Cure light wounds (pine pitch)

Pine pitch grows on trees, of course, or at least comes from trees. The clear gum drips like crystal tears, its delicacy against the pine bark strikingly lovely. As it ages, it hardens and dries. If left undisturbed, it will harden into copal, and ultimately can fossilize into amber.

Not for cooking. Probably. Or not much. Although retsina, and I can imagine the sharp medicinal flavour working well in some settings ... and deep in the subsequent pages of a google search, I found a few oddities: pine resin potatoes, and pine resin chocolate. And, oh happy day, these people after my own heart making all sorts of bitters and syrups and shipping them from Colorado.

Pitch can be incorporated into a balm or used alone as an incense. The pitch is also traditionally used in the southwest and Mexico to remove splinters, spines, or glochids. The balm is useful for small cuts or irritations, for soothing rashes, as a barrier cream, and generally for minor insults to the skin. It even makes a pretty reasonable emergency deodorant.

Gather the fresh resin with a stick, because wow it is sticky*. It's also almost overwhelmingly tempting to touch it, because the partly dried droplets are gummy, squishy, stretchy, and generally a source of tactile satisfaction.

So it's good to know that oil will unstick the stickiness - hand sanitiser/rubbing alcohol too, but not quite as well. Oil will also dissolve the resinous gum, making a strongly pine-scented maceration which can then be blended with other ingredients as usual to make various creams and potions. I use a lot of pine balm and I like the foresty smell of it, so when we saw quantities of pitch out in the wild recently, I thought I'd harvest some and figure out how to make my own ... luckily, the internet, and little figuring was required.

Currently I have a big jar of pine pitch oil sitting in the kitchen. With the greenish oil and lumps of pitch slowly dissolving, it looks like something that would be more at home in a potion master's dungeon-cum-office. But one day soon I will turn it into perfectly well-behaved and seemly balm. More to come ...

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*Q. What's brown and sticky? 

A. A stick. 


Cure light wounds specification.

A desert sage adventure

Desert hills, sage in foreground

In the Mojave National Preserve, desert sage is everywhere, acres of it, whole arroyos full of it, great gardens spread out lengthwise over hillsides. Its leaves smell recognisably like common sage, only stronger, spicier, and more like armpits (hmm, maybe I'm not overselling it here?) Some plants have an almost coyote-pee stink to them.

This is not the world-famous white sage, used for smudging. Nor is it the giant Mojave blue sage, whose flower spikes have huge magnificent spheres of blue rising up out of the grey-green foliage, one of the only Mojave flowering plants that you can buy in nurseries. This is the desert sage, salvia dorrii, also called Great Basin sage or purple sage. It grows all over the place around here, but in very specific kinds of terrain: not too high up, not too low (too hot in the desert valleys), usually on sloping ground, often in wide washes.

Caruthers Canyon

Towards the New York Mountains

A spring weekend morning, an unexplored road, and a 4x4 with new tyres is a sure recipe for happiness. The trusty 'Hiking in the Mojave Desert' won, yet again, with another spot-on recommendation. 

Caruthers Canyon reminds me of very old descriptions of canyons in the desert southwest - the isolation and unspoiled beauty, the trees, flowers and peacefulness. (Probably those 19th and early 20th century authors did not have the near-constant noise of planes overhead though.) 

She gets a bit bumpy aye.

We could camp here. Look! It has a table!

This haven of pine trees, granite, and wildflowers is just three hours from home. Two of those are over dirt roads, of which some are graded and not too washboardy, and some are tracks that would make you yelp. (Barreeeee!) 

We picnicked in the shade of an oak tree. These desert species are non-deciduous and have sturdy little leaves, almost like holly leaves. The warm sun on nearby junipers made a fragrant accompaniment.

Then we walked up the track to the camping - and immediately wished we had driven up there before lunch. The pines shelter a few primitive campsites, and the granite outcrops are all sorts of picturesque. There are grizzly-bear-prickly-pears sprawling low to the ground, and stony hills rising on three sides. 

We could buy it. Look! It has a wall!

On the way out from the canyon, we saw 20 acres for sale and had to be quite stern with each other. We already own an ample number of tumbledown out-of-the-way properties. (Surely just one more couldn't hurt?)

Our drive home took us along the Mojave Road, a 500-year old trail westwards through the desert. In many places it is sunken six feet or more below the level of the surrounding desert, and you have the feeling of being immersed, or of tunneling through sand. And my word, but the Mojave is astounding in bloom this year. Hillsides purple with sage or golden with - eh, IDK, yellow flowers, I guess. Lots of globe mallow making fields of orange, and splashes of day-glo cactus blooms and paintbrush.

There's something soul-cleansing about being out in the middle of that rich dense everything, all calmly going about its normal occasions. Sometimes it's even enough to last me all week.   

