“The landscape looks like nothing,” says our guide Victor as we drive from the airport to Loreto Baja California Sur, “but there are owls and woodpeckers in those cactus, and big horn sheep, grey foxes, mule deer, raccoons and mountain lions in the arroyos, the valleys.” The green and gold mounded hills studded with lanky cardon cactus, copal bushes and prickly chain link cholla seem as static as a western movie set to my untrained eyes. The town of Loreto, and the surrounding towns of Baja California Sur, have their own surprises and I was more than ready to savor them all.