Baja California a land of windswept coasts and windswept plants, native indigenous people from far, far away, statuesque stereotypical cactus and some that defy description.

Major funding for         The Desert Speaks was provided by the Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners and Arizona State Parks.

music Baja California is the third longest peninsula in the world.

It's isolated, sparsely populated, mountainous and dry.

Most of the peninsula receives less than six inches of rainfall a year.

For these reasons, the place has become an indescribable wonderland of native desert plants.

The oddest of these plants takes its Anglo name from the poem The Hunting of     the Snark by Lewis Carol.

It's called the boojum.

Alberto Burquez is a Mexican desert plant expert.

He'll be joining ecologist Yar Petryszyn and me in our coast-to-coast exploration of Baja California.

Over the past five and a half million years it has gradually drifted northwestward pulling itself away from the mainland over eighty miles distant.

With ocean on three sides, Baja California has forty times more coastline than it does international border.

This isolation is the perfect place for odd plants to evolve, even at the ocean's edge.

When you are driving in Baja California and run into fog, it means you're near the coast.

Since a lot of Baja California is near the coast, it means a lot of fog.

It can be hazardous too.

You've got to watch out.

But the fog also brings a little extra water to some of the plants in this very dry place.

It makes 'em grow better, makes 'em different.

Although the plants we see on this slope here by the sea are fairly common, in this case they have some strange shapes.

And it's due to the winds whipping across this exposed surface and it stunts the growth of a lot of these plants.

For instance, this alkine heath, Frankenia here, typically in another area may grow this high.

But here it's probably the same age as far as how long it's lived but it's really stunted and low to the ground to avoid the winds.

Another interesting plant that's quite common is the cliff spurge, one of the Euphorbia.

And typically it'll grow waist high or even higher but on this exposed slope it's growing low to the ground.

And this plant may be eighty years old or more, who knows.

You can also see this bonsai effect of stunted plants growing low to the ground up above timberline where it's very, very dry typically and also there's very strong winds much of the year.

It's hard to know whether to look at the plants or look for old archaeological sites, look at the water or look at the birds.

You've gotta make a choice.

Or watch the edge of the cliff so you don't fall in.

So you don't fall in.

I hate it when we do that.

It's amazing considering how dry it is here, only four inches of rainfall, that we get so many lichens in the area.

And it's probably due to the fog that comes in certain times of year and provides the moisture that they need.

On this little rock alone there's at least three different kinds.

There's the crustose, this flat gray-white looking material, and then the foliating type, the green that protrudes off the rock and also this little gray one here that stands up off the rock as well is a foliating type.

On this exposed rocky slope you really don't expect to see much in the way of cactus because of the winds and so forth but if you look closely, there's these little mammalaria.

And like much of the other vegetation you find on this exposed slope, you'll find 'em among the rocks, which protects them from the laminar flow of the winds that blow across these cliffs during certain times of the year.

Another interesting plant is this Dudleya in the stone crop family.

And it's a succulent plant, real fleshy leaves that store water.

And you'll see little clusters of 'em like this in amongst the rocks to protect them from the winds on this cliff face.

The Valle de Los Cirios Biosphere Reserve, was established to protect one plant, the boojum tree, or as they call it in Mexico, Cirio.

Adrián Aguirre is the preserve manager.

The boundaries of the preserve extend clear across Baja California from the Pacific Ocean to the Sea of Cortéz.

It's an area covering one-third of the state of Baja California and it's bigger than Massachusetts but with only three thousand inhabitants.

There are not many boojums near either coast.

The majority of them are found along granitic spine that runs the length of the peninsula.

There are two plants that dominate the landscape around here.

One is the big columnar cacti called the cardón or cardón sagueso and the other is the amazing       cirio or boojum tree.

The cirio gets its name because it resembles a candle, these old-fashioned candles that Jesuits brought to the region and the inflorescence on top is the flame of that candle.

