San Jose Island, Sea of Cortez
The island is anything but dry and forbidding. Had Eden been depicted with twenty-foot-high cactus and spiny bushes with crimson flowers – it would have been located here. Under blue skies we land on a shore that is so lush that it resembles an oasis, not in a sea of sand, but on a sea of teal blue water.
We walk up an ‘arroyo,’ a Spanish term for dry creek bed. This walk is sandy and wide, and it quickly fills with the sounds of birds. Exotic names like ash-throated flycatcher, loggerhead shrike and Costa’s hummingbird are bandied about. Their songs, albeit modified for a winter’s retreat, are rich and gurgle down the steep canyon walls.
Our senses are further stimulated as wafts of exotic fragrances drift about us. Incongruous. How can a landscape crispy with cactus of various dimensions and stature be so bewitching? Does an enchantress loom high above in the ramparts of the desert walls and cascade down scented ribbons of myrrh and bella donna?
Then the desert landscape is punctuated with merrily flitting butterflies. Their striking colors awaken us. An overturned rock harbors a scorpion; a shed rattlesnake skin drapes a bush. Oh, every turn shares another myth.
The island is anything but dry and forbidding. Had Eden been depicted with twenty-foot-high cactus and spiny bushes with crimson flowers – it would have been located here. Under blue skies we land on a shore that is so lush that it resembles an oasis, not in a sea of sand, but on a sea of teal blue water.
We walk up an ‘arroyo,’ a Spanish term for dry creek bed. This walk is sandy and wide, and it quickly fills with the sounds of birds. Exotic names like ash-throated flycatcher, loggerhead shrike and Costa’s hummingbird are bandied about. Their songs, albeit modified for a winter’s retreat, are rich and gurgle down the steep canyon walls.
Our senses are further stimulated as wafts of exotic fragrances drift about us. Incongruous. How can a landscape crispy with cactus of various dimensions and stature be so bewitching? Does an enchantress loom high above in the ramparts of the desert walls and cascade down scented ribbons of myrrh and bella donna?
Then the desert landscape is punctuated with merrily flitting butterflies. Their striking colors awaken us. An overturned rock harbors a scorpion; a shed rattlesnake skin drapes a bush. Oh, every turn shares another myth.
