Here’s the riddle: Nobody can say how old the California desert actually is, or where its plants and animals came from. Creosote, ocotillo, cactus, the chuckwalla itself — did they evolve out there over tens of millions of years, or move in recently after the Sierra rose up and cut off the rain? Wallace walks Death Valley, Red Rock Canyon, the Kelso Dunes, and other stretches while tracing two centuries of scientists arguing over it. Daniel Axelrod, a paleobotanist who read the answer in fossil leaves and got loud about it. Ledyard Stebbins on the botany side. Edmund Jaeger and Joseph Wood Krutch, who just went out and lived there. He doesn’t settle it, because it isn’t settled.
Chuckwalla Land