How long ago did this get established as a protected area in Mexico?

It was twenty years ago but they didn't have the staff to take care of it and that was recent, about one year ago.

It's one of the biggest in Mexico and I guess also in the world.

Because this area Valle de los Cirios.

Outside there will be a little bit in Sonora, not much, and most of the extension of Valle de los Cirios is where you'll find the Cirio, this amazing plant in the Valle de los Cirios.

Like I know that you think the baobobs of Africa are weird.

You don't see a baobob growing up and then over and down like a rainbow.

Well, I do consider it, right.

What a strange plant.

Cirios are boojum trees that have the most amazing shapes and forms.

They do all kinds of gymnastics with their shape.

It would have been thirty to forty feet tall had it grown straight but it changed its mind and decided it wanted to drink out of the ground or visit relatives underground.

Cirios are part of a family of desert plants and one of the most common plants of this family that is all through the southwest of the U.S. and northern Mexico is the ocotillo.

Cirios can live for hundreds of years.

All the time they keep growing, if they have favorable conditions they will grow up to sixty feet or even more.

Why do you suppose the Cirios and boojums do so well in this rather small area?

Four inches of rain a year.

The sandy soils I think hold a lot of water plus the rocky slopes that concentrate the runoff.

The Cirios are opportunistic species so as soon as enough rain falls, they immediately sprout new foliage.

And these leaves will operate as long as the humidity stays in the ground, in the soil.

So when the soil dries, they will drop their leaves.

These plants do very well in central Baja California because here we have a combination of summer rainfall with some winter additional rainfall, high temperatures during summertime and very mild winters.

After thirty years of wanting to see the Cirios, the boojums, I can finally say "ho, ho, the boojums, definitely a boojum."

I was totally unprepared for how big and tall, thick the boojums are.

And so few people here.

Well, forty years ago, probably only five people a year came.

Now there should be about just under one thousand people every year coming to this place.

There's a growing interest by the Mexican government to increase the number of protected areas, both in acreage and in quality of protection.

However, protected areas are competing heavily with development.

This is a very close race and we don't know who will win at the end.

As more and more people visit Baja California, many of them are flying in, usually to go to resorts.

Others are coming in by boat, with good reason, because the marine life is phenomenal.

But for us, the best way is to drive.

That way we can stop and explore.

Okay, if we take this steady, we'll be at Guardian Angel Island in two hours and forty-seven minutes.

Well, let's go for it.

It's cold enough right now that we could actually do it.

Although there's whirlpools between us and there.

Ah, I was hoping he'd dive.

Come on.

Let's see ya.

There he goes.

There he goes.

Man, that is cool.

Unlike the Pacific Ocean, which generates huge waves where the water is rough, the Sea of Cortez has very little in the way of waves and is usually cold enough for sea kayaking.

It's the perfect way to relax, view bird life, and look back up at the rugged coast.

We better go around this point.

I know some guys that went clear across the gulf and island hopping.

Wow!

That would be a lot of fun.

Oh man, would that ever be.

They ran into some whirlpools between San Lorenzo and San Esteban that were pretty scary.

But they went right through 'em.

It didn't seem to affect the kayaks at all.

Apparently the gulf is very deep between some of the islands.

They're like ancient mountains and there's these immense valleys between them so you get these very deep currents and when the tide moves, it creates whirlpools.

Oh, look at that.

Oh, god, he got that.

Oh, that was cool.

You know, he's just a kid, right?

Close to the Sea of Cortez it's too dry for another of Baja California's unusual plants, the native palms.

For those we head a hundred miles north to Cataviña.

In Baja California the landscape, the plants, everything, so much can change very quickly.

You go close to the sea, you get new plants.

You go into the mountains, you get new plants and different landscapes.

Sometimes in the space of just a few kilometers it's as if you've gone into a different country.

In this canyon, near Cataviña, there are three kinds of palm trees.

