By Ella Richie DeMaria

Photos by Travis Puglisi

Not all who wander are lost. In our third blog post honoring Mental Health Awareness Month, we speak with Travis Puglisi, owner and operator of Wandering Mojave Hiking Services. A resident of the desert for over 20 years, Travis launched Wandering Mojave Hiking Services after extensive hikes throughout the region. A longtime supporter of the Mojave Desert Land Trust, Travis is also a strong advocate for mental health awareness. We talked about the positive effects of hiking, mental health, and the challenges of desert life.

Mojave Desert Land Trust: How did you start Wandering Mojave as a business?

Travis Puglisi: Hiking, I think, had become my hobby. I’ve come to learn hobbies are what adults do to not do other things they should probably be dealing with. It was as much of an outlet as an inlet. I did a lot of that hiking west of Quail Mountain, a lot of times on lands managed by MDLT or adjacent to MDLT lands.

In 2018, I started learning how to learn about plants, and I went out and I bought the Falcon Guide to Mojave Desert Wildflowers, and just started getting familiar with the families and genera and taxonomy and shapes and colors associated with plants out here. Then in 2019, there was a superbloom, which really advanced my learning, because it’s never easier to learn a plant as when it’s in flower.

Another big thing that was a big deal that year was the last government shutdown, from 2018–2019. The parks remained open but unstaffed, so local residents were going up into the park help clean toilets, empty dumpsters, etc. I did all that stuff. I helped people park in crazy busy conditions, I emptied dumpsters at Cottonwood, I cleaned toilets in the middle of the park. It was actually about the first time I had been in central, classic Joshua Tree National Park in any real way for something like eight years. I really just kind of had abandoned it completely. I had walked away from a lot of stuff as I was building a family and a having career. Going into the park to help out reminded me how crazy, how beautiful, how big it was, and I really started to miss it. It also showed me how busy the park had become. It was kind of heartbreaking and beautiful all at the same time.

And I think, shortly after these events, I figured I wanted to create a hiking guide service. So I decided to build a business model for a hiking guide service that would eventually start doing backpacking trips as well.

“I think that plants make flowers because they’re not busy doing taxes. And if we spent less time doing taxes we could probably make more flowers.”

MDLT: What are the positive effects you’ve observed in your clients?

TP: I think there’s certainly a few things I have seen. I’ve had clients with very limited experience in wild places who, after hikes or several hikes with me, they’ve gone on to completely start owning their own experience of exploration and learning about the desert. I’ve seen that a couple times, primarily with local clients, which is another reason why I love working with people that live here. You can provide a corridor to a path around learning about your immediate environment. It’s cool when people come from far away, but it’s even cooler with people who live here but don’t quite live here all the way. That’s one of the best aspects, expanding people’s worldview, generally.

I think that for most people, they’ve never been to a desert and when they arrive, especially this National Park, it’s so novel and alien to them. They really struggle to interpret it; it all seems like environmental noise to them. You start pointing out layers of existence, or life cycles, or geology, and they start understanding there are systems that govern all those mechanisms, and they’re all interconnected, which helps them remember everything around them is alive, whether they’re actively thinking about it or not.

And then generally feeling small, helping people feel small in a good way, because most of us associate feeling small as a bad thing.

MDLT: I wanted to ask about how in a recent post, you talk about seeking inspiration less from pieces of classical art or pop culture, and moving more towards “the source within nature — the interactions between humans and a planet.”

TP: I think like we certainly have progressions through life, almost like seasons of life. Youth is probably the spring, that 13–30 year-old time when we feel young and invincible. Then you start getting into the summer of your life, and you start realizing it’s like a desert summer: you’re either gonna burn out, or you’re gonna make it through on the other side. You try for a long time to hold onto the spring, but really all you’re doing is burning yourself out in the summer. So if you want to make it through the summer, you’ve got to reign some things in, and treat yourself a little bit better, and I think that has something to do with it. It was gradual. For a long time, I thought, I should still be into art, and I should still care about what other people think or do, and I do now less and less.

