How hitchhiking through America spurred a love of desert walking for author Geoff Nicholson

26.01.2024 - 09:25 / nationalgeographic.com / Art

The memories of my first encounter with the California desert are so clear and intense that sometimes I wonder if I invented them, but I don’t believe so. I was hitchhiking across the States — it was the 1970s — and I was a young Englishman ‘on the road’, having read too much Jack Kerouac. My lift dropped me at a gas station near Barstow, a city in the Mojave Desert, in the south of the state. The car was air-conditioned and as I got out, I was hit by a wall of heat as strange and thrilling as anything I’d ever experienced. 

I was wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I went into the petrol station’s bathroom to drench it in water, then went out looking for a place to hitch. By the time I found one, the T-shirt was completely dry. It was a learning experience, proving that the desert has to be treated with huge respect. It isn’t a monster, it won’t bite you, but it does demand that you’re on your mettle.

That was the start of a long relationship with the American desert, chiefly the Mojave, especially Joshua Tree National Park, Yucca Valley and Death Valley. I’d always lived in cities and done lots of urban walking, but the moment I set foot in the desert I knew it was a very special place for me. Nothing in the English landscape moved me the way it did.I began to make regular desert trips and for a decade and a half I lived in Los Angeles. I had many reasons for moving there, but the fact that I could be in that landscape in a couple of hours was a large part of the attraction. 

Walking is the way I experience and explore the desert, although, of course, a reliable 4WD helps in getting there. I don’t claim to be some great explorer. I find an appealing stretch of desert, and I walk there. And if I find wonders such as petroglyphs, an abandoned gold mine or, say, the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art, then so much the better.

Cliches abound regarding the desert — that it’s a place of stillness, silence, emptiness. But, only up to a point. It is also a place of winds and shifting contours, sometimes of low-flying military planes, and although it’s in some sense empty, once you start looking, every plant, every rock, every jackrabbit is a source of fascination. 

There’s isolation and solitude, but sometimes you meet fellow travellers. I was once in Stovepipe Wells, in Death Valley, setting off into the wilds, when I met a huge, imposing man who asked, “So how do you like my desert?”. I said I liked it very much and didn’t argue about whether or not it was his. Then he said, “If you walk on concrete for too long you start to think like a predator.” 

I had no answer to that and went on my way. Undoubtedly, I’ve done a lot of walking on concrete, but I don’t think I’m a predator. And when I’m in a