Santa Rosalía is the end of the line for the ferry that leaves mainland Mexico and crosses the Gulf of California.

But it is the beginning of the adventure for exploring wild, woolly and eccentric Baja California.

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 Mention Baja California to most people and they think of sandy beaches, golf resorts, margaritas, scuba diving.

Not much different from Alta or Upper California, the state.

That's fine for them but it's not for me.

I'm in search of the authentic Baja California, the heart and soul of the peninsula.

A couple of friends of mine, both ecologists, Yar Petryszyn from Arizona and Alberto Búrquez from Sonora, Mexico suggest that the best place to start is smack dab in the middle of the peninsula.

Most people traveling in Baja California start at the extremes.

They enter crossing the border at the sprawling town of Tijuana or they fly down to the tourist town of Cabo San Lucas.

Few people start in the middle at Santa Rosalía, the destination for the ferry that departs from Guaymas a few days a week and sometimes close to on time.

Good morning.

I've got tickets for two vehicles.

Where are you going?

Baja California.

First to Santa Rosalía, then, who knows?

We're going through Baja California while bicycling around the world.

We want to see the desert, nature and the people, so that our child can see the worldóreal world.

You have to walk farther to get on here than you do to get off by quite a bit.

I wonder how old it is.

They've obviously painted it over.

But I bet it was made before I was born.

We may make it to Santa Rosalía.

We'll see.

Twelve million years ago you could have stepped off the shore at Guaymas on to the shore of Baja California.

It's now the longest, skinniest peninsula in the world and moving to the northwest at two inches a year.

The best way to get there is to hop on this ferry and leave the port of Guaymas and cross the deep and deepening Sea of Cortez.

You look at those big cacti on that island and there are probably a lot of 'em thirty, forty feet tall.

They are probably a thousand to two thousand to an acre.

Amazing that they could be so thick on that island.

Yeah, you're probably right about a thousand per acre.

I mean they are really dense and you wonder why they would get that dense.

Nowhere else that I've seen are they that.

Just on those little islands.

Yeah.

Yes.

You only find these high densities on islands and it's probably as you say is due to lack of predation on seedlings.

I know that we're going to see them but I'm interested to compare how thick these are in Baja California.

Baja California isn't really an island but it might as well be, right, for ecological purposes.

It's a six-hour trip across the gulf.

The dolphins welcome us to Baja California.

Arriving in Santa Rosalía we have a chance to think about a new adventure for usóseeing strange plants, exotic rock formations and places and people that very few in the world have had a chance to visit.

Santa Rosalía grew first as a mining town but then the economy diversified.

And there is, from need of goods and the shortest route and the historical route of supplies, was Guaymas.

So the ferry runs from Guaymas to Santa Rosalía and brings all kinds of supplies to this area.

They say that they are going to shut down the ferry service because now the highway coming from the north will replace the ferry.

The ferry is becoming uneconomical.

The next morning we can see that Santa Rosalía is not your run-of-the-mill Mexican town.

It was more like the French Quarter of Baja California.

Santa Rosalía started as a town in the, at the end of the 19th century.

It was founded by the French that came to exploit the copper ore of Santa Rosalía.

They settled down in Mesa Francia, that is there and built very large houses while the Mexicans were settled in Mesa Mexico.

It is a busy place where we stand now.

How many years have you made this simple bread?

Is this a French recipe?

I think people in Santa Rosalía are very proud of their French heritage.

All these recipes are French ones.

When they came to build the mines, they brought the recipes for the bread and they built the churches, pre-fabricated in France.

They brought a lot of things here.

Steam engines for electricity as well as steam powered ships and trains.

There's a long French history here even still.

In Santa Rosalía it was popular to the French but they weren't the only foreigners to appreciate the value of Santa Rosalía.

Some Germans used the safe harbor to hide out for four years during World War I and then departed without a trace.

The French stayed awhile longer and left more than just recipes.

I get the feeling when I walk down the streets of Santa Rosalía that I'm not really in Mexico.

I've never seen a place that has such a different feel.

Because of the French heritage you see all these wooden rails and the wooden construction of the houses and so on that the French brought here.

It is more like walking down New Orleans and the heat is similar too.

It smells better.

I've been all over Mexico, seen hundreds of churches, I've never seen anything like this one.

It must just be part of the mystique of Baja California.

Yes, the story of this church is amazing.

It's attributed to Eiffel, the constructor of the tower.

Of the Eiffel Tower in France?

That's right.

But he apparently is not.

And it's all steel.

Yes it was assembled somewhere in the world and somehow got stopped in Santa Rosalía.

There are a number of people now questioning whether Mr. Eiffel really designed and was responsible for this place.

Would a brilliant French engineer really attach his name to a building put together with steel plates and rivets?

Certainly no self-respecting Mexican would allow a church of steel, anything but rock, to be built in Mexico.

But then we have to ask also would the man who designed the Eiffel Tower have caused the construction of a steel building in a place where the temperature is over a hundred five to a hundred ten degrees six months of the year?

