Once upon a time in Mexico, back in the 80s. Cacti.

After becoming lost in the desert and shooting a cactus with a pellet rifle as a diversion, and being disappointed that it didn't blow up like the melon in Day of the Jackal (skip to the end of the clip), and then becoming un-lost, I shot a few more cacti, but with a camera.  Above is a cardon cactus, the biggest species in Baja.

Here's a cardon forest.  There's not a lot of shade in a cardon forest.

This appealing barrel cactus with fish-hook spines was photographed near San Ignacio in the middle of the peninsula.  In taking this picture, I learned that you should not lie on your stomach in a Mexican desert unless you are dressed head-to-toe in prickle resistant garments.  There are pokey things everywhere.  Some of them are scorpions.

Winterlude, with hawk.

Two odd things happened on Sunday.  The morning was relatively warm and decidely sunny, and suddenly in the middle of the afternoon an angry snow cloud descended on the city to remind us that it was still winter, which was really sneaky, because as in so many places we hadn't had much wintery weather so far.

And then a small hawk landed on a wire and just sat there.  It's so tiny it has to be a Sharp-shinned Hawk, the much less often seen of the Coooper's-Sharpie Accipiteran pair.

Even he's surprised to find himself there.

Now he's puffing himself up to look scary.  Cute.  Eventually two crows chased him away, but only after silently staring at him for a while.  They too were puzzled about tiny-hawk on a wire.

Once upon a time in Mexico, back in the 80s. Almost the end of the road.

We drove south toward the cape, with much of the way monotonously like this.  At one point, the driver looked in the rear-view mirror, and swore.  His puffy, satin-blue sleeping bag, which had been nestled among the other stuff in the open-topped trailer of gear we were pulling, had disappeared.  He worked the truck around and we headed back.  I lifted my binoculars and scanned the road.  "I see it," I said.  "It's right on the centre line, about five miles back."  It was like the joke that in Saskatchewan you can watch your dog run away for three days.

We drove through La Paz at night, and camped on a narrow, gravelly beach about 35 miles beyond.  Behind the beach was a high rock wall containing a cave with a flat floor and enough room for three people to hide from the sun while processing specimens from the previous day and night.  This entailed dissection, and removal of tissues that were placed in small plastic vials and then flash-frozen in the tank of liquid Nitrogen that sloshed around behind the rear bench of the Bronco.  What remained of the specimens were injected with formalin and wrapped in formalin-soaked paper towels. These were stacked in Tupperware containers.

Once that was done, we ate a meagre breakfast (instant oatmeal with dehydrated raisins) and piled back into the truck, heading for the hills, our goal the endemic Baja Blue Rock Lizard.

We drove winding roads, eventually ending up near the top of a canyon that had a rough track leading to a radio tower.  Here we split up to cover as much ground as possible, and starting searching the canyon walls for our quarry.  I can't remember if I shot anything at that place, or even shot at anything.  I was by now way beyond tired and it was hot, and I couldn't seem to focus.  I lost my footing a few times, and took a few minor tumbles.  Eventually I found a way up around some cliffs, up through boulders to the top, which was what the others had done.  Now what?  Go back down, but a different way, no use repeating an unproductive route.  I cut across a gently sloping rock face, intending to search the jumble of stones on the far side.  Then I saw one.   A big, beautiful blue lizard, maybe 25 yards away, sunning on a rock.  I swung the butt of the gun up to my ear, got a bead on the lizard but couldn't hold steady.  If you miss, they're gone.  So I went down on one knee, which was a mistake.

I take time out here to explain that this trip to Baja was an expedition with the goal of collecting as much genetic material from endemic herpetofauna as possible, as part of an ongoing series of what would now be called phylogeographic studies, the biogeography of a geologically very complicated land mass read through the phylogenetic relationships among its fauna and with the fauna of other land masses.  In order to collect tissues, animals were either snatched up dead or alive from the roads at night, or shot during daylight with pellet rifles.  When I agreed to go to Mexico, I was naively unaware of the killin' part.  Thus I was perplexed when handed a gun on the first day.  To be honest, I've always liked shooting, had taken firearms training as a kid, and even won a few prizes in competitions. But I never wanted to shoot a living thing--and suddenly it was my job.  I did it okay, but sometimes lost my steely resolve and let one get away. (I passed this dilemma on to Derek, the character in my book set in Bermuda).  I believe that by the time we were on the hunt for the Baja Blue Rock Lizards, others in the group were doubting that I had what it took to be a field herpetologist.  I had a low body count.  To prove my worth, I would shoot the lizard.  And so I went down on one knee.

