Home > An Ode To The Cima Dome

An Ode To The Cima Dome

On August 15, lightning started a devastating fire (called the Dome Fire) that burned the entirety of Mojave National Preserve’s Cima Dome.

The Cima Dome is usually seen from Interstate 15, where the long shape of the mountain is easily viewable.

This area hosted one of the largest Joshua Tree forests in the world. In fact, the Joshua Tree forest in Cima Dome had larger and more prevalent trees than the National Park. The fire burned most of them, estimated to be over 100 years old.

This location is also interesting because the conjectured subspecies of Joshua Tree, yucca brevifolia var jaegeriana, exists here. These trees exhibit much different behavior. They are typically shorter, and create many, many branches. They are pollinated by a subspecies of the same Yucca Moth.

I typically visited the Cima Dome via the Teutonia Peak Trailhead off Cima Road. This is the Northeast area of the Dome. In the ghost-town of Cima, you can follow some of the side roads to access the Southern area of the Dome. As recently as 2006, Cima still had a functioning post office.

This post is a sad ode to the beauty of the Cima Dome. As with other fire complex areas, the grasses will come back. In particular, it is expected that the non-native and invasive grasses will come back quickly. These will out-compete the native vegetation, and this will include the Joshua Trees.

Creating A Joshua Tree Forest

I also read something interesting. Some scientists believe that the extensive ranching that has occurred in the area contributed to the size of this forest.

In other words, the size and depth of this forest occurred because ranching activities like grazing self-selected the Joshua Trees for growth and unnatural expansion. Cattle ate grasses and shrubs that they preferred, leaving the Joshua Trees without competition on the ground. This helped create a much larger forest than usual.

Than, when the native grasses were consumed, invasives like Red Broom and others had little ground competition from the native vegetation. This large Joshua Tree forest and ground cover of invasive plants then created conditions that were a perfect fire storm when lightning rolled through the Northern Mojave in August.

The really strange thing to consider, then, is that the Joshua Tree forest I have long enjoyed is probably not a natural phenomenon. This thought has implications far beyond the Dome Fire. What do I love about the outdoors that hasn’t already been permanently altered by human activity? The answer, likely, is nothing. So sometimes being a landscape photographer is really documenting what humans have done to the “natural world.”

Mojave National Preserve Image Archive (Non-Portfolio)

Deserts Photography Gallery

1 thought on “An Ode To The Cima Dome”

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Discover more from T.M. Schultze

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

MNP8
MNP8
MNP9
MNP9
MNP10
MNP10
MNP11
MNP11
MNP12
MNP12
MNP9
MNP9
MNP13
MNP13
MNP14
MNP14
MNP15
MNP15
MNP16
MNP16
MNP44
MNP44
MNP17
MNP17