A few years ago, I started keeping a bucket list. Being a predictable person, about half of it is just places I want to go hiking. The rest of the list ranges from the mundane (cook Thanksgiving dinner – check) to the cartoonish (throw something into a volcano – not yet accomplished), and it keeps growing about as quickly as I can tick things off. I bring this up because when I came out to Palm Springs, I made a desert bucket list composed of all the things I want to do before I leave, and I am sad to say I have less than a month left to work on it.

But stars must have aligned, because recently I’ve been able to make good progress on my desert list. This weekend I felt my first earthquake (check), which still counts even if I initially thought it was just a particularly heavy truck driving past my apartment. And then the week before, I was lucky enough to get to help our office’s interpretive specialist with some family outings, where I caught a scorpion (check) and saw my first ever wild sidewinder (check). Somehow, the kids were even more excited to find the rattlesnake than I was, and I had to step in and keep them from poking at the poor potentially lethal critter. It was an amazing time, and seeing kids excited to learn about nature never fails to make me smile. Hopefully I managed to get at least one kid interested in botany by showing off how desert willow fruit bursts open and releases a puff of winged seeds into the wind, but my bit on how to identify the features of an animal skull was predictably more of a crowd pleaser.

At work, we got to go out and see the Salt Creek (check), the waterway that connects my oasis to the infamous Salton Sea. I spent a fair while poking at the thick layer of salt covering parts of the creek: as water evaporates, the salt precipitates out to form a surprisingly thick crust – much like a horribly unpleasant crème brulee. But despite that obvious hardship, the water itself is teeming with life: pond skaters, tadpoles, swarms of brilliantly colored damselflies laying their eggs in the water, tiny fish that dart out from cover just long enough to grab an insect. It is absolutely amazing to see that this tiny trickle of salt-saturated water, surrounded by so much empty space, can support so much life. Reading that desert life is dependent on rare water sources is one thing, but it’s entirely another to go to an actual oasis and see first-hand just how stark the contrast is. That’s one experience I am very thankful to be able to tick off my list.

I’ll be taking care of a few more bucket list tasks in the coming weeks (Joshua Tree, here I come), but my work time has been occupied with the usual end-of-field-season duties. I have herbarium samples to prepare and mail, a heap of data to enter and start to analyze, maps to make or update, and a next adventure to arrange. It was great to meet so many of you at the workshop, and I hope you all enjoy your internships as much as I have.

Joe