Wednesday we drove to the Joshua Tree National Park. This is a huge national park that is comprised of two deserts. At the southern entrance we took a short walk to a small oasis. The oasis is completely overgrown with huge palm trees that almost completely hide the water. I couldn't begin to get the picture of the oasis palms to fit on this blog, but this pic shows a couple of them, with Randy at the bottom of the frame.
The desert is starting to bloom here. The cactus often has blooms, and on the ground, almost unseen, are tiny red or yellow flowers. Further inside the park there is a garden of ocotillo plants. It’s not a garden in the Midwest sense - it’s an area that contains several dozen ocotillos, and people are allowed to walk among them. Right now they are full of green leaves and several are showing red flowers at the end of their branches. These are not true cacti, and they are nowhere near as dangerous as what is in the next “garden”. That is a group of Cholla cacti. They are nicknamed Jumping cactus because the small segments of cactus at the end of their branches are very easily dislodged by the slightest touch, and will stick (literally!) to anything that bumps them. Because such a slight touch transfers them to what touched them, people often don’t know they actually did touch it and assume it “jumped” onto them. Their other nickname is Teddy Bear because the many fine needles make them look fuzzy, like a teddy bear. And anyone who knows me knows I want to touch anything that I shouldn’t, so yes, I really, really wanted to touch these fuzzy looking things. But for once, better judgment prevailed and I didn’t.
(Who am I kidding? I touched one of these earlier, and it hurt like the dickens)
We got back into the car and drove on. The next area is full of huge, huge rocks. These rocks just sit on top of the ground like they were stacked up there. They don’t match the ground rock beneath them and don’t blend into the landscape. To give some indication of the rock size, on the first picture below, Randy is just barely visible on in lower right corner. This was nowhere near the largest rock.
The rocks were in fantasic shapes, and often looked like sculpture.
Eventually (miles later) we reached the northern section of the park. This is the area that contains the many Joshua trees that give the park its name. Joshua trees, according to one source, appear to try to grow in as many directions as possible.
We drove to Keys lookout, climbed a few steps, and found a breathtaking view. The plains below stretch out below and on you can see as far as Palms Springs, which is over 40 miles away.
And on the way home, as we passed by the Palm Springs area, we saw an amazing sight – an enormous wind farm. There was easily more than 200 wind machines, all turning and generating electricity for someone and cash for someone else!
Thursday we talked about going to Palm Springs, but instead we headed back into the mountains in search of more beauty and a little exercise. We drove out to the Painted Canyon, which fulfilled all the requirements. On the way we saw two very unusual planes overhead, which Randy recognized as Ospreys. They are a new type of air force plane that can change the direction of its engines, so it can move vertically through the air. The rest of the drive to the canyon was uneventful, except that it was a tough drive – Randy had to drive very slowly and very carefully on a pitted, sandy, rough dirt road for about 5 miles But when he parked the car and we started hiking into the canyon, it was all worth it! The part that is responsible for the name “painted canyon” is at the start of the canyon. The rock is in shades of red, light gray, dark gray and almost white.
Further on as we hiked deeper into the canyon, we found several slot canyons and explored a few of them. This is new territory for us and we both loved it! These are narrow slits in the canyon walls that wind around the harder rock columns, going up and down, following the path that was cut out by the flash floods. The slots would be a deadly place to be if there was any rainfall because there is no quick way out, but today there was no danger.
Eventually we hiked back to the car and drove on to the next canyon, which was Sheep Hole Canyon (not sure how it got its name). This canyon had a trail that led upwards. As we climbed, we found we were standing on the top of the canyon, overlooking the valley below on both sides.
The “valleys” on both sides are spectacular vistas of craggy canyons and smaller mountains. The pictures I got don’t convey the view, and I can’t get them to fit here anyway. But on the picture below you can see the trail that runs on top of the ridge – this is the trail we walked along.
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