MDLT: Can you speak to the importance of being open about mental health, or about your own openness about it?

TP: We all have to pick our battles, and the battle for me that I could — and I don’t want to frame it as a battle — but I can get behind Mental Health Awareness month because it’s close to home. I’ve had experiences with it. It’s strangely easy for me to talk about. I’m very comfortable talking about it, and I feel the more people can just hear that others suffer, the possibly more inclined they’ll be to take some steps to alleviate their own suffering, and that can only be done by the individual. But that’s not entirely true, either. The thing that allowed me to set down my path was that my therapist gifted me his counsel pro bono when I was going on SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). Because I didn’t think I could afford — or whatever the case may be, but someone had to give me a lot of time and trust in order for me to take that path, and it was exceptionally lucky. It was probably the most important gift I’ve received in my life. It was a little luck and a little effort.

“I think humans like challenge. If the environment stops pushing back at you, that’s when you stop growing.”

MDLT: How does your outdoor lifestyle complement that healing methodology?

TP: I think that plants make flowers because they’re not busy doing taxes. And if we spent less time doing taxes we could probably make more flowers. It’s real, it’s just real out there. That’s the real world. I don’t believe in the western idea of wilderness as a place bereft of human beings. Human beings have always been on the planet, working with the environment, exploiting their environment, trying to survive in their environment. That’s very real to me. It just feels so real, way more real than taxes. But it’s cool, I guess, that taxes facilitate some of it. I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

MDLT: The Mojave, why does it resonate with you?

TP: I have been all over the planet, all over the place. I’ve been to wild places, city places, cold places, hot places — and in many ways I’ve had an exceptionally privileged life — and just about everywhere I go, life feels easier than it does out here. This is probably true of a lot of deserts, but the amount of experience and patience and thoughtfulness that it takes to exist in a desert makes everywhere else feel super plush. I went to Idaho last summer, there is just water and shade and fish and lumber — it was all there, all this stuff that people need to exist. Sure, it gets wicked cold, but it was all there, you could make it happen if you went for it. It’s a lot harder to make it happen here. And that’s what I like about it. It makes everything else feel luxurious. And if I can feel rich here, I can feel that way in other places.

I think humans like challenge. If the environment stops pushing back at you, that’s when you stop growing. It’s like a plant: if a plant never gets any wind, it won’t get strong, and then the wind comes, and it will break. Feeling the environment around us keeps us stronger, and it helps keep our priorities better aligned.

MDLT: I imagine a lot of folks may be intimidated by a hike in the desert. How do you address fears of the desert?

TP: The worst thing you could do is tell your guide you’re afraid of snakes because your guide is going to do everything they can to find snakes. I posted a photo of desert milkweed with a tarantula hawk, and people will say, the tarantula hawk has one of the most painful stings in the world. Everyone wants to be afraid, but it takes so much less energy to actually observe something, to see it means no harm, to just let it exist. To be afraid it gives people something to bite into, but playing at the edge, seeing those boundaries and playing at the edge, is the best medicine.

MDLT: What is it about MDLT’s mission that you support?

TP: It’s kind of a matter of lineage. I know the people that founded this organization and did all the work to create it. Some of them were my mentors. Some of them I consider family; co-director Cody Hanford I consider a dear and valuable friend.

… I’ve been living next to and hiking next to Section 9 for a really long time, and it means a lot to me. Every time I see the land preserved by MDLT, I see the value of that land, regardless of what the policies are or who’s being efficient. I know the value of what they steward over and what they are gathering as a resource. Every piece of land that does not have an electric light on it, every land that does not have a parking lot on it, is valuable. Apart from the people who were and are involved, it’s the land. It’s the land I trust. And I trust the Land Trust.

Photos by Travis Puglisi