Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the desert.

A week of wild weather, those cold winds coming up the mountains.

To remind you so clearly, winter is not yet over.

The Joshua trees are beginning to show their strange green colored blooms a size and shape of artichokes.

The emotional call of a gamble's quail is beginning to be heard

in the washes and beneath the junipers and black brush.

The weeds are already springing up around the human habitations.

So maybe we will get a good crop of wildflowers in the Mojave High Desert.

But the nights remain chilly and a blast of midweek cold air arrived to admonish those of us

who'd already taken the cover off the swamp cooler.

You could remove every sign of human habitation from Morongo Valley to 29 palms and it would be a great improvement but for a true high desert heart, nothing compares to this wild landscape.

The blobs of granite boulders pushing out of the earth's crust, the tall mojave yuccas with their perfect little curls along their long dagger-like leaves.

The California Juniper's.

Male and female sometimes near enough to touch.

The latter covered in blue-white berries that nourished bird and beast.

A human, too, in the form of our beloved spirit called gin.

From Geneva, French for juniper the high desert is a riot of green over sandy soils and chocolate colored mountains the The Mormon tea bushes,

the Joshua tree,

spiky leaves,

mighty pinions on the hillsides.

These are the evergreens,

...