For vacation one winter in the mid-1980s, we stayed at Yosemite and tried cross-country skiing at Glacier Point. Based on the theory that practice makes perfect, I learned how to get up on skis since all I did while skiing was fall down.

Mary and I began looking for other types of vacations, A few years later, we started camping and decided to try the Death Valley National Monument late one spring and immediately fell in love with the desert -- silent, open and a little odd.

We soon started making almost annual camping trips to Anza-Borrego State Park east of San Diego and to Death Valley and Joshua Trees, two former national monuments that were promoted to national parks by the 1994 California Desert Act that created the Mojave National Preserve, which we just visited for the first time in October 1999.

After several of our desert sojourns, I've written travel articles for the two newspapers I have worked for and have put them online here, although rereading articles years and decades later is painful at best.

I haven't corrected inconsistencies or updated such things as the name of my current newspaper, which appears as the Telegram-Tribune in early articles and is now The Tribune. However, I did fix typos were I found them, although I probably added a few retyping the stories. Anything that has been added is set apart in italics and explained in a footnote.

I appreciate any feedback about the articles, the desert or any author who writes about them that you would like to recommend.