Baja California is well known for its historic missions, its desert landscapes, and remote villages.

But what may surprise you is its bountiful harvests, its lush oases, its cave paintings and sea salt.

Major funding for         The Desert Speaks was provided by the Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners and Arizona State Parks.

music The human history of Baja California until about a century ago has been as barren as the desert landscape there.

The peninsula is so dry that human activity has been limited to those isolated places where there is water and more recently work.

Not in the salt mines but in the salt flats.

I love a desert and the people who have managed to survive there.

Joining me in the search for these Californias are two ecologist friends of mine, Yar Petryszyn and Alberto Búruez.

We begin this part of our journey at the mission oasis of San Ignacio.

It's near the geographic center of the peninsula.

San Ignacio is located on the old Jesuit mission trail that connected southern Baja California with the north.

The Jesuits arrived at the beginning of the 17th century.

Baja California is called Baja California because the name implies lower, and it's lower California, all the peninsula, opposed to upper California that is the actual state of California in the United States.

The first mission in Baja California was founded by Father Kino in San Bruno that is near Santa Rosalía in 1683.

To this follow many others all through Baja California, mainly in the central portion of the peninsula.

Well, Baja California was a very exotic land as Japan was at the time.

So it was the intention of the Jesuits to spread the Word of God to what they considered barbaric regions.

San Ignacio was founded in 1728, was not among the first missions to be done but for sure was the wealthiest.

And it comprised very fertile land with ample supply of water and with these extraordinary oases that allowed the introduction of date palms that increased the richness of the land.

The date palm arrived here when the Jesuits came from Arabia or Spain.

They brought a seed and then the date palm came to be.

There are plants here that are very very old, 200 years old.

The smaller ones are newer.

There's a fifty year old.

Some are from the very beginning when the mission was first built.

In October we start harvesting the fruits.

We bring them here in bunches and lay them out on these bamboo mats.

We lay them out for seven days so the sun can dry them.

Then we can select the best ones.

As we're picking out the best ones, we start packaging them.

First we boil them and then we start sending them out to the different locations where they're eventually sold.

This man is eighty-six years old.

He's been working here ever since he was a child.

So he knows dates better than any of us.

He's an expert.

The principal business here in San Ignacio is a date.

There are no other types of industry like cattle ranging or fishing.

Most every one that's from here has left to work on the coast.

If all those people were to get together, there'd be about ten thousand of us.

But there's only about four hundred in town right now.

The date palms were able to survive because San Ignacio is a rarity in Baja California.

It has a fresh water oasis.

We've spent the last few days, some of the driest desert, probably the driest desert in North America, all of a sudden to come upon this.

This is the meaning of an oasis.

It's quite a dichotomy, you know, just inside of the desert and then here, here we are in a big oasis here with cattails and palms.

When the Jesuits stumbled on or found San Ignacio in 1728, thought they had died and gone to heaven with good reason.

Yeah, no doubt.

And they started all these, they started the mission, they started with all these date palms, got the crops growing.

And then in 1767 all the Jesuits were expelled from the New World.

And it wasn't until the 1780s that the Dominicans came in and built the church.

By that time, they were already benefiting from those date palms that the Jesuits had brought in.

They thought that this was a great place.

This is the oasis in Baja California.

That's probably true because most of the supposedly estuarine areas are brackish.

But this is strictly fresh water here, spring fed.

So it's a very unusual situation in all of Baja.

Every shore bird, every bird that wants water, that's migrating must have this as a target.

Oh, this is a great stop over for all the migratory birds.

And they probably have resident populations breed here as well.

Hey, what's that?

Is that a little, a little heron right in front of you, Yar?

Right straight ahead at twelve o'clock.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, he got a little fish.

See that?

This is one of the smallest of the herons that we have in this area and like most herons they're stealth foragers.

In this mode of foraging they're fairly successful because the fish are unaware that they're there.

And as they're near the surface they're gonna get nabbed by this little guy.

And I've seen him get two or three fish at least since we've been watching him.

He got one didn't he?

That's cool.

The oasis is cool, shady and comfortable but it's in the dry desert that the unusual plants and the original authentic Californios live.

Some were here thousands of years ago and some can trace their ancestry only a few generations.

Many North Americans refer to Baja California simply as Baja and some people think that's insensitive because Baja simply means low .

We wouldn't call South Dakota south so the name is Baja California.

Some Mexicans refer to California as Alta California or High California.

We are on the road to Sierra San Francisco where the famous paintings are.

The rainfall is much lower here than towards the east.

Here we get about two inches of rain yearly.

The plants suffer a lot.

