I wake up startled… some dream it must have been! I was falling. I'm sweating and panting. It’s 4:30am and I want to be in the park before dawn to watch the sunrise. It’s cold outside. Desert cold. Such is the violence of this place. Scorching hot during the day, freezing cold at night. I drink it all. I jump in the good old Ford, turn on the headlights and catch the silhouette of a fast-moving creature on a hunt. I ride through Pioneer Town, or rather it's ghost at this time, traffic lights changing at an unruly pace, store fronts illuminated but obviously deserted, a few long haul trucks ripping the night with their diesel roar, and a biker on a charge coming from far away, blasting my ears as it overtakes me and spits rubber on my windshield. A half-hour later I climb a hill out of the town and houses start to scatter out until they totally disappear. I reach the entrance of the park marked by a frontier-post cabin with the American Flag hoisted high, catching the first pale pink rays of the sun. It’s closed. I will save the $25 fee for today. I floor it and in a blink find myself on a different planet. Since yesterday I’ve be slapped out of my gaze several times by drastically changing landscape. It’s as if you were roaming somewhere and went through an invisible portal that teleported you on another world, over and over again. I am in the city # FLASH # I’m in the desert # FLASH # I’m in the mountain # FLASH # in a town # FLASH # in Joshua Tree Park!!!

The road starts to slither through the same kind of soil I've seen in the Antelope Valley except that Joshua Trees and increasingly massive rocks have been scattered over it… The high ridges. I make a right towards Key’s View. It’s a sight-seeing spot on the crest of the Little San Bernardino Mountains about twenty minutes in the park when you enter from the North. And it is… breathtaking! If you love the outdoors chances are that you’ve already seen beautiful sceneries. Sometimes I wonder why it is that I’m still struck and enchanted by sites such as this one. I never reach a logical explanation that would satisfy the rational and analytical part of my brain that structures every thought, that classifies them, orders them in sequence, that ranks them, that compares. Comparisons are necessary but toxic somehow. The more you compare, the less you lose the ability to abandon yourself in the moment, in the depth of the experience. Then again, without comparison experience cannot be utilized to learn and grow. I’m on a journey to tame the mind and acquire the ability to navigate between spontaneity and analysis, between abandon and control, between a child-like sense of wonder and adult use of knowledge. The moment I stand alone on the edge of the highest point on Key’s view, I’m slapped in the face, and I laugh. I laugh like a kid on the craziest ride at the amusement park.

It’s all the same brown I’ve seen on the lower half of every view since yesterday. The mountains are witnesses of the on-going million-year-old twirls and twists and pushes torturing the center of the earth. All is crumpled and rippled and stretched and compressed. The wind is blowing extremely strong, whipping pure mile high brisk air into my face, unbalancing me. My eyes are watering, and as the sun rises I can see miles and miles away, into the Coachella Valley, the San Andreas Fault and the Salton Sea. They say that on a good day you can see Signal Mountain in Mexico… It’s as if I were free falling, the sensation of speed is compelling and has me giggling and laughing. I am struck by the first rays of light shooting vaporous lazers of pink, purple and gold on the valley. It’s cold. I enjoy the bite on my bones. My mind is present and loose. I am just grateful.

Back on my ride I roll down ready to explore more of this place and find interesting locations for the team. This certainly was one to be reckoned with. As the road starts to level again after the descent, I see a sign for the Lost Horse Mine. I can’t resist the name. Legend has it that this very prolific mine of the 18th century gold rush was discovered by Johnny Lang, a cowboy who had fled New Mexico after one too many gunfights! One night one of his horses disappeared and while looking for it he ran into a local gang who threatened him and a man who claimed he had found a gold mine but was afraid to exploit it on account of said gang. Johnny wasn't afraid. He'd dodged bullets before in New Mexico. He was kind of addicted to the smell of gun powder and aroused by the thought of Gold. Johnny made the deal, loaded his six-shooters and called it the Lost Horse Mine.

It’s a two-mile hike from the parking. After five minutes between hills and cracks, surrounded by Joshua trees and crumbling rocks, I’m in the middle of nowhere, with no one but the intimidating presence of a thick silence. My imagination catches fire and I can feel the horse between my legs, a bow around my chest keeping my eyes peeled for signs of the poaching white man (I’ve always only fantasized being an Indian, never a cowboy). I get down from my faithful horse and whisper to him to stay still and keep quiet. I lie down in the dirt and start crawling to the top of the narrow path to hear where the noises on the other side are coming from. There I see a group of white men, talking loud, shouting, building a wooden structure… a mine! Hmmmm it’s bad news. White men found gold here, means more will arrive, defile the land, kill all living things and bring violence for money!

The Lost Horse Mine is an impressive structure that gives a good idea of what the gold rush was all about. It is said that 10,000 ounces were extracted here, about 310 kilograms, worth over 13 million dollars at today’s value of the metal. It’s easy to imagine how men who had given up everything, thrown themselves on the road in hope of a better life, drifting along with nothing but a couple of horses and a few items, could be willing to die for this. Gold drifters in a way.

It would be a nice place to shoot scenes were it not for the fact that I suspect the guys on the crew are not gold rush pioneers and miners and I doubt they’d be happy to carry the equipment that far out on challenging paths. Johnny Lang and his crew did transport all the equipment to build an active mine in the middle of nowhere!!!

As I walk back, reflecting on the pioneer spirit and what it means to expose yourself to the unknown, to confront head first a hostile environment, to live most of your life in the midst of the harshest adversity, I feel a kinship with all those men and marvel at the fact that barely more than a hundred years later, we are able to enjoy this place as a park! I must come back and camp here. Strangely, the silence is a presence here. It talks. It is loud. The sand and the rocks that dominate the landscape and promise a cruel disappointment to whomever would try to plant any seed, cannot resist the Joshua Trees… What a strange and magnetic place.

