The Juniper

You may be wondering by now what on earth a juniper berry is.  Here you are:

Juniper trees are the only ones I see on a daily basis out here, each eking out a living on a patch of desert sand.  At a slightly higher elevation, you'll also find some pinyon pines, but other than that this country is a bunch of shrubs and rocks.  It's a far cry from what I'm used to in the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest, where big green trees line the city streets and moss creeps out of every corner, but I'm learning to love the desert landscape.

They frame things nicely, too.   Junipers around Hovenweep's Twin Towers.

Juniper berries are not actually berries.  They are cones with "unusally fleshy and merged scales" (says Wikipedia), which makes them look like little blue or purple-ish berries, but when you open them up you'll find a hard seed on the inside.

It was while trying to peel off the outer layer of a juniper berry to see exactly what was under its skin that I finally came up with a name for my blog.  Wandering among juniper forests and especially if you smell the leaves--which seem to be more scaley needle-like things than leaves--up close, you'll notice a very faint sweet smell coming from them.  This scent is intensely magnified when you peel open a juniper berry and the sticky inside is smeared over your fingers.  I had a realization that this was one of my favorite things about the desert, this delicious smell.  It reminds me of pine sap from back home, but tinged with a distinctive desert flavor, a honey-like scent that only comes from this place.

You should smell the desert when it rains; when the juniper and sagebrush and sand-dirt that covers everything mix with water droplets to fill up every bit of the air.  It is as wonderfully refreshing as the just-rained smell you get back in the northwest (or other places with ground that has actual dirt on it and smells "earthy") but here it comes with a unique desert sweetness, that hint of honey-like juniper and extra sense of renewal that even the slightest rainfall brings to such a dry land.

Anyway, those juniper berries, to me, are one of the "sweetest things in the desert," along with the amazing sense of solitude one finds out here, in a landscape where there is so much room to explore and little to get in the way of your thoughts.

It turns out different varieties of juniper trees grow all over the Northern Hemisphere.  The one I'm most familiar with is the Utah Juniper, or Juniperus osteosperma.  Besides juniper berries, they grow these really interesting things called galls which are growths caused by the Juniper Tip Midge, but are actually quite pretty:

Two thousand arches!

On my first weekend since beginning work at Hovenweep, I took off for Moab, UT (a 2 1/2 hour drive away).  Moab is a great little city surrounded by beautiful red rock cliffs, and is just minutes from Arches National Park, one of the most-visited in the country.  It's famous for housing over two thousand natural sandstone arches--defined as any opening at least three feet in diameter, though many are much larger.

I stayed for three days with a fellow SCA intern who is working this summer at Arches, which gave me time to explore all sorts of incredible things in the park.  I saw some of the famous sites like Balanced Rock and Delicate Arch, and also hike out to less-traveled areas like the "Devil's Garden," where you'll find Double-O Arch.  But the best way to describe all of this, of course, is in pictures!

Balanced Rock

  

A rainbow at Delicate Arch just before sunset

 

The "Three Gossips" at sunset

Double Arch, one of my favorites

Most arches--and other really interesting rock shapes--are formed in the Entrada Sandstone, a layer of sedimentary rock deposited about 200 to 150 million years ago.  (A reference point for any Questers: the Entrada layer is just above the Carmel Formation, which is above the Navajo Sandstone, the highest-up and latest-deposited layer we encountered very much of on the Green River.  So this Entrada sandstone is somewhat younger.)

Now, one thing that's been difficult for me is to get any pictures of myself on my adventures, as I'm traveling alone.  The secret solution?  Pick a guy who's carrying around a big fancy camera, and ask him to take a picture of you!

At the South Window.

Arches is a huge park, and there are even more interesting things to do there besides look at arches.  One is to take a tour of the "Fiery Furnace," an incredible maze of sandstone "fins," out of which arches are formed once water or wind erosion pokes a hole in them.  The fins are formed from the weathering away of sandstone around cracks made in the rock as the earth shifts over hundreds of years.

The Fiery Furnace

There's a joke among the rangers at Arches that "the Fiery Furnace is full of rainbows and unicorns" because they have to deal with a large number of visitors whining and screaming about not being allowed to go in.  Only a small number are allowed to enter each day, and only on ranger-guided tours, because it's a place where you could easily get lost wandering through the thin openings in the rocks if you don't know exactly where you're going.  The tours are often booked weeks ahead of time, so people who wait until the day they arrive to demand entrance into this area of the park are almost always disappointed.  Very lucky for me, a tour on the Monday I was there had openings!  And because I am an SCA at a nearby park, I am both automatically well-connected and taken pity on because I make only $75 a week.  So I got to go into the Fiery Furnace for free :)

Descending into the Fiery Furnace

Coming up on Surprise Arch--wow!

And that's only a small slice of what I got to see and do on my weekend at Arches National Park, but this is getting quite long, so I'll sign off with a few more of my favorite photos.

Landscape Arch at sunrise--290 feet across!

Double-O Arch: two arches stacked on top of each other!

An excellent example of "fins"

"Lasagna Rock" as a thunderstorm rolls in.
I just made up that name because I was so fond of this rock,
but the Dewey Bridge member of the Carmel Formation,
from which it is formed, is sometimes called the "lasagna layer"

Sunset behind sagebrush,  a plant you grow to love
if you spend enough time out in the desert.

"As a Junior Ranger, I pledge to...

-be a friend to this and all other parks
-to learn more about plants, animals and history
-to conserve water and energy here and at home
-recycle whenever I can
-show a loyalty to the preservation of our earth
-and to keep all wild lands clean and beautiful for future generations."

"Congratulations!" we say, "you are now an official Junior Ranger at Hovenweep National Monument!"
After filling out a book of activities about Hovenweep and taking this pledge, any kid can be a Junior Ranger.  In fact, you don't really have to be a kid--since I don't get a real ranger badge, I undertook the challenge of becoming a Junior Ranger myself on one of my first days here.

It seems to be something of a tradition among Park Service employees, or at least us SCA interns at parks in this region, to collect Junior Ranger badges at each park we venture to.  You have to do a little extra work in the booklet if you're over twelve, but even if you fall outside the normal age range it's a great way to learn more about a park's history and importance.  I've now become a Junior Ranger at Arches and Mesa Verde, too!

Showing off my badge.

Welcome to Hovenweep!

On August 13th, I drove up to Hovenweep National Monument for the first time.  And here I am to stay for the next four months as an intern with the Student Conservation Association, learning what it's like to be a Park Ranger: helping people out in the visitor center, patrolling our outlier sites, and giving presentations on aspects of this place that most interested me.  Hovenweep protects several ruins left behind by the Ancestral Puebloan people about 750 years ago--here's a glimpse of some you might see if you came to visit:

Square Tower and Hovenweep Castle

A tower (built right around two boulders) and multi-roomed home at the Cajon site

Cutthroat Castle

A  mostly-tumbled wall and a round tower at the Cutthroat site

Two weeks in, I'm already in love with this fascinating place out in the middle of the desert.  From where I am right on the border between Colorado and Utah, there are so many interesting things to explore within a few hours' drive that I'm overwhelmed just trying to decide where to go on my next weekend.  Stay tuned for more about where I've explored thus far!