Arriving in the Desert — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
Open the window for a moment if you can, because the change is physical: the air is hotter, drier, and it smells completely different — dust and creosote instead of pine.
We have dropped thousands of feet and you are now in desert. Look for the plants: prickly pear with its flat pads, cholla with its deceptively fuzzy-looking joints that are in fact vicious, agave with its rosette of spikes, ocotillo — those tall thin whip-like stems that look dead most of the year and then leaf out green within days of a rain and put scarlet flowers on the tips.
Everything down here is engineered around water: waxy coatings to stop evaporation, spines instead of leaves, roots that spread wide and shallow to grab a rainstorm before it drains away, and seeds that can sit in the soil for years waiting for the right rain.
Two practical notes. It can be forty degrees hotter down here than where you started this morning, so check your water. And this is rattlesnake country — they are not aggressive and they do not want to meet you, but don't put your hands or feet anywhere you can't see, especially around rocks at dusk.
Ahead of us now: the copper country, and the strangest landscape on this entire drive.