Ancient creosote shrubs at the Cadiz Dunes wilderness. [View all]

I got to spend an afternoon last week at one of my favorite places, the Cadiz Dunes wilderness east of the Sheephole Valley, in San Bernardino County, California. Cadiz Dunes is a roughly 20,000 acre dune field where windblown sand swirling from the Cadiz dry lake bed is deposited between the Old Woman Mtns in the east and the Calumet Mtns to the west.

The creosote shrubs at Cadiz Dunes are impressively large and presumably, quite old. Over time, many of the big ones have accumulated sand into hillocks from which the shrubs grow as seen in the photo below.