It wasn't until some time later that I understood that although for the most part Baja California seems parched and moon-like, there is a season when hurricanes come ashore and it rains like hell.  If you look at satellite imagery (thanks, Google Earth), the land is as much shaped by water as by tectonics and orogeny.  The thin layer of dust on which I placed my denim-covered knee became lubricant atop a giant granitic cueball, the top of a waterfall waiting to return.

My knee went out from under me and I sprawled face down, the gun scooting ahead to the edge of the cliff.  And like a cue ball, the slope down which I was sliding was curved, its downward aspect increasing until I arrived at what in a hurricane would be the lip of the falls, a sheer drop.

I remember yelling.  That's what you do when you're falling.  I also remember going through anger, denial, and acceptance all before I crashed onto the jumble of rocks below.  There was no time for bargaining, although I did say, "Sorry," to someone who had not wanted me to go on the trip, who had made me promise I would come home in one piece.

I landed on my right side, bounced, went over another ledge, and fell onto, of course,  rocks, landing on the back of my neck.   The dust cleared, and one of the others, having heard my yell and perhaps my impact, was shouting from a distance, "Don't move!"

I had to move.  A sharp edge was digging into my left kidney.  

When they got to me, I was sitting up, laughing, because I was alive and not paralyzed.  They couldn't believe where I claimed to have fallen from, and all walked away, leaving me sitting there.  That's when I went into shock, because I had a broken elbow and what felt like a broken femur and I had lost the skin from several fingertips in trying to stop the slide.

It was a few minutes after taking this picture that I fell. Almost hidden in the background is a classic VW minibus, which belonged to a herpetologist from a Californian university whom we had met and had joined our trip a few days earlier.  This was the vehicle that took me to a rustic hospital in San Jose del Cabo, an experience that was an adventure in itself, which I should write down some time.

 Yellow-footed Gull (tick).

My leg was not seriously damaged, a deep bone-bruise, and it was decided not to put my elbow in a cast, to prevent it from being set incorrectly.  I spent the next two days with my arm in a sling, lying on a little beach, watching gulls, frigatebirds, and circling vultures as the others went off to shoot things.  I couldn't have shot anything anyway.  I couldn't raise my right arm, and besides, when the gun accompanied me off the cliff, its rear sight was knocked off.  Oops.

For a while one of my children had a paper route, and I would go along, pulling the wagon with the papers. When the wagon was heavy, my elbow hurt.  It tends to hurt when slightly hyperextended, ever since Baja.

When I was falling off a cliff, in all the hurried thoughts that raced through my terrified mind, one certainly was not that delivering papers a long time in the future with a child whose mother I didn't yet know existed would remind me of this.

Once upon a time in Mexico, back in the 80s. More still.

The end of a road.

Four days in, we were near Santa Rosalia, about halfway down the Baja Peninsula on the Gulf side.  Little food, almost no sleep (night was when we drove the blacktop looking for heat-seeking snakes), and mid-day temperatures in the high 90s, even on overcast days.  I was slowly learning the value of a canteen, and how much water you needed to drink when clambering up and down the sides of arroyos in such heat, but I hadn't learned enough to pay close attention when my supervisor held up the keys to the Bronco, and said, "The keys are under this rock here," and he lifted one of a thousand identically sized and coloured rocks, dropped the keys, and placed the rock back on top.  So when you need water, lift rock, open back hatch, access water tank.  Okay.

 Beige and thorny.

We went our separate ways, off to make a bad day for whatever lizard crossed our paths.  It was hot, windless, absolutely silent.  I went up and down ridges, filling my collection bags, so enamoured with being a herpetologist in a place with mucho herps that I wasn't paying attention to my route, and eventually my canteen was empty.  Uh oh.  Which way, over which series of twenty-foot ridges, was the truck?

I wandered one way, and then another.  It was a world of beige mystery.  Hot, dizzy, on the verge of panic... I yelled for the others.  Nada.  I climbed the highest ridge.  Nada.  I shot a cactus, just to see what would happen.  Next to nada.  A knitting needle would make a more impressive hole.  I blundered into a cholla,

 Cactal revenge.

resulting in this detachable attack-pod becoming embedded in the indentation below my right kneecap.  It took pulling as hard as I could with both hands to remove it, and it hurt like hell.

