Sunset over the contact zone (Jeremy Yoder)
We had a whole aisle to ourselves at the Henderson, Nevada, Super Wal-Mart. The shopping list for a month of desert fieldwork with a team of up to twenty filled half a dozen shopping carts — apples and oranges by the five-pound bag, piles of potatoes and pasta and oatmeal, twenty-five dozen eggs, three different kinds of Oreos, dishes and five-gallon water jugs and an extra folding table. We stacked it all in a rental RV, and the next morning we drove north.
For years, JTGP collaborator Chris Smith has organized trips to Tikaboo Valley, a site at the northernmost end of the Mojave Desert where the two species of Joshua tree meet. Over the course of each flowering season, Chris leads a team of Willamette University students, field staff, out-of-town collaborators, and willing volunteers in an ongoing experiment to understand how the trees match two different, highly specialized, pollinator species. Tikaboo provides a natural “common garden” where it’s possible to swap the pollinator species between the two Joshua trees, to see how things work out for all of them.
I drove up from Los Angeles to join Chris and his advance team in setting up camp in advance of the arrival of more than a dozen Willamette students for this week’s spring break. I was sorry to head back before things got properly underway, but I had a couple days to spend with the team scouting for flowering trees — a fine tour of Tikaboo Valley at the very beginning of spring.
Click on the gallery below to scroll through some images of the trip!
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