On Mexico's Wild Side, Baja Peninsula Features Whales, Exotic Preserves Dario Lopez-Mills
go to original March 19, 2015

Mexico's Baja Peninsula is one of the most spectacular places on earth. You can see the beauty and why it's worth protecting. (UGENAdotORG)

Far from the sprawling, all-inclusive resorts of Mexico’s Los Cabos is a part of the Baja California peninsula that few tourists ever see, but should.

In one of Mexico’s largest federally protected conservation areas for flora and fauna is a land forested with desert plants that look like they were drawn by Dr. Seuss: candle-like boojum trees and distinctively sculptural elephant trees, towering cardon cacti and other types of succulents.

Sitting in the middle of the peninsula, this little-known spot is the Valle de los Cirios, or Valley of the Boojums. The plants it is named for were dubbed cirios — or candles — in Spanish, evidently because of their resemblance to tapered church candles at the missions nearby. Southwestern naturalist Godfrey Sykes later christened that same tree the “boojum,” for an imaginary animal character in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark.”

Birds like pelicans and ospreys abound and peninsular pronghorns, once hunted to near extinction, roam the desert landscape. Under a Mexican government program, the hoofed animals are now making a comeback from their once critically endangered status. Among the oldest known mammals in the Americas, the pronghorns are known locally as “ghosts of the desert” because their golden brown or tan color and white markings helps camouflage them.

Nearby, visitors can see ancient cave paintings depicting deer, whales and humans with six fingers.

The stark beauty and solitude encountered are a far cry from the fancy restaurants, pools with swim-up bars, fishing, snorkeling and sunbathing popular on the southern end of the Sea of Cortez, the long slip of water sandwiched between the Baja Peninsula and Mexico’s mainland. The peninsula was once eloquently described in a travel journal by American writer John Steinbeck; its stunning coral reefs were praised by ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.

A short way to the south, magnificent gray whales arrive every year off the Pacific coast town of Guerrero Negro, following one of the world’s longest migration routes. They mate and calve in the lagoons nearby.

Read the rest at Orange County Register

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