I doubt it.

The French closed the mines and left, taking their money with them.

But local people have figured out other ways to make money from the ground.

There's an alabaster deposit just eight kilometers north of Santa Rosalía.

There's another one just off the coast of San Marco Island.

There are all kinds of mineral and geological deposits found around this area.

It's time to leave Santa Rosalía and its Franco-Mexico façades behind.

We venture now into the arid, wild, rugged and sparsely populated interior.

It is what sets Baja California apart from anywhere else in the world.

One of the first finds are enormous crystals left behind when an ancient sea dried up.

So the water left and it left this mineral.

Oh, my gosh!

Left this mineral behind.

So it created these huge crystals.

This is amazing, isn't it?

Oh!

Like a giant diamond.

Gypsum is a mineral that is very common on earth and it's sulfate and it occurs everywhere.

Can you taste it?

You can find out if you're willing to test it.

It doesn't taste salty.

I suppose.

Well, the salt is gone but the gypsum stays there because it crystallizes.

But then the salt dissolves much more easily than gypsum.

How did it get so torn?

How did it get so messed up if it was just laid down like a salt?

The land has been just torn apart.

Okay, it's tectonic activity then.

That's right.

Yes.

Even movement, breaking these crystals.

And this area is well known by the tectonic activity.

It's operating continuously.

We might be standing on a volcano right here.

The quality of this is very, very uncommon.

There are very few instances in which you find the size and the purity of the crystals you find around Santa Rosalía.

You can look right through it.

I mean, it's, if it were clean, if we'd wash it off with a little Windex it would be like window glass.

That's right.

Gypsum windows.

I never dreamed such a thing could occur.

It's most likely that these beautiful crystals will be eventually turned into household products.

In the tortured topography of Baja California you're never far from a canyon.

We're lucky.

This one we can drive up.

I've been in a desert for about forty years and I've never seen a tree like this with white bark.

This is what locally is known as palo blanco.

Palo blanco, white stick.

There are many theories on why trees have different colored bark and this white bark we see on the Palo blanco could be a sort of sunscreen that will protect the tree from the sunburn.

If I take my thumbnail, it won't hurt the tree, and scratch, the first thing I see when I get through the sunscreen is all the green.

And that's going to allow the tree to carry on photosynthesis.

If I scratch it a little more, then I get a reddish color, a beautiful reddish color.

And that's another pigment that helps photosynthesis.

The growths here are really beautiful.

And this is found only around here?

It's only found in Baja California.

It's throughout Baja California.

The wash seems to be the place where it's growing.

You don't see it on the hillsides.

Can it only survive down here?

Well, given that the rainfall is so scant, they prefer this habitat.

So the runoff is what really keeps 'em alive.

Yes.

They need some water to keep growing.

And they put a lot of energy in the trunks.

They are high density trunks, slow growing.

Real hard wood.

That need ample moisture to grow.

You think this tree, its been cut, but do you think it's more than a hundred years old?

I would say that it's easily more than one hundred years old, yes.

While we're looking at plants in a canyon, Yar is up on top looking for critters.

And he always finds them.

This is a Paramiscis, a cactus mouse.

These little guys aren't really that desert-adapted.

They need free water and they get it from greenery, plant material.

They'll chew the leaves or maybe suck on part of the bark like on ocotillo.

Unlike the kangaroo rat that can do without any free water at all, this guy can't.

So you'll find 'em in among these rocks here, a little wetter, a little more protected from the sun so you get more greenery that they can feed on.

We find kangaroo rats throughout Baja and these little guys are the epitome of desert survivors.

They can go their whole life without any free water like in plants, that's stored in plants.

They actually get some free water out of seeds.

The rest of the water that they use comes from breakdown in carbohydrates and get metabolic water.

Between those two sources they can survive their whole life, up to seven years or so, on that water source.

They have all kinds of neat adaptations to consume water; a long snout and a counter-flow system where they reabsorb moisture that would be lost through breathing and have external cheek pouches that they can store seeds in as they find them.

That way they can keep their mouth closed and not lose moisture that way by putting seeds in these external cheek pouches.

And then they carry them down into their burrow and empty their cheek pouches and store the seeds.

Their urine is very concentrated so they cut down on the loss of water in that fashion.

They're nocturnal 'cause it's cooler and more humid during the night.

They're called a kangaroo rat because, not that they're so much closely related to kangaroo, but they hop on their hind leg like a kangaroo and they have a long tail as a balance.

And by hopping on two legs they're much more efficient in covering a greater distance foraging for seeds.

All these rodents that are herbivores, which means eat plant material, or grainivores that eat seeds, are kind of at the bottom of the food chain and everything else then feeds on themóthe foxes, the coyotes, the snakes, the hawks, the owls.

So if they're doing well, the rest of the animals will do well.

And they can actually smell seeds that are buried a half inch under the surface or so.

The highways in Mexico can be hazardous.

They're narrow, they have no shoulders and the curves can be very sharp.

