← All stories
Plants
·
Joshua Tree, CA
·
·
8 min
The trees that keep time
Joshua trees grow about an inch a year. We sat with them until dark.
Mile
1,214
A Joshua tree grows about an inch a year. The big ones in this valley were already old when the first wagons came through.
Not really trees
They are a kind of yucca, and they depend on a single moth to make seeds. Each branch marks a year when the tree flowered. Count the forks and you are reading its history.
We stayed until dark, watching the shadows stretch across the sand. Nobody said much. It was the end of the road for this issue, and nobody wanted to leave.
Some things out here are measured in inches. Others in centuries.
Visiting
Stay on the trails, never climb the trees, and carry out everything you carry in.
Words and route by Wren Hollis
Amboy, CA
4 min
A sky with nothing in the way
No towns, no moon, and the Milky Way all the way down to the creosote.
Kingman, AZ
11 min
The last windmill on the ranch road
A fourth-generation rancher, a pump that still turns, and very little rain.
Marble Canyon, AZ
5 min
Where the Colorado turns
Above a river that took six million years to cut its way here.
The Sunday Dispatch
Get the next stop on Sunday
One letter a week. Free, and easy to leave.