Ahhh, berry picking, miss it in the high country, miss it on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Harvesting natures bounty started as a daily chore growing up on the ranch, but remained a means to add tasty treats to the larder all my life every place I lived. So I feel a berry story coming on... from when my ex, son and I moved to the edge of the Mojave Desert in Utah's Dixie early 90's. Left behind was all the wild berries found in the high country, so big time blackberry picking became an annual must do. A small roadside town of Leeds was a wild blackberry mecca. In the southern throws of it there were huge blackberry brambles on both sides of the local road mingling with the desert plants, growing as much as 8'-10' high up into mesquite trees and in some places 20 yards deep. Escapee's probably from a small ranch a few hundred yards east of there. It was very hot and dry picking sometimes, and sometimes standing knee to waist deep in monsoon rain water catch basins. And one eye/both ears always had to be on the lookout for the many rattlesnakes that lurked in the brambles. I grew up with them/have been around them all my life... my still young at the time son grew up with them as well, but my ex didn't grow up in the outdoors so we had to always watch out for her. Since I have not been able to hear them rattle since Vietnam I relied on an inner sense/instinct to keep my family out of harms way, and it worked quite well with me taking any hits. Four species were possible there, but it was always the very aggressive Mojave Greens with their deadly Type A venom, and Western Diamondbacks that inflict more bites on humans/pets per year than all the the other western species combined. They are not normally aggressive, just very common in all habitats so a species that you run into all the time in the outdoors out west. While many of them were encountered berry picking every year, many more on other outings, other than a few dry strikes I took no one was bitten and no snakes were killed. The plus side is the snakes and Gila Monsters (that are no threat) there kept a lot of other folks out of the berry patch. So we scored enough over several days every year to have enough preserves, juice for syrup/wine, and fresh frozen for dutch oven cobblers and pies to see us through to the next year. The list is very long of other wild favorites I have always collected... when living off the land for weeks/months in wilderness areas, those I collected on other outings alone and those I taught my family how to collect that we did together for home use.
Now the only berries I get fresh are store bought, and they are not as good as the wild self harvested. I especially miss some of the other wild berries I used to gather...elderberries, loganberries, gooseberries, black huckleberries, buffalo berries, thimbleberries, serviceberries, bunchberries, chokecherries, etc.
