Easy Rest Inn

The Mojave Desert contains 25,000 square miles of desolate beauty, take it or leave it. The desert doesn't care either way. I lovingly choose to take it for the expansive, careless elbow room it throws out in all directions like heat from a major fire. There are places here you can hike for scores of miles... a hundred miles... and never see another human soul, places where it seems like no one but you has ever been.

But there's something else we desert lovers find enthralling here: In sites littered across the Mojave, one finds relics of man's optimistic struggle to subdue one of the fiercest places the planet offers. Sometimes it's a crumbling hovel, or a rusty plowshare, a bone-dry cistern, or a decaying old mine. Sometimes it's just a dirty shard of 100 year old crockery.

When we find these relics, they're usually broken, disheveled, disappearing inexorably back into the land, half gone and completely forgotten. They're emblems of the struggle lost, of nature showing who, ultimately, is boss.

That's why it can be a delight, even a shock, to run across something like Club Ed (or Easy Rest Inn, as the sign proclaims) out in the lonely precincts, looking vintage and proud, exotically traditional and very much intact.

But, like much of what we've made in the Mojave, from glitzy Las Vegas to the dirtiest hard-scrabble miner's claim, Club Ed is a total lie. This is not some ancient diner proudly sailing into a nostalgic desert twilight. It was constructed in 1991 as a movie set for the Dennis Hopper movie Eye of the Storm. As a desert diner, it looks too good to be true because it is. It was also too good to tear down after the movie wrapped, so it was acquired, lovingly maintained, and has since served as a prime location for motion picture, television, and commercial photography shoots.

To access the Club Ed property for a project, you'll need permission and you'll probably have to pay money. Contact me if you need help figuring out how to do this (but you can also Google it). The inside of the diner and hotel rooms are every bit as complete, authentic looking, and detailed as the outside.

For my part, I'm happy being what I am in the desert... just an outsider looking in; the Mojave doesn't ask for permission to be with her, and she won't lie to me either, because she just doesn't care. With or without me, the desert is always alone.

Mamma Killdeer

This killdeer is sitting on 4 eggs in a break in the pavement and has been for about a month. They're about to hatch.

Killdeer are an interesting kind of Plover... they always nest on the ground. If a predator gets too close to their nest, the mamma killdeer calls out in distress and begins flapping around on the ground as if her wing is broken. The predator, sensing easy prey, chases after her. She continues this routine as she makes her way away from the nest, luring the predator to follow. When she and the predator are far from the nest, she suddenly heals and flies away. I don't know why this works (dim-witted predators?) but it must, because there are a lot of killdeer in the world.

See her four eggs? The camouflage is pretty good.

Joshua Love

People from other places often think the iconic Joshua tree is a sort of cactus. It grows in the desert, right? But it's not a cactus. The Joshua tree is a variety of yucca plant and has little in common with cacti but its love for dry climates. The largest ones are very old... some are hundreds, even a thousand, years old. They are often top-heavy, so they have elaborate roots to anchor them in the sandy desert soil.

At first glance they might seem strange, severe, even a little scary. When you see a Joshua tree, you know you're in the Mojave desert -- they don't grow in any other desert anywhere else in the world. (In California, we have both the Mojave and the Sonora deserts, quite distinct from each other. The Great Basin and Chihuahua deserts lie east and north of here in Arizona, Nevada, etc. But the Mojave alone can host Joshua trees; they are the emblem of this desert.)

Becoming familiar with the Mojave, learning to love its austere and careless beauty, one can't help but learn to appreciate, even admire, Joshua trees. They exude a strong and quiet dignity, wise and wizened men of the desert patiently persisting through hard times. And they can seem terrible in their beauty too; this is how they came to be named for the archangel Joshua.

But the Joshua tree's survival as a species is tenuous, and it's not just the old story about industrialization, development and loss of habitat. The Joshua tree suffers an inbuilt fragility in the form of its symbiotic dependency on one solitary species of moth (the "Yucca Moth" or Prodoxidae) to reproduce. The Yucca Moths are obligate pollinators of Joshua Trees, meaning without this one species of pale white moth, no bigger than a pencil eraser, Joshua Trees cannot reproduce. Depending for your species' survival on one insect, and one insect alone, is a vulnerability.

Then there's climate change. You'd think that Joshua trees would like the world to get even hotter, but that's not the case. They only grow in the higher, cooler, moister elevations of the Mojave and as the desert gets warmer and drier, these sentinels of the desert will find less and less terrain to suit them. This is why they don't grow at all in the nearby Sonora desert, drier and hotter as it is. (Of course as the planet gets hotter, if they can get the Yucca moths to move with them, perhaps we'll begin seeing them at the beach in Los Angeles, or growing along Hollywood Boulevard).

Here are a few shots of these trees I've made over the years. I hope my love for them shows through.

Bookish Delight

I'll just say it: I love books! I have always been a book geek, since my earliest reading days. Even today, in the Kindle era, my home office/photo processing room is also a library, lined wall to wall with hundreds of books collected during my lifetime. Which is why it's an extra special delight to license an image to a book publisher for a book cover. Here are a couple of recent book covers featuring a Mojave Morning image:

The British edition of The Son by Philipp Meyer. I took this picture in El Mirage, Mojave Desert. The novel is set in Texas. Close enough.

I was just contacted by the publisher of the French edition for permission to use the image on the French version. Avec plaisir!