Two of them in the genus Washingtonia that is the common fan palm and an old one that is endemic to Baja California, the Mexican blue palm.

Blue palms are only present in Baja California.

They have beautiful blue foliage and they are common in the canyons.

The two forms of fan that occur here are the California fan palm that has a stout base and is not very tall and the Mexican fan palm that is very tall.

In some cases it can reach more than seventy feet high.

Two of the many uses of these palms growing out here in the desert were one, to make rope.

They could tear these little leaflets apart and the resulting fiber could be twisted together or even woven to make a very strong rope.

A rope as long as you wanted it.

Another odd use would be to take the leaf of a fan palm, tear off the barbs on the side and you'll actually have a fan.

And when you were done fanning yourself, it makes an excellent thatch for a roof.

Palm trees are relics from our former era, widespread when life on earth was more humid and warmer.

So now we find palm trees in protected canyons where they can use the available humidity that the canyon brings as well as the protection from freezes.

The indigenous people long ago discovered that underneath all these leaves, the trunk always stayed dry.

So they figured if they put them on the roofs of their houses, they would stay dry as well.

So one by one they would take and lay one down, put another on top, put another on top, fit another one underneath and layer them just as so they were roofing tiles, roofing shingles, come out with a roof that would shed all water and would last from fifteen to twenty years.

There aren't many houses or thatched roofs in Cataviña, partly because there's no water but mostly because there's no place to build.

Granite is the best rock in the world for boulder hopping.

Right.

Makes you think you're a billy goat or a little kid, I don't know which is worse.

Brings back childhood memories.

This looks like a baseball cap up there.

I can't get up there but I can hop over somewhat.

The area around Cataviña in northern Baja is unique because there's massive piles of granitic boulders throughout the area.

And these are formed by big pluton, molten magma, that comes to the surface or close to the surface but not to the surface therefore overlaid by parent material that insulates it and this massive glob may take tens of thousands to a million years to cool.

But as it cools, it shrinks and by doing so you get fracturing.

This eventually is uplifted, the overlay material is eroded and the granite is exposed and erodes into these massive jumble of boulders.

And granite's unique in that this long cooling process allows the crystals like quartz and felspar and hornblend to grow to some size.

Yeah, we could stay here and get out of the rain, what little rain there is.

The whole family can be accommodated here.

The kids would certainly have a lot of fun.

Look, this piece cracked off just for us.

The granite that's been on the surface is typically weathered and may break easy.

If we break this, maybe we can see the inside crystalline structure a little better.

And you typically see some of the common crystals in granite, the white is quartz and then there's a slight pinkish crystal that's felspar and then the dark crystal is probably hornblend.

It's pretty dense material.

Matter of fact, tombstones are typically made out of granite.

But once it's exposed to the elements, the weathering, moisture getting into the cracks, it crumbles readily and actually produces a nice sand in the washes and beaches that happen to be near the coastline.

It's called grus.

In Mexico do you ever play King of the Mountain?

Something like that, yes.

This would not be a good place to play King of the Mountain.

It makes you want to be in charge of the whole place.

Apart from the wonderful geological scenery, the plants that dominate the landscape are boojum trees, big cardóns and elephant trees.

Those three species are widespread in the region but are restricted to Baja California.

The combination of these strange plants and the strange geology makes an eerie landscape that characterizes this region near Cataviña.

These big columnar cacti are known generically as cardón.

That means big thistle.

Also has the name of cardón sagueso.

They are among the biggest columnar cacti in the world.

I'll measure the number of Yetmans this pachycereus has.

There's one, two, three, four, five, six and a half Yetman units.

And that means that if this is thirteen meters tall, it's probably forty-five feet tall.

That's about the same height as the steeple on my father's church when I was a lad.

I thought that was the tallest thing in the world.

But there are taller saguesos.

I think the tallest is about sixty-two feet.

