More desert

 1/23- Imperial Valley Desert Museum, Octilla CA

  The desert was playing with us today. On the way to Yuma suddenly the desert turned green. What had been brown before was now a pale green between the creosote bushes. There was some kind of ground cover that was blooming and it spread out all over the ground. I don’t know if it was spring or if the little rain we got last night sparked it. 

   After Yuma we saw rows and rows of planted bushes which we discovered were jojoba plants that were planted in these orderly rows after WWII. 

   Then on to California where we entered the Imperial Sand Dune area. There were huge towering sand dunes on either side of the road as far as you could see. People were running dune buggies all over the place. The dunes must have been 20 feet over the road. There was a purple flower that spread in large patches over the sand. 

   After this it was mostly cultivated fields growing broccoli and lettuce. They grow 160 million pounds of broccoli here a year with considerable irrigation.

  We are now right on the border of Mexico. We stopped for the night at another Harvest Host site which is the Imperial Valley Desert museum. This is another amazing spot as we are parked in a parking lot that sits up on the side of a hill and affords us a spectacular view of the desert. It also sits right in the middle of a forest of windmills. In fact the rv is rocking pretty good as the wind has picked up. 

   The museum had a very nice collection of old Indian pottery. This was more pieces than I’ve ever seen together before. Some were very large and I was wondering why they would have made something so big if they had to carry it. Turns out they would bury these out in the desert filled with water as water caches. 

   They also had an exhibit on the Salton Sea which is nearby on how the sea is 200 or so feet below sea level. This makes the magma of the earth much closer to the surface and it occasionally leaks out as hot springs. They also generate electricity geothermally. 

   Today the temps were high 70’s and it should be another night without the heat coming on. Now we start to head north and west.    

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