Explore the World one Step at a Time
Explore the World one Step at a Time
A Shark Week detour into the ocean that used to cover the Coachella Valley — megalodon included. It’s Shark Week, and normally that means I’m on the couch watching sharks relocate to places they’ve never been before, because apparently climate change comes for everyone’s commute, teeth included (pun intended, payoff coming later). But this year I got distracted by a wilder fact: the ground under our hiking boots used to…
A halfway-up-the-mountain snack you can actually pronounce every ingredient of. Somewhere around the halfway point of every hike, my crew and I perform the same sacred ritual: find a rock, drop our packs, and attack our snacks like we just summited Everest. On one of these rest stops, the conversation drifted to the eternal trail question, what is actually the best snack to haul up a mountain? One of our…
finally reaching Tamarack Valley, and why a meadow grows at 9,100 feet We are up and up on the first tram on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway for this week’s hike to Tamarack Valley. This hike will take us past the 9,100 feet (2,774 m) mark and the trail has an elevation gain of over 1,000 feet (305m) on our 6.3-mile (10.1 km) hike. The air is getting thinner. One…
Part two of our San Jacinto summer project: butterscotch-scented pines, a vanishing snowmelt lake, and a wildflower that grows nowhere else on Earth Hike number two in our summer quest to summit San Jacinto Peak (or at least hike as many trails as we can manage in the San Jacinto State Park), and we’re back at the tramway for the first car up the mountain. Full disclosure: a couple of…
Our First Step Toward San Jacinto Peak Summer is here, and so is the Summer Pass for the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. When the Coachella Valley is flirting with 110°F (43°C) and your car doubles as an air fryer, there’s something deeply satisfying about riding ten minutes up the mountain into a breezy 70°F (21°C). A little shiver in June? Bring it on! Half the fun is the ride up…
100 Lizards, 2 Blood-Squirting Showoffs, and a Fire Scar In early May, our Community Science team laced up for a lizard survey along the Panorama Loop Trail at Black Rock Canyon, in the quiet northwest corner of Joshua Tree National Park. The mission: count lizards. The final tally on this nearly 7-mile (≈11 km) loop with about 1,200 ft (365 m) of climbing? A very satisfying, perfectly round 100. A…
Eye to Eye With a Rattlesnake When my Canadian friend told me she wanted to see a chuckwalla, I knew exactly where to take her: the Fortynine Palms Oasis Trail in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s a 3.5-mile (5.6 km) round-trip hike with about 660 feet (200 m) of elevation gain, and in my experience, it’s one of the most reliable chuckwalla-spotting trails in the park. What I conveniently didn’t…
When the Desert’s Timing Goes Off In early spring I was showing a friend the Hi-View Trail at Black Rock Canyon in Joshua Tree National Park. I like this trail: it’s easily accessible, doesn’t require a national park pass, and there are bathrooms. There are several access points, and the trail often gets shown as a 1.3-mile (2.1 km) trail, but if you start at the Black Rock Nature Center…
The Desert Oasis That Knows How to Bounce Back Some places make you work to find them. Dos Palmas Preserve is one of them, tucked away near the Salton Sea at the end of a few sandy dirt roads. I have visited Dos Palmas several times with my community science collaborative. I was there in 2023 and 2024, just a few days after a fire had swept through, and I…