Ozymandias and the Zzyzx dancing girls (Desert Studies Center, Mojave National Preserve)

I could only see them as plumptious dancers, green fan hands high and modestly wrapped to to the ankles. Try un-seeing that now. Eh, you're welcome.

Zzyzx dancing girls

Christmas tree flowers

It's December, and I am missing pohutukawa ... (link for my non Kiwi readers if such there be)

But - look what I found in Arizona. This will do til the real thing comes along.

I think it's a calliandra

Cans, stripes, luck (Carrara NV)

It was a lovely cloudy day on Sunday. I'm still delighted by stunning blue sky days here, but sometimes a brewing storm can be even more beautiful. It wasn't heavy enough to be raining down to ground level much, but the virga/walking clouds were trailing lightly over the hills, and the sunlight was dappling the land through huge crazy cloud patterns.

Raffle prize - a chunk of halite from California.
Approx 25 cm across. Yes, it's pink.

We started out by driving over the hill to Pahrump, where Simon had won two raffle prizes at last week's rock and gem show. (Our batting average lately is astounding, actually. Last time I entered a raffle was at the rock and gem club meeting a few weeks ago, where I also won two prizes, one of them the grand prize. Hey statistics, you just keep looking the other way, okay? Okay.) The prize pickup was handled in a particularly Nevadan way, by meeting up in a casino car park.

Goldengrove unleaving (Autumn aspens on 143)

We took a drive from Panguitch up the hill. The road climbs through farmland and forest, past a lake and alongside creeks, from about 6500 feet to nearly 10,000.


The autumn foliage was at its fleeting loveliest, the sky flawlessly blue ...

So here's some melancholic autumn poetry for you.

(It isn't magic all the time
It's only magic when I rhyme.
- Johnny Fartpants (attr.*))

"That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."
 - Shakespeare


“At no other time does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost."
- Rilke

"Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing"
 - Rilke again


("Margaret, are you grieving
over goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
with your fresh thoughts care for, can you?"
- Hopkins

How things from high school stick with you! Shout out to the girls of De Valon House, Miss McLafferty, pre-photocopier duplicating machines of all kinds - can you smell the spirit? - and autumn nostalgia.)

Itinerary

Highway 143 Panguitch - Brian Head - Parowan

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*So Simon claims. Weirdly, this Viz character was written by Simon Donald. Coincidence? I Don't Think So. I'm onto you, SDM. 

Cima Dome / Teutonia Peaks (a Mojave desert hike)

One of our favourite desert spots is the Cima Dome / Teutonia Peaks walk in the Mojave National Preserve. Simon went there in the winter and saw animal tracks in the snow. I've so far only been in the spring, but I've been trying to make up for lost time by taking visitors out to enjoy the cactus in flower, Joshua tree forest, other wildflower blooms in great profusion (especially desert sage) - and of course, the solitude.

and then I saw this flower

I'm usually the one saying "Oh no we should really clean the kitchen this weekend". So even though it was a really cool, wet spring, which means a bumper year for desert wildflowers, I was exceptionally slow to warm up to the idea. Of course I did, eventually, and then in my customary fashion created a series of completely artificial and absurd tasks for myself ... I want a picture of this kind of flower. Okay, now this kind. A close-up. A landscape. Standing on one leg ...

Now the procedure is to take a close-up, a bigger shot of the plant so I can see its habits and structure, and maybe remind myself just where we were, and then when back at home try and match it up with one of the wildflower books and leaflets, or, as a last resort, online (cheating, cos it's too easy.)

And this was the first one that I was struck by, on the way out to Death Valley in April with a bran new camera in my lap. (It's a white Sony α5000. Is nice, like sputnik.) The hilarious part is that it's one of the most common wildflowers (this year, anyway) in these parts ... we've since seen fields of it in Southern Nevada, Mojave, Arizona, Utah. But when I first saw it, I didn't even know its name, and it was only just coming into flower here and there. (A bit like my knowledge of desert flowers, really, which is still only coming into flower here and there.)

On Black Canyon Rd, Mojave Nat'l Preserve

Desert globemallow. (Sphaeralcea ambigua - urk, really?) is the orange jewel broadcast on the side of highways, freeways, byways in late spring and early summer. It seems to like a bit more elevation or moisture than creosote, from what I've seen. It's not noticeably scented. The leaves are almost rough to the touch. They look quite like pelargonium leaves and have the same fleshiness to them.

The flowers are vaguely like poppies.

I don't know that it's specifically good for anything other than being lovely. (Well, I looked it up and you can use it like other mallows and that was fantastic because I found this site while doing that, which also reminded me I need to get out my Art Stix and notebook and draw flowers again.)

But it's so good at being lovely, and anyway I'm no herbalist, so the mucilaginous qualities of its roots are probably going to remain undisturbed by me for now. (Famous last words, right?)

Some other Anglo names are apricot mallow, desert mallow, globe-mallow, sore-eye poppy.