49 Palms Oasis

Author's Comments

The trail begins in nothing. That is the part I want to describe first, because it matters. You park at a small lot off a road that does not feel like it leads anywhere, and you start walking up a slope of pale rock and creosote with no shade and no promise. For the first mile you wonder if you have made a mistake. The hills are the color of bone. The sun is already working on you. And then the trail crests and drops, and below you in a fold of the canyon there is a green so improbable it reads at first as a trick of the eye. The palms are tall and shaggy, their old fronds hanging in thick brown skirts, and they cluster around a seep of water that should not exist in a place this dry. The contrast is the whole photograph. Lush against barren. Soft against hard. A pocket of somewhere else inside the desert. I prefer this trail in February, early, when the air is still cold and the light comes in low and sideways across the canyon walls. The palms catch it differently than the rock does. There is a wide shot that works from the ridge above the grove, but the photograph I keep returning for is closer in - the texture of the trunks, the way the fronds layer against each other, the small dark pool at the base where the spring surfaces. Bring more water than you think. Go before the sun is overhead. Leave the oasis the way you found it, which is to say, mostly to itself.

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