In late summer 2020, bolts of lightning struck near Cima Dome, a rocky promontory in the Mojave Desert. The strikes ignited both woodland and ground cover; by noon the next day 16,000 acres had burned; among the casualties: grasses, shrubs, trees and cacti all scorched and left for dead in the fire’s wake. The speedy wildlife — rabbits and squirrels — ran for their lives. Most of them survived. Animals adapted for life underground — lizards and serpents — rode out the conflagration in burrows and snake-holes. Things got much worse and more urgent August 16th throughout the afternoon. I quote from a document published by the National Park Service:

“Essentially, the fire created its own weather. A convection column rose, then capped out when it hit a certain altitude and was stopped by the atmosphere. When the convection column then collapsed, it created downdrafts and fire whirls (sometimes called firenadoes).”

Thus the inferno fed tornadic winds. Tinder near and far exploded on a hot wilderness day, while backup firefighters with adequate equipment remained miles away. Over the next week, an additional 27,000 acres were destroyed, including a million Joshua trees, most of them now presumed beyond regeneration.

People say forest fires disfigure, destroy beauty, leaving nothing behind but a grim waste. I offer these images — recorded by me two years after the event — as counterexamples. It seems this desert retains aesthetically pleasing qualities. Different shapes have unveiled themselves; new shades of color and new patterns of light and dark have come into being. Some yucca — for example the specimen below — have undergone a metamorphosis. They are no longer trees; instead they have become natural works of art to rival many parallel creations of Homo sapiens.

Our NPS writer used metaphor to describe the ravaged land beneath the Dome; he called it a graveyard of Joshua tree skeletons.

I prefer a different figure of speech — my idiosyncratic way of describing the new reality: a garden of sculpturesque delights.