A benefit of the influence of the Pacific Ocean on the region is the heavy load of humidity that the air carries and is deposited on the plants and that allows the supplement of water that in turn permits the existence of epiphytes on the plants, a rather bizarre combination.

This Tilandsia is just an epiphyte, it's not a parasite.

It's just used, in this case this Organ Pipe cactus as a surface area.

And as you look around you'll see it on top of everything, the elephant tree, the      palo , any surface that is provided for it, you'll see clumps of it.

It's actually in the family that you find pineapple.

The flowers of these Tilandsias are tiny little things.

They're little purple flowers and then they produce these seed heads that have just a multitude of tiny seeds that are windblown and they get just, like a dust, scattered across the desert area here.

They get established and start growing into these clusters of many-leafed plants.

Sierra San Francisco lies at about the middle of the peninsula.

So we are at the same distance to the Gulf of California as to the Pacific.

Well, the part where I live, another part of the Sonoran Desert, you get higher, things get greener, you get different kinds, bigger plants but I guess there's nothing left here to milk out of the clouds.

I think I understand why the aboriginal people wanted to live up here.

I know there's more water.

There's not much, but there's more.

But the view is worth living through tough times.

That's satisfying.

That's Isla Cedros so that's sixty miles off the coast of Baja California.

We can't even see the Pacific because of the fog, right?

Yes.

This is what we can call the spur of Baja California.

That sierra just goes out into the Pacific and at the very tip you'll see Cedros Island.

I love the way you call the spur and I never realized it 'til now but that's actually what it looks like.

If that's Isla Cedros, that's some hundred kilometers off the edge of the coast of Baja California.

Yes, about.

Yes, easily.

This truly is about as pristine as North American deserts can get, I think.

Yes, I think you cannot get a better preserve in the case of the Sonoran Desert than these rugged areas isolated in Baja California.

To reach this place is very difficult.

You have to go across the gulf or drive the trans-peninsular highway and then take a very long and treacherous dirt road to Sierra San Francisco.

The highest part of the Sierra San Francisco is renowned for its rock art.

Fortunately, the government has begun to protect it.

Well, this site has extraordinary paintings in caves, in many caves along these big canyons.

The paintings predate the Cochimís and other indigenous groups that were founded by the Jesuits when they came.

So they are very old and they are representations of different entities, many of the supernatural world and others perhaps associated to daily life.

And here in Baja California there were no known agriculturalists, isn't that correct?

They were all nomadic hunters and gatherers.

There is no evidence of agriculture.

There's one of those strange human figurines, beautifully proportioned, half black, half red.

Yes.

What do you suppose that means?

This dualism that is ever present in different cultures.

The yen and the yan.

That's right.

They have been dated on the order of thousands of years so they go really back to the colonization of America by man.

Back in a time when the weather was different and the resources that the land contained had a different quality and abundance.

There's some black rock in the parent material of this cave.

Could they have crushed that to give the black pigment up there?

Or charcoal.

For the paintings are mineral pigments extracted from crushed rocks that were combined with natural products, gums and oils from animals, and then imbedded in the rock.

But they obviously also knew how to make it so it would be colorfast.

Yes.

And how to put it on so it would last for a few thousands years.

That's outstanding.

The guides and guardians of the rock art Californios.

They live in a nearby pueblo.

Many places in Baja California, like in Sierra San Francisco, there is people that still retain the character of the very old Conquistadores and they still have the language with ancient archaic words interspersed with the modern Spanish.

They are truly Californios.

People that was born here for generations and raised in this isolated region of earth, they developed skills that are unique to the region and retained cultural traits and traditions that are lost in many other parts of the Latin world.

A lot of these little villages up in the mountains, too far away for electricity, they've got solar panels.

What's weird, I found up in Sonora one village that had batteries to charge so they could run their satellite TV dishes.

Every house had one.

Technology gets way ahead of the basic rudiments of electricity.

Good afternoon.

Here comes a gringo in American Sonora Mexico.

Be careful.

There are many more paintings around here.

Some depict serpents.

Like rattlesnakes?

Yep.

How many times have you been bitten?

Me?

Never.

But there are people here who have been bitten by rattlesnakes.

Some died and others have swollen hands.

Still others have their skin come apart from the swelling.

They took them to the doctor right away.

And what happens if you can't get them a doctor?

The pitaya is very good for that and there's another plant.

We boil it and you drink the water.

If you get bit and right away you brew this little leguminous brush into a tea and drink it and that helps alleviate.

He said that you should not drink water because if you drink water instead of this beverage, you surely will depart happily.

Maybe unhappily.

Who made the teguas ?

