. There are 28 cactus species surviving here in Organ Pipe National Monument and the monument’s name comes from the organ pipe cactus which lives only in this place in the US (though it is common in Mexico).  In 1976 the United Nations designated the monument as an international Biosphere Reserve.  It is an out-of-the-way place of beauty and wonder and I hope, if you have opportunity, that you will go out of your way to see it.

We are “desert hopping” today.  We will leave the Sonora Desert and within several hundred miles find ourselves traveling through the Mojave Desert in California.  I even suspect that we’ll spend the night in the Mojave and I can’t think of a better place to spend the night than under a desert sky. “I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince).

Another sunset and the Super Moon at
Organ Pipe National
Monument