So this is about, not even three-quarters as tall as the tallest one and it is massive.

Columnar cacti are extremely efficient in collecting water after the rains.

They actively pump water into their trunks and expand like accordions, filling with water that will allow them to pass through the dry season.

Cardóns do have an internal skeleton made of soft wood that provides the structural support for the whole plant and it allows to carry the weight of these many tons of water that there is stored inside.

This elephant tree seems appropriately named.

It's branches and trunk are thickened like an elephant.

Pachy, Pachycormus , pachyderm.

What does pachycormus mean?

Well, pachycormus means pachy -thick and cormus -trunk, so it's very appropriate, the name.

So what is it called in Spanish?

In Spanish it is called torote, that means big bull and also copalquín.

That would be for the medical properties, right, that it's got?

Yes.

copalquín refers to the medical properties of the bark and stems.

This elephant tree inside has a lot of weird chemicals, dyes, astringents, all sorts of stuff like all members of the cashews and tasting this, you can see the red color which means it's got weird dyes.

That is very astringent.

It puckers your mouth like a prune or a piece of alum.

No herbivore in his right mind, no insect, no mammal, is going to want to gnaw on the bark of this tree.

The rugged less well- known landscape of Baja California fades into the urbanized north about two hundred miles south of the U.S. border.

The fairyland of the boojums merges into the fairytales of modern industrialized society, like here in San Quintín.

Yeah, twenty years ago, San Quintín was this little bump in the road place.

Now it's a boomtown or a boom bust town.

It's grown a lot in this very short span of time and it's mainly caused by immigrant workers that were looking for a brighter future in California and failed completely and stayed here.

So they couldn't make it into the U.S. so instead they harvest tomatoes here.

They decided to stay in this region and started settling the area.

So these tomatoes probably have a future because they can be raised in green houses, don't take a huge amount of water.

No.

And there's a huge market in the United States for these kind of products, at certain times of year.

But ultimately I have to wonder whether it's gonna be another bust and we'll see another vacated town as we so often see in the U.S. in agricultural towns and in Mexico.

The people of northern Baja California tend to be of Mestizo stock, i.e.

is light skinned, perhaps tall.

When you see people who are shorter and have darker skin, you know there are no indigenous people in Baja California, you know they came from elsewhere and these people mostly have come from Oaxaca, the southern very poor state which is very high percentage indigenous people, Indian.

They've moved up here to try to find a better way of life.

The family with whom I'm speaking have twelve children and the parents who came together in a bus looking for work.

They had relatives here who said they would be able to find work when they got here in the area of San Quintín.

The new colony that they have founded up here already has more than a thousand people.

They're of Mixtec descent.

They still speak the Mixtec language.

They come up here and find that they are readily accepted in the community.

They marry within the community and try to carry on all the customs that they had back in Oaxaca.

But all of them say that they miss greatly the beautiful land of Oaxaca.

It's a very popular meal in Oaxaca and here we find it in northern Baja California.

And they are good.

They taste sort of like sunflower seeds.

The southern cities have a tendency to have been there longer, to have colonial traditions.

People with more roots, with longer roots, going back perhaps a hundred, two hundred years.

The north is new.

Very few people lived here fifty to a hundred years ago.

Now there are hundreds of thousands in the area of Tijuana, millions.

Very few people have long-term roots here.

It brings on social problems with it.

Creating social conditions that will permit these transplanted indigenous people to perpetuate their ancient traditions and maintain their cultural identity may prove to be more difficult than protecting the great droves of boojums and saguesos.

You know that here in Mexico they are called Cirios.

Cirios.

And it's because of the shape.

They resemble the candles that the Jesuits brought to Baja California with the tapered form.

And at the very end they have the influorescence, that is yellow and when it ages it turns a bit reddish so it resembles a flame.

It's very well named.

The flowers are always at the top.

Yes.

Major funding for         The Desert Speaks was provided by the Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by