I began this project researching an area called the Spangler Hills near Ridgecrest and the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station. Learning about the botany in the Spangler Hills, I soon found myself on the creosote path, the monoculture shrub of most of the Mojave.
I never dreamed that reading about creosote would lead me to King Clone and the ancient creosote rings of the Mojave. But the wonders (ok sure, nerd alert) didn’t stop there. Because creosote also led me to… camels. Yes, camels.
Sure, I’d seen the the monument pyramid in Quartzite, Arizona with a camel on top, but had assumed that was stereotypical desert iconography, continents out of place.
But it turns out, camels couldn’t be more in place in the Mojave, a land from which they originated and returned. Here’s the nutshell version of the story:
In ancient times, camels as a species originated in North America, evolving alongside other megafauna like giant ground sloths, sabertooth cats and mammoths during a far wetter epoch. The earliest known camel species Protylopus was the size of a rabbit (eee!) and lived in today’s South Dakota 40 to 50 millions years ago. Surviving camels around the Mediterranean today, as well as llamas in South America, all evolved from these early species, who migrated from North America across the Bering Straight to Eurasia, and across the Isthumss of Panama to South America.
The last camel native to North America, whose bones appear across California, was Camelops hesternus. Amazingly, this species went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene as temperatures warmed only around 13,000-11,000 years ago.
With King Clone’s age conservatively estimated at 11,700 years, this remarkable plant could have (maybe, almost, possibly) been nibbled on by a roaming Camelops when it was just a baby.
Wait, camels eat creosote? Doesn’t it taste like railroad ties? Ah yes and yes, stay tuned for part 2 of the story.
Quartzite, AZ monument to Hi Jolly, a character who appears in part 2 of this story.