Creosote Bush

With leathery hands, the shaman laid the creosote twigs across the corpse then placed the male cadaver in the prone position. Facing north in the shallow grave, fired clay jars of seeds and dried venison for the afterlife were sealed by creosote lac and tucked up next to the dead dark skin of the La Junta Warrior.

The creosote plant covers over 120 million acres of land in Mexico and the southwestern USA. Native people of this region used the plant medicinally from birth to death for centuries in its raw form, as tea, and smoked. Perhaps as common as penicillin today, the creosote bush or greasewood remedied rheumatism, menstrual cramps, coughing, sore throats and poisonous bites. Today the federal government considers it unfit for human consumption, but some people still use it for the treatment of lyme disease and the melting of kidney stones. Modern medical experimentation includes using the plant to combat fatigue in patients undergoing chemo-therapy.

Scientists believe that a creosote plant seed was deposited in North America from South America by birds during the last ice age some 10,000 years ago. A descendant of one of these early bird droppings lives in Johnson Valley, California. At 9400 years old it is thought to be the oldest living organism in the world.

Like pine, the creosote bush is a bodega of resins suspended in an amber syrup rich in flavinoids, oils and waxes. These resins shield the leaf from the strong UV light and heat of the desert allowing photosynthesis to go uninterrupted inside the leaf. Three hundred and sixty chemicals have been isolated in the oils of the creosote bush including forty-nine types of volatile oils.

After many days of drought, a fresh rain in the Trans-Pecos brings out the smells of vinyl, camphor, and methyl ketones from the washed leaves of the creosote plant that many still call hediondilla or “little stinker.”

Fog

The morning sun warmed the moist air rising from the melting snow of the Stockton Plateau. Particulates not usually found in this region had been swept in by the storm. Now the particulates enhanced condensation of the air just above the ground as the snow lost its whiteness in a great gray blanket that covered the land.

Fog is a cloud that touches the ground. Water vapor, a colorless gas, becomes visible when it condenses and forms tiny water droplets. The gas turning into liquid or the water vapor becoming water is the visible spectrum that the human eye detects. The density of this air and water combination is the key to determining whether scientists consider it fog or mist. Fog reduces visibility to less than 1km while mist reduces visibility to I KM or more.

The temperature difference between the dew point or condensation point and the ambient air temperature is usually reduced with colder temperatures. Fog most often occurs when this temperature differential is less than 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

The process of water vapor turning into water droplets occurs in saturated air with a relative humidity of 100 per cent but can be less when particulates especially hygroscopic or water seeking particles like carbon emissions produce a condensation nuclei that enhances water vapor to condense at a lower relative humidity.

The foggiest places in the world are not found in the Trans-Pecos, but occasionally when storms or fronts sweep in wet cold air along with particulates from pollution sources such as vehicles and smoke stacks, together with other naturally occurring aerosols like soil dust lifted up from wind, the combination can increase the possibility of fog.

Fog on the California coast in Marin County occurs an average of 200 days per year where cooler dry land air meets the wetter warmer air above the Pacific Ocean. It is now believed that the sea weed known as kelp emits iodine particulates producing the condensation nuclei that enhances fog to form in air with less than 100 per cent relative humidity.