Oscar T. Odegaard Describes a Hike in Death Valley
It is astonishing what one can retrieve from the vasty deeps of the World Wide Web. I was thinking today of the late Oscar T. Odegaard, of Alhambra, California, father of my boyhood friend Joe Odegaard with whom I attended kindergarten, grade school, and high school. A little searching led me to this site where I found the following excerpts from Oscar's pen. I preserve them here in honor of a man of whom I have fond memories. He was no slouch of a wordslinger.A more recent account from a desert visitor is by Mr. Oscar Odegaard of Alhambra. He described a trip to the Eureka Dunes by an Explorer Scout Troop, sponsored by St. Therese Parish, in the Parish Newsletter under the heading, "A Desert Experience". A few selected paragraphs appear below: (1980)
"These empty valleys are serene, majestic savannahs of creosote bush and sage, of sand mountains and their lesser dunes, always shifting, but always in the same places. Empty? Well, empty of mankind, that is, except for us."
"I hiked over to the opening of a canyon coming out of the bluffs of the range--about two miles away, SE. As I walked up an alluvial fan, I found thousands upon thousands of a low growing flower, only 6 to 7 inches high, with golden-brown, almost hairlike stems, each very stiff and branching, and then branching out again, at perky angles. Each branchlet was tipped with a tiny bright-yellow pair of petals, like the wings of some small perched insect made of new gold. I hated to step on them, but they made an almost solid carpet in the late, grey afternoon, after the rain. I didn't have the camera, and intended to photograph them the next day. However, the next day they didn't look the same--they were flowers that did their thing on a grey afternoon, after the rain."
"Most mountains in the California desert have a serene and relaxed aspect--sedate, and of the past, so to speak. But the Last Chance Range is different, something special. It is bold, abrupt, busy, and muscular, bursting outward and rearing upward, both at once, with a show of geological exuberance, suddenly arrested."
"The western face of the range is a wall of rock, miles wide, that cowers the onlooker. Gold, tan, and deep russet strata, metamorphosed into bands of bold color, ripple across the faces of the bulging cliffs, and folding back disappear into the recesses of each canyon, emerging again on the face of the next buttress."
Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Tuesday May 20, 2008 at 6:58pm
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