Twenty minutes further I stumble upon a sign for Desert Queen Mine. By then my mind is boiling and bubbling high on all the gold rush mystic so without hesitation I head on and immediately find myself on a dirt road. The Ford is as far removed from its horse carriage ancestor as can be, even from it’s great grand-father the Model T. She’s a delicate princess, with tons of electronics, a hybrid engine, air conditioning and blue-tooth for my phone! Yet it still has four wheels and as a heavy cloud of sand and dust lifts from the road in the middle of this desert where hills, rocks, mountains and cracks play tricks on your depth of perception, and toys with your mind, I remember that scene from Martin Scorsese’s Casino when Sam “Ace” Goldstein/Robert De Niro awaits for Nicky Santoro/Joe Pesci in the Nevada desert.

“Meeting in the middle of the desert always made me nervous. It’s a scary place. I knew about the holes in the desert of course, everywhere I looked there could have been a hole. Normally my prospects of getting back alive from a meeting with Nicky were 99 out of 100. But this time, when I heard him say ‘a couple hundred yards down the road’ I gave myself fifty-fifty”.

Robert de Niro / Sam "Ace" Rothstein in Martin Scorsese' Casino

It is a scary place alright. That single shot of De Niro standing in the desert with his thick shades, his gold jacket, black trousers and his polished loafer, nervously smoking a cigarette says it all. Everything is dead still around him, the sand, the bushes and the ridge in the background. Silence. He is calm and controlled, yet his voice is tense. He takes a look towards the ridge over his shoulder into nothingness. Then one nervous side step and another one as the camera follows. You can feel his sinister discomfort. Over the next few days I will have flashes of this scene, and especially the following two shots, the aerial view of Nicky’s car and its reflection on a close up of De Niro’s sunglasses with its trail of dust.

A couple hundred miles South of Jean Dry Lake Nevada, where that legendary scene was shot, is another trail that leads to the Desert Queen Mine. This time we’re talking a ten-minute walk to reach the former site, the anti-climactic lack of equipment compared to Lost Horse is more than compensated by the layout of the area. In a hollow spot right before the top of the little ridge is the ruin of a house that used to belong to the mine, surrounded by rock formations that provide a good cover from bad weather or potential assailant. A few steps further and you reach the edge of a sort of mini canyon where you can easily imagine bands of horsemen arriving looking carefully over the shoulder on the hills to detect the presence of any hidden Indian scouts or enemy gangs. It would be an epic spot for a gunfight… or a TV shoot.

Back in the dust. Back on the road, huge rocks start sprouting on each side. A coyote trots sideways, takes a lazy unimpressed look at me…

He seems one with his surroundings, his fur the perfect camouflage, stealthy hunter, blending with the bushes, the send, the rocks, as smooth as the grass, as nonchalant as the Joshua trees. There is a harmony around here that is absolute; until out of a right curve, death itself arises and finally claims it’s empire over the land.

My heart skips a beat and I have to confront it. From up close the Skull Rock is about to swallow me but just whispers in my ear “remember… out here you are only tolerated… don't overstay your welcome”. How many souls did it claim?

In a few hours, hordes of fat tourists in mini-vans will come, stop for two minutes and take five hundred pictures before going to Disneyland. The Skull will look at all of them with a silent contempt and the quiet certainty that a couple of them, at some point, will have some mechanical issue on a side road, discuss briefly what to do considering there is no cell phone reception in the park and the fact that they are physically unable to walk more than a couple of hundred yards, start to argue and then just panic. He’s heard it many times before. He’s watch them despair and repent. He’s heard them beg for forgiveness for having disrespected the desert. "Told you, this ain’t an amusement park". He will stand here long after we’re all gone.

I pay respect to the mighty Rock and leave before I see any of them fast-food-fueled-disneyland-loving-selfystick-carrying goons. I drive and drive until the road splits and I have to make a choice: left towards the North East exit or South towards Highway 10, the longer option. I’m strangely attracted by the Salton Sea, so I make a right a floor it. I should get used to passing through those invisible teleportation portals, but I’m still stunned when I get over the ridge and out of a curve and find myself on top of the premise of the Coachella valley laying right there, miles and miles ahead in front of me. Where have the rocks gone? They seem to congregate on the other side towards the center of the Park. They are a tribe and the tribe has moved. This rattle snake road smoothly crawls through increasingly weird vegetation. Out of nowhere in this unforgivingly dry land where the Skull rules and coyotes dance, I stumble upon a surreal plant, the Cholla Cactus. On this brownish planet, below the lapis lazuli roof, I witness an explosion of the most delicately pale emerald green. You rejoice. But before you imagine desert is finally reaching out with a friendly wink and is letting you know that you’ve almost made it to the other side, get closer and whatever you do, do not be fooled. These mesmerizing gems are not your friends. They are ferocious creatures that will punish you even harder than the Skull with their thousand spikes, torture needles that pierce through any fabric and break under your skin.

Yet as I keep going down in the valley Southbound on the Cottonwood Springs Road towards the Salton Sea, I feel a deep attachment to the desert arising. It is a very harsh and unforgiving place, but if you respect it and open yourself to its power, if you learn how to listen to its whispers, it becomes this low frequency growl, this presence in your soul which stays with you long after you are back to wherever you belong. This idea was on my mind as I exited the park, crossed the interstate and started on the Box Canyon road. Joshua Tree was behind me and I was eager to see this “sea” that looks like an unimpressive lake on the map.