GLOBETROTTERS MONTHLY CHALLENGE

I Found a Whale in the Desert

How it got there was a mystery wrapped in a riddle

A black shaman touches a red whale that appears to be breaching above the ocean surface at Cueva de las Flechas (Cave of the Arrows), Baja California Sur, Mexico. Other animals depicted in the scene and once abundant in Baja include a desert bighorn sheep, lower right in red and black, and a pronghorn antelope, middle right in black. (Photo: ©Craig K. Collins)

It’s not every day one encounters a whale in the desert.

I had never thought it possible.

And it certainly wasn’t something I’d expected, especially not in a 3,000-foot-deep arroyo carved into a mile-high plateau in one of the most rugged, foreboding and unforgiving deserts in the world.

But there I was on a cliff-clinging trail in Arroyo Santa Teresa, in Baja California Sur, Mexico — two hours by car and another four hours by mule from any modern city — looking up in awe at a 6,000-year-old cave painting of a black human figure reaching out and touching a red, breaching whale.

How and why anyone — or more precisely a Paleolithic Native American — would paint such a thing in such a place so seemingly remote from the nearest ocean was at the time a baffling mystery.

It seemed so incongruous and jarring to the senses, this whale in the desert.

But, of course, I’m always up for delving into a good mystery.

And I was determined to get to the bottom of this one.