A cousin of mine who's half deaf.

The teguas are moccasins of local indigenous design.

The ancient ones were made of deer skin.

With the arrival of the Spaniards, deer skin was replaced with cowhide.

More recently the leather soles were replaced with tires.

Tires will last forever.

Twenty some bucks.

This is the shoe for the rancher, the cowboy, the gentleman, and the goat herder.

For everybody, doing every type of job.

In the winter, in December, it gets very cold.

Sometimes we even get snow, lots of snow.

Leaving the mountain people, possibly the most isolated folks in all of Baja California, we think we're rejoining the modern world.

But we don't soon find the comforts of the 21st century.

Back in the 70s the Mexican government replaced the old pounding dirt road with this new paved highway but they didn't really add enough gasoline stations.

I worry about running out of gas and I understand up here about twenty miles there's some guys who sell gasoline out of barrels.

I never pass up a chance to buy extra gasoline.

So you have to bring the gasoline in from a hundred thirty kilometers.

That's almost eighty miles away.

I'm glad they're going it, I don't have to do it.

Years ago there was a gasoline station here, was opened with the help of the government.

But there were some problems in the ejido or sort of the communally owned project here and the managing of it so they had to close it.

And now these guys do the business by themselves.

They have gasoline here from six o'clock in the morning to six o'clock at night.

If you don't get it then, you're out of luck.

It's seventy or eighty miles in each direction for the next place where you can buy a little.

The trans-peninsular highway was completed in 1973.

It's eight hundred fifty miles long and it was the first paved road that connected the Mexican-American border with the southern tip of Baja California.

The trans-peninsular highway is so new that not many memorials or shrines have been built along the way.

It is also so fast that many drivers are not able to negotiate its curves.

This is a monument to one truck driver who didn't.

The truckers name was Salerito and the monument was built in his memory by his buddies.

The adornment to the monument consists of various pieces that came from the truck, broken off in the accident.

This is probably a light, perhaps from the bumper area.

And candles that were lit in his memory by his friends and his family.

The trans-peninsular highway has as its midpoint the city of Guerrero Negro at the twenty-eighth parallel.

It didn't even exist forty years ago.

The city was created by the world's demand for salt.

Guerrero Negro is the largest producer of salt in the western hemisphere.

Each day you've got the machinery working all the time.

How much salt comes out of here?

We harvest every day twenty-two thousand metric tons per day.

And we work eight-ten hours every day.

So, twenty-two thousand tons a day, how much does that come out to each year?

We can reach seven million, seven and a half million metric tons.

That'd fill up a lot of table salt containers but it's more than table salt.

Most of your salt is not the kind we eat.

You can eat but the main use is for industrial use.

From here where does all that salt go?

We send the salt to Japan and then United States, Canada and Korea and Taiwan.

So you have international salt right here.

Yes.

All is for exportation.

It's all for exportation.

All for exportation.

All around us we've got this salt.

This is salt.

But how does it get from seawater to become salt like this?

We pump in the seawater from the concentration areas.

We move by gravity for two years and when the brine is separate, we can move to the crystallization areas and we leave the brine for six months.

After the two years and a half we can obtain this kind of salt.

So this salt crystal was two and a half years in the making.

Yes, two and a half years.

You know it tastes very much like salt.

Yeah, it's a good quality.

And it's actually, you're right, it is very tasty salt.

Yeah.

Now this kind of salt is ninety-eight percent sodium chloride.

After the washing plan we reach ninety-nine point seven sodium chloride.

That's very pure.

Very pure.

The west coast of Baja California is the ideal place for producing salt.

It's extremely dry, it's right on the ocean and flat.

The salt produced in Gerrero Negro is put on barges and taken back out to the rest of the world, by the sea.

It goes to Cedros Island, a hundred kilometers to the northwest.

From there it's loaded on big ships.

Who knows when some of it may wind up in our food and the chemicals that produce the goods that we buy.

The Mexican government is just starting to exploit the industrial resources of Baja California.

The challenge will be how to provide economic growth without endangering its scarce water resources and pristine shoreline and the original way of life of the Californios.

Next time on The Desert Speaks we visit Baja California, a land of windswept coasts and windswept plants, native indigenous people from far away, statuesque stereotypical cactus and some that defy description.

You don't see a baobob growing up, over and down like a rainbow.

There's the famed sea lion of the Bahia de los Angeles coast coming out to visit the sailors.

I get it.

He's foraging for crabs.

He's a harbor seadog.

There's a walking seal.

There were some scuba divers out there that I thought was the sea lion.

Major funding for         The Desert Speaks was provided by the Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by