Kellerman's "Bad Love." I shot this at the Santa Monica pier. They added the scary dude.

I don't always track where images have gone, particularly the royalty free images (the above are rights managed, not royalty free), but when I find a book cover, I get an extra shot of glee.

Hollywood Forever

I received a loaner lens from Canon last week. I've been playing with it quite a bit and really enjoying it. I'll probably talk about it later, but for now, here are a couple of shots from a lens-testing trip to Griffith Park. Sadly, I have to send the lens back to Canon tomorrow.

Shooting into the sun is a good way to see where a lens is weak.. especially a zoom lens. This one did really well.

Even stopped down, depth of field seems shallow when the subject magnification is large. Resolution,sharpness, color and contrast are beautiful.

A Real Gas

When I license an image for commercial use, I know who is licensing the image but I often don't know how they are going to use it, other than web site, book cover, point of sale, etc. And that's ok... I don't really need to know, because the buyer shouldn't have to think about me at all when using the image. But it's always a treat finding my images in the wild. In this case, I happened to find one of my images on the front page of the Southern California Gas Company website.

The Secret Swansea Petroglyphs

There is a secret place near the ghost town of Swansea in the Owens Valley, California, where you can find dozens of ancient petroglyphs dating from as far back as 4,000 years ago. No one knows with certainty who made them. Researchers believe that the petroglyphs at this site were made in several different cycles over a period of  a few thousand years.  Many generations of petroglyphs have been identified. Early research pointed to the Owens Valley Paiute as the creator of these petroglyphs, but members of the Paiute Tribe maintain that they were created by an earlier people.

The site is unmarked, unprotected; the ancient relics sit alone under the open sky just as they always have. If they knew where to go, people could just hike right to the site. For that reason, its location is a secret; wherever crowds of people go, vandalism and desecration always follow.

I did some sleuthing and had a little luck; Stephanie and I managed to locate the site; I photographed every petroglyph we saw. We felt calmly elated and awed to have found these ancient treasures, and to be able to walk quietly and respectfully alone among them in their atmosphere of ancient ceremonial meaning.

Family Hike

We go hiking a lot, and when we do I often want pictures. But I'm not willing to carry lights or stands or assistants (if I had any) on long hikes and I can't often wait for the light. It's just the camera and maybe a flash and five minutes. But the memories are preserved and the picture-taking moments are fun.

Found Treasure

Often Macro photography is about stopping down the lens to show as much detail as possible. But sometimes you don't want detail; sometimes a smear of color or an overall feeling is what you want. The technical look of a careful macro doesn't cut it. Instead, you want to tell about a feeling. In those cases, you look for light and shape and color, and you open up the lens and just find the patterns.

Lost Treasure

When my wife Stephanie kindly wrote the About Me section of mojavemorning.com, she mentioned my former life as a Forest Service fire lookout. And she was right to include that in the bio, because doing that work more than anything got me energized about photography in a deeply felt, lasting, and almost transcendent way.

Here are some snapshots from those days about a decade ago, when I was working with a compact camera and slowly relearning the craft of photography. Unfortunately, Vetter Mountain Fire Lookout burned to the ground in the massive Station fire in 2009 (I was not on duty at the time). The sadness and irony are not lost on me.

Vetter Mountain Fire Lookout

This is the fire lookout. The structure was built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps and it was administered by the US Forest Service. Because of the ecology and geography of Vetter Mountain, it was one of the few fire lookouts that could be placed on the ground instead of on a tower. From here a person could see about a quarter of the 1,000 square mile Angeles National Forest, from the 10,000 foot high Mount Baldy to the famous Mount Wilson Observatory where astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the "red shift", proving we live in only one galaxy among millions in a rapidly expanding universe.

Eric and Cooper 

In the lookout with my trusty dog Cooper. Cooper was crazy about the forest. It might be hard to see, but at the bottom of the stool in this picture, the legs end in glass insulators. All chairs in the lookout had these… in a lightning storm, the lookout was often the first thing to be struck by lightning. So when I felt the hair standing up on my neck, I got onto one of these chairs in a hurry. There was one harrowing lightning storm I recall in particular, with each bolt of lighting not polite enough to wait until the previous one had finished shattering the air.

Big Tujunga Canyon and fog. The view south from the lookout.

The Osborne Fire Finder

After a lightning storm there was often smoke, and with spotting smoke came the use of this thing. This is the "Osborne fire finder", a neat old antique that still performed its indispensable function. I used it to determine the bearing and distance of any smoke I spotted to accurately radio its location in to the firefighters. Fire lookouts were trained in map reading and orienteering skills, and we had to learn intimately the geography of the forest. We frequently logged weather readings, so we learned about the weather and how to use the weather reading instruments; frequent readings become crucial to firefighters when a fire breaks out. Of course we learned about fire science and since the lookout was open to the public (hikers and mountain bikers would visit on the weekends), we had to be forest docents as well. So we learned about the flora and fauna of the forest, and its history.

Western Diamondback at Vetter Mountain Lookout

Speaking of fauna, we had it. Not just rattlesnakes, but brown bears, deer, marmots, coyotes, mountain lions, little squirrels, birds… lots of lovely animals.

I was really happy. Perhaps I’m not smiling in this picture because I was trying to look official or something. I’m still happy now, but the forest has to continue on without the lookout. It's sad to lose unique old gems like Vetter.

The view North