But somehow that pain cleared my head, and I was able to figure out where I was.  I got back to the truck, and of course could not find the rock.  One of the others returned as I was bent over, panting, flipping rocks in vain, wondering how long it would be before I would use one to smash a window. 

He said nothing, flipped the correct rock, and we had sweet, warm, plasticky water.  Best drink ever.

Once upon a time in Mexico, back in the 80s. More.

Taken from about 30 02 59.02 N 115 30 03.25 W Elev ~ 420 m.

Highway One takes you down the Pacific coast, and after a while turns inland, over the intermittently mountainous centre of the peninsula.  The land forms are worth marveling at, wondering at.  At the spot above we stopped and peeled a flattened Patch-nosed Snake (Salvadora sp.) from the road.  First specimen of the expedition.

 Somewhere east of 29 47 38.23 N 114 47 13.54 W Elev ~ 650 m.

Farther on, heading south and east, climbing gradually, the road cuts through the Catavina boulder fields.  The bleached boulders range from ping pong ball (not technically a boulder) to house size, and all within view of the road large enough to be tagged with graffiti, are.  I was told that the boulders are the eroded remains of a dome of igneous rock that collapsed.  Sticking up among the boulders are the extremely odd cirios, or boojums, spindly, spiny, broad-based plants that are mostly trunk.  Better pictures here.

And then the sun went down.

 Morning light, Bahia de los Angeles. 28 57 06.83 N  113 33 29.86 W

We drove on into the night, and eventually ran out of land.  We slept on a beach at Bahia de los Angeles on the Gulf of California, the Sea of Cortez.  During the night, a strong offshore wind whipped up, filled our sleeping bags with sand and blew my jeans down the beach, into the water. 

Overlooking Bahia de los Angeles, taken from 28 58 30.09 N 113 36 14.33 W Elev ~ 240m.

The next day, we drove back inland to scour arroyos for lizards.  We got some, although I forget which species and how many.  Then, for a reason unclear to me, we climbed a minor mountain, which was more or less a huge pile of rocks mined with cacti.  It was one of those deceptive mountains where you think you are almost at the top, but once you reach the crest, there's another one up higher, so up you go in hundred degree heat, your canteen empty since three crests ago, and you start to wonder what the heck you are doing in Mexico.  But at least it ended up in a nifty picture (above).

Once upon a time in Mexico, back in the 80s.

I'm working on a story set in Baja California, fleshing out details of setting by going through a jumble of slides I took on a herping trip when I was a graduate student. (Oh why couldn't digital photography have been invented a lot sooner?)

I flew to LA from Toronto, and a few days later was wandering among cacti and creosote bushes toward a spectacular volcano.  This is the Volcan las Tres Virgenes.  If you want a Google Earth peek at the peak, it's here: 27 28 05.88 N 112 35 25.90 W.    We were supposed to be looking for lizards, but judging from the sequence of pictures I took, I was severely distracted by strange plants and rock formations.

Such as here.  This pile of red rubble is a two-story tongue of weathered lava.  The sticks springing from it are extremely mysterious and tortured elephant trees. What are they, and why do they live there among tumbled igneous boulders?

Lizards, what lizards?

It all comes back to me now.  My head is spinning and I haven't slept since the plane landed, plus my supervisor has us on his diet, which is more-or-less food-free. I feel like toppling over in the dust--which is not advisable because usually there are plants in the way and almost everything in Mexico is prickly.

Turning around, back toward the road, I spy a similarly impaired man, a member of our team wearing the uniform of tight T  and short shorts (recall, it was the 80s), fearlessly and senselessly staring down a thundering transport truck.

It was an adventure.

Varied Thrushes mingle with robins, and hummingbird wishes they would all go somewhere else.

Robins are not signs of spring here in south-western BC.  In fact, bunches of them (collective term: rash) are signs of the dog days of winter.  In large numbers they bluster around suburban neighbourhoods eating berries and making angry chicken-clucks, and are scarcely worth a look except that sometimes among them, vastly more spectacular

 Upper left.

Varied Thrushes are slumming.   In the first picture, upper left and lower right are VATHs.

Here's another, feeling the dimwitted, berry-drunk robin vibe, uncharacteristically loitering in plain view, perched in the hazelnut tree at Paulik Park three feet below its owner,  the resident Anna's Hummingbird, Scritchy, who has no fondness for inebriated thrushes, or anyone really.

Scritchy, unimpressed.