Cacti, Crags and Cranes

Kicking off 2023 with a road trip across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas

Part 1: Ventura to Tucson

By the time Leslie and I set off on our first extended journey of 2023, Next Chapter had been parked in our driveway without moving for 11 weeks. That matches the longest previous stretch our adventure van had remained idle since we took delivery in September 2020, and it was the longest gap between trips since I retired at the end of 2021 and no longer had to plan outings around a full-time work schedule.

Suffering this indignity, the van seemed a rather reproachful presence on its patch of asphalt during all those weeks, looming like a caged beast that had been kidnapped from its natural habitat and forced into cramped immobility. It wanted — needed — to get back out on the road.

It is possible I may be projecting here.

In any event, it was a relief when Leslie and I pulled out of the driveway in mid-February and pointed Next Chapter’s nose to the east. Over the next three weeks, we would travel more than 3,000 miles across four states and three time zones, visit five national parks and two national monuments, and explore craggy mountains, deep canyons, monumental caverns and desiccated dune fields. We’d lose ourselves in vast distances, and feel our sense of time’s passage become unmoored from clock and calendar.

The long road and the open desert sky also would begin to heal the wounds that 2022 inflicted on us, with the deaths of both my parents six days apart during the Christmas holidays. I’m not going to revisit that in detail here, but a sense of loss is a constant emotional background hum wherever I go these days, unpredictably waxing and waning in intensity. It repeatedly delivers a lesson about the relative brevity of our presence on this beautiful planet, the fragility of our physical shells, and the consequent imperative to squeeze the most out of every day, every week, every month. Immersive travel is one way of accomplishing that.

The RV capital of North America

Our first real destination was Tucson, Ariz., where we planned to spend a couple days exploring Saguaro National Park, wandering the city’s historic neighborhoods, and meeting up with an old friend from my journalism days. But it’s nearly 600 miles from Ventura to Tucson, and Leslie and I don’t put in those kind of exhausting transit days any more. We needed an overnight stopping point halfway.

We found it in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge a few miles south of Quartzsite, Ariz., which is one of the odder towns in the desert Southwest. This is saying a lot, since quirkiness is deeply embedded in the rural region’s DNA.

Quartzsite is a small community just east of the California-Arizona border, with a nominal population of 2,400 souls, according to the 2020 Census. During the winter months, however, its population swells by a million people, most of them snowbirds drawn to its salubrious desert setting from frozen climes across the country.

The townsite, conveniently athwart Interstate 10, is home to more than 70 RV parks, and it is surrounded by thousands of acres of public land open to camping. In an attempt to corral the mayhem, the Bureau of Land Management has designated several huge Long Term Visitor Areas in the area, where campers may secure permits to stay continuously from Sept. 15 to April 15 as long as they agree to abide by a somewhat strict set of rules. As we drove through town, we saw lot after lot jammed with recreational vehicles of every size and description, along with countless rock shops and pop-up vendors catering to residents of the sprawling mobile metropolis.

Cheek-by-jowl “camping” in what is basically a huge gravel parking lot is not our scene. We bypassed the congestion and commotion in favor of a dispersed camping area several miles down a dirt road 18 miles south of town. We weren’t alone there, but the few other campers were sprinkled thinly enough across the landscape to afford us ample privacy. We rolled in at sunset, staked out one of the first suitable spots we saw, and enjoyed a peaceful night amid the cactus and creosote bush.

Morning in Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. (John Krist photo)

In the morning, we hiked the nearby Palm Canyon trail uphill to a craggy overlook with an expansive view of the surrounding desert and mountains. It also afforded a glimpse of a cluster of California fan palms tucked into a narrow defile high in the canyon wall. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages Kofa, refers to them in its trail guide as “perhaps the only native palm trees in Arizona.” The brochure also notes that news of the palms’ discovery was reported in December 1923 in the Yuma Morning Sun.

I would love living in a place and a time when discovery of a remote grove of desert trees is considered sufficiently newsworthy to warrant coverage by the local paper.

Cacti of unusual size

We arrived in Tucson that afternoon, and made our way through a light rain to a neighborhood known as Barrio Viejo, where we had rented an Airbnb for three nights. True to its name (viejo means “old”),  the area is one of the older parts of town, and our accommodations were in a carefully restored adobe home built in 1870. Parked in front of the 153-year-old house, on a street lined with adobe buildings of similar vintage in various states of disrepair and restoration, Next Chapter stood out like an alien spacecraft.

I’d been to Tucson once before, to attend the 1997 national conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. I flew into town for that visit, and our van journey in 2023 reminded me how parachuting into a new city results in a very different experience than reaching it after driving for hours across the surrounding countryside.

I often feel disoriented when exploring a place I’ve reached by air, unable to figure out how the community I am in relates to its surroundings. I remember feeling that keenly during my initial visit to Tucson 26 years ago. An approach by land, however, helps provide grounding geographic context, a sense of how the community has developed over time and how it exists in relation to its physical environment.

In Tucson’s case, that environment is the Sonoran Desert, and the old town center is on the banks of the Santa Cruz River, a life-giving artery in a dry land and hence a magnet for human occupation for thousands of years. We started our exploration of the area with a deep-dive orientation at the expansive and informative Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, where we spent several hours learning about the flora, fauna, climate, geology and prehistory of the region we had driven across to reach this destination.

Late-afternoon light in Saguaro National Park. (John Krist photo)

The museum is on the doorstep of the western unit of Saguaro National Park (a second unit lies to the east of Tucson), where after lunch we hiked a couple of trails and marveled at the preposterous size and surreal shapes of the Sonoran Desert’s signature plant species, the giant saguaro cactus. Saguaros grow in relatively dense stands, reach 40 to 50 feet tall at maturity, and live for centuries. Hiking among them is like wandering through a spiny old-growth forest that casts little shade and resembles an illustration in a Dr. Seuss book.

The next morning, we took our time packing up the van and heading out of town. There was no rush: We had only about 100 miles to drive until our next overnight stop, where we had a date with thousands of “snowbirds” parked together in a patch of desert. Unlike the winter visitors gathered in and around Quartzsite, however, none of them were human.

Coming in Part 2: Tucson to Carlsbad, New Mexico.