The plants in their own way can be different.

They're strange, they're unusual and they may be hazardous.

We are now in higher ground a few miles from the coast and the vegetation is greener and much better shade than in the cold.

This is mainly caused by changes in the soil and the humidity availability.

Here we start looking at new species.

The species that will be more common to the north, like the invicta cholla with lots of sharp thorns.

And thick stemmed species of Bursura or elephant tree and some other trees that have storage of water in their trunks.

Here's one of these "euphorbs."

They call this        candelilla , candle.

But it gives out milky sap.

Oh, that stuff's coming out.

In Chihuahua in Texas, like in Big Bend area, they actually make wax out of, extract the wax.

They treat it with sulfuric acid and are able to extract wax to make candles out of and use it for other things as well, lubricants.

This stuff might make a good wax but some of my indigenous friends have warned me never to let that touch your skin or if you do, you've got to wash it off because they say it'll purge you as quickly as anything in the world.

The canyons in the Santa Rosalía region have very curious naming.

Starting from the south with the names of saints, Heaven, San Bruno then Santa Águila then La Solidad, solitude, La Providencia, providence, where Santa Rosalía city is.

And then northwards, El Purgatorio, Purgatory, El Infierno, hell and Lucifer, Lucifer which are the northernmost ones.

Lucifer and his kind might be comfortable in the molten lava that has made this peninsula's topography so tortured.

The most recent example of the volcanic havoc is called The Three Vírgins, Las Tres Vírgines.

Tres Vírgines peak is one of the highest points in Baja California.

It's only used by navigators inland and out in the Sea of Cortez to locate this region of Santa Rosalía.

It also has shown some volcanic activity.

In the 18th century it erupted and created terror among the inhabitants.

The presence of Tres Vírgines also created a varied habitat.

The lava flows of different ages contained different vegetation and they also collect a lot of water that infiltrates and allows establishment of little oases in between the lava.

So there are different life forms that will be found in the region.

This lava flow looks like it could have come out of the mountain three years ago.

Of course, we know it's a lot older than that.

Yeah, it's probably older.

We're on the leading edge, the front of it, and this is called aa.

It's broken up by the pressures pushing the lava from behind.

As you look down, I bet we're forty feet up already.

Yeah.

This was a real large flow.

Yeah, it was pretty plastic stuff when it came out here.

A lava flow like this is magma that's made it to the surface and erupts from, it could be either be cinder-cone or a composite volcano, a strata volcano, and typically breaches from the base and flows out as a fluid very similar to the consistency of honey.

It's so rough up here I don't see how any plants could survive and if you think the temperatures must be in the 130s in the summertime, it's a tough place for anything.

Yeah with this dark rock, I bet it absorbs a lot of heat.

How in the world does a big 'ol tree like that, found only in Baja California, come to survive in this, this dead spot.

It really looks like a dead zone.

This particular lava flow is really raw.

It has to be several hundred years old because there's no written evidence of it and these elephant trees are probably a hundred, maybe even more years old.

And it's so dry here that there's not much erosion and breaking down of this material.

But there are micro habitats.

I have a feeling that he's confident up there.

He knows that we can't move more than three feet a second through this rock.

That's right.

Look at him looking back and forth, just checking out all around for anything that moves.

I sure wouldn't want to try running a hundred yard dash through this jumble of rock.

It's hard to imagine what it was like when it was red hot.

It must take a long time to cool.

Yeah.

It does.

It has an amazing capacity to hold heat.

Years, huh?

It's obvious that this lava flow, looks like come from a different planet, is quite different that what most people experience.

It adds to the mystique of Baja because of its rawness and couple that with the desert element that's intruded into this really makes for a dynamic system.

That dynamism not only created the oddities of Baja California but it also attracts individuals from all over the world searching for their personal adventure.

I'm realizing a childhood dream.

I grew up in eastern Germany behind the iron wall.

I was not able to travel.

In '85 I left eastern Germany, went to western Germany and I thought one day I have to go to America, to realize that dream, travel America by horse.

This German found that wandering in the United States was too restricted.

So, he traveled south.

I've seen a horse rental station in Ensenada and I asked this guy if he would agree to trade my car against one of his horses.

And he said, "Yes, why not."

And I tried three horses.

He was the third one.

Nobody cares when I put up my tent here anywhere.

Nobody cares.

And now I go down to La Paz.

In La Paz I take the ferry over to the main country and then I continue to Mexico City.

A friend of mine is living over there.

I'm writing a book about the travels.

In Baja California the main and only highway is eight hundred fifty miles long.

From time to time, obscure roads veer off and fade into the distance.

Places like those can be perfect for the adventurer, for the traveler, who wants to just be alone or perhaps with family or friends and enjoy the native desert vegetation.

It's also excellent for anyone who wants to camp, pull out a chair, kick back and enjoy a margarita.

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

But next time on         The Desert Speaks what may surprise you is its bountiful harvests, its lush oases, its cave paintings and sea salt.

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

Additional funding was provided by