Back in the Wash

It’s an easy place to get lost. A quiet and serene sweep of desert scrub brush, shifting sands and soft whispering winds. It can change its appearance in subtle yet curious way on almost a daily basis. It’s a perfect capsule of silence capped around your ears. Everything around you seems dead and yet is alive in a hundred different ways.

There’s usually a small muddy creek meandering by. The scrub brush is usually full bloom except in the dead of summer. Nesting birds’ flitter about endlessly. The stillness there can be deafening with only a few fleeting sounds floating by. All is peaceful until every couple of years when the rains come and wash that complacency away with astounding fury and force in just a matter of moments.

After the storms, the leftover residue slowly settles into the newly formed crags and crevices and the wash goes back to its dormant life once again.

I experienced that here in the desert several years ago. A record three and a half inches of rain fell in one day. Contrast that to an average rainfall of five inches for the entire year and one can understand the magnitude of the hard rain pounding on concrete soil.

Before the rains, the wash was alive with horseback riding, mountain biking and hiking.

Horse trails become mountain bike meccas. Hikers wander the wash, meandering back and forth as the rutted grounds give way to dry beds. Arroyos cut in the corners and debris lies crumpled up in distorted jumbled piles randomly deposited everywhere. Then after the rains, new trails are forged on a totally altered landscape.

Fortunately for me, the wash isn’t the only place I’ve found for tranquility and peace in his part of my world. The best views of this ever-changing tapestry of desert landscape are from the mountain trails that climb up to the summit.

As a fellow hiker commented the other day. “It really is one of the best playground for adults in the world.” I’ve also found a host of other newly discovered venues to get lost in around the Coachella Valley.

Whether it is walking the berm and scaling the heights above, they are all magnificent escapes just steps away from my home. Places to meet and greet and at the same time go solitary if I want to.

Its heaven’s confessional where I reveal my earthly sins; the good ones, the bad ones, and the fun times in-between to nobody else but me.