This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.

~ Mary Hunter Austin, The Land of Little Rain

There comes a time in every trail runner’s season when the winter chill starts to feel personal. 

When the mud no longer feels like an invitation but a threat. When the days are too short, the nights are too long, and your favorite mountain loops are buried under a taunting, impassable layer of snow. I do take it personally. 

And that’s when it happens—desert season. 

Like some ancient migratory impulse coded into our ultrarunning DNA, we pack up our dusty Hokas and drive south and west. We trade alpine damp for sun-cracked mesas. We tell ourselves we’re escaping the monotony of winter, but really, our migratory murmurations are in search of something deeper—a season of movement unencumbered by layers, a time to run until our fingers no longer ache from cold, to remember the joy of sweating just because the air is hot.

I’ve always loved the desert. So much so that I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on desert literature (yes, it’s a thing). There’s something about the desert’s stark beauty, its jarring emptiness, its disorienting scale, and its unapologetic vibrancy that disrupts our usual sense of time and space. It’s apparent hostility hides an ecosystem teeming with life, a lesson in resilience and adaptation. Being in the desert doesn’t just shift your perception—it shifts you. 

That’s why I love Desert Season.

Desert State of Mind

The desert, when the sun comes up… is like a moment of creation; it simply exists and glows.

~ Barry Lopez, Desert Notes

Embracing seasonality and shifting focus aren’t just gifts found in the desert. You don’t have to stock up on sunscreen and move to Sedona to experience the ebb and flow. Desert Season isn’t as much about the desert as it is about establishing a practice of presence, bringing attention to your endurance. 

Maybe there’s an overlooked trail near your house that is especially beautiful when the spring’s languid rays hit the dogwoods ’ tender blooms. Perhaps you can run by a wetland that buzzes to life with ducks and dragonflies as the weather starts to warm, providing the best springtime soundtrack for your afternoon meander. Maybe it’s a familiar road, transformed when the afternoon sun tilts at just the right angle, shifting the way everything looks, the way everything feels. The specifics of the place don’t matter as much as the act of noticing it—of allowing the landscape to pull you from winter’s torpor and remind you that you, too, are waking up.

To paraphrase Mary Oliver: pay attention. Be astonished. Run about it.

Desert running demands attention. There are no mindless miles here. The terrain insists on presence. One inattentive footstrike, and you’ll be picking sandstone out of your teeth for days. After a season of zoning out on the monotony of sidewalks and bike paths, the focus that mesas and arroyos command is both refreshing and relentless. The desert is a teacher, a trickster, an uncompromising companion, a welcome reminder: we don’t run just to get somewhere—we run to be somewhere.

That’s Desert Season. And you can find it, wherever you are. If you just pay enough attention.

Embracing Seasons and Change

If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found. 

~ Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

In running, as in life, fighting the seasons is a losing battle. I’ve spent entire winters in denial—convincing myself that numb fingers can still open a gel packet or that technically 21 degrees and sunny is basically warm. (Spoiler: it’s not.)

Or, we could embrace the rhythm of things.

There is a time to go deep into the pain cave and grind. There is a time to build, to peak, to redline our way through alpine switchbacks. And then, there is a time to let go. To move for the sake of movement. To run because it feels good, not because our Strava graph demands it.

Desert Season isn’t just about changing scenery; it’s about changing purpose. You leave behind the rigid constraints of winter training and replace them with something looser, wilder. They say the same man never stands in the same river – and likewise, the same runner never runs the same trail – you will be different, and the desert trails, alive with flora, fauna and infinite possibility, change too.

Go West, Young Dirtbag

It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for… Flat expanses would call to me… These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor…

~ Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

When I feel the pull, I don’t fight it. I load up my crusty Subaru, covered in umber dust from the last trip. I throw my worn-out shoes and dog-eared copy of Desert Solitaire into the passenger seat, and head west. Head for the red rocks, the open sky, the endless miles of singletrack that unspool like a mirage of potential. 

Find the trail, or path, or backroad that’s capable of shaking you out of winter drudgery, and ignites a tender bud of possibility. 

Stretch out like a lizard on a rock. Look at the stars. Touch the sand.  Embrace a season that lies in the juicy sweet spot where performance and presence overlap. Be astonished. Run about it. 

The desert only asks that you show up, that you move through it with curiosity, and that you leave just a little bit of yourself behind—woven into the dust, waiting for you to return next year.