Travel Through the Mojave Desert

On my way to a pretty incredible photo journey for 2+ weeks. My first stop is going to be the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Arizona. To get there from San Jose, the best route includes 200 miles of travel across the Mojave Desert. Certainly beauty abounds here. My route was via Hwy 40 East. As I traveled through Mojave today, I saw wide expanses of desert flora and fauna - young, naked to the eye, geological features as well. One cinder cone that had obviously blown and spread it's unique debris for miles, was listed as a young feature, "only 20,000 years old."

Most of the Mojave is "high" desert - well over 1500 feet and over 2000 in many spots. Edwards Air Force Base is located in the Mojave, famous for Chuck Yeager's X-15 experimental rockets in the 50s and 60s and home to most of the astronauts, including the famous Mercury 7.

I drove past what looked like (in the distance), a graveyard for old 747 jet liners. There's so much open space here, that it seems appropriate to come up with different ways to utilize it... One of the features I passed was the boron mining district, famous for Borax and the 20 mule team that originally delivered the boron for processing. There's plenty of signs of resource exploration as various elements, exposed by weathering (wind and rain) and various geological fracturing and explosions, give up there individual compounds and colors. See a white site from a distance, it must be gypsum or boron - let's set up a mine. Yellow is sulphur, on and on.

It's is very beautiful. Today I saw the longest train I've ever seen. They snake themselves, both directions across an exposed land, painting the foreground with ribbons of color. As it got darker you could see flashes of light and brilliant lighting strikes creating a kaleidoscope of colors in the night sky.

Please enjoy this image of one of those trains passing below a mountain range close to sunset. Tomorrow, Grand Canyon - and I'm told it is indeed GRAND.

Look close up for more details.