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I just got back from 6 days in the desert with a few other folks - looking
for rare plants at some proposed construction sites in the wilderness.
I've never done this type of consulting before. The proposed sites were
pretty large - around a square mile. We walked transects through the area,
spaced a ways apart, scanning the ground looking for any of 10 rare plants.
It would have been really tedious (ok, at times it was really tedious)
except for we were in a gorgeous area - sagebrush scrub on the edge
of pinyon-juniper woodland. The second half of the survey trip, we
were in view of the palisades section of the Sierra Nevada, where a glacier
or two remain. It was strange being hot and sweaty in the desert and then
looking up at these snowy peaks.
When we found a rare plant, we counted it/them, and GPS'd the location.
One of the plants - Astragalus inyoensis (a vetch),
hasa zig-zagged branch - an identifying characteristic!
Then we filled out a datasheet describing the area (the soil, the
surrounding plant community). I have not done plant identification in a
while - I was out there with folks who had done a lot of work in the
desert, had had recent taxonomy classes, or were taxonomists by profession.
I felt a little rusty and insecure - I know quite a few plants, but Central
Valley grassland plants are not often found in the desert! By the second
day, my terminology was coming back to me and I was being super brave about
asking other people questions. No one knew what everything was, anyway.
So I allowed my own competence to recede from question.
After our last day of surveying, we drove along a beautiful road, through
cinematic geology. As we came up over a pass and down a hill, we were
confronted with a strange landscape. Before us spread a population of
 Joshua trees for miles and miles. It was so ... unexpected. It was
like coming upon an ancient civilization - a precious view of something
rare. Joshua trees have such naked architecture, each one is so
obviously individual, that you can't view the population as an
undifferentiated mass, but rather as an aggregation of spirits. The
compelling uniqueness of each tree, combined with the suprise of seeing
them (the nearest other population is 50 miles south) nearly brought me to
tears.
Our destination was the very northern part of Death Valley National
Monument.  We camped next to Eureka Dune, which is an inland dune about 3
miles long, 1 mile wide and 700 feet high. The moon was almost full and we
went for a walk on the dune at night. The light played tricks on my depth
perception - it was hard to tell how steeply the sand sloped in front of me
because it was glowing so. There's actually a fair bit of water available
to plants on the dune - you don't have to dig too far to find damp sand.
But few plants grow on the dune because of the large amounts of sand moved
about by wind. A plant can get buried in an hour, or can have its entire
root system exposed. There are only a few plants that can handle these
extreme conditions, including an endemic grass that can grow roots
from any part of its stem, and an endemic evening primrose. Imagine
the dune covered with tire tracks as it was only 20 years ago. The
endangered species act and the hard work of a few people have closed the
dune to off-road vehicles, but sandboarding and horse activities remain a
threat to the special flora of this location.
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