Rocks

For the first half of today, I was wondering why this place is called Joshua Tree National Park.  We came in the Twentynine Palms entrance and camped on the east side along the main road.  Here there are a few Joshua trees, but the main feature is rocks.  Huge fantastic piles of reddish sandstone rocks.  Our boys would have loved this place when they were growing up.  Rock scrambling is a definite must here and there are a LOT of rocks to scramble.  A lot of the rocks are the grippy combination of granite and feldspar, so your feet don’t slip, even on steep slopes.  A rock scrambler’s paradise.

Our first few hikes for the day were done at such places as Arch Rock, Skull Rock, Split Rock, Face Rock, Heart Rock, and others. Do you see a pattern here?  It’s all about rocks.

And with some high cloudiness and temperatures in the low 70’s, the dry desert air gives you goosebumps when the wind is blowing.  Perfect weather for rock scrambling.

We put in a few miles of trails in and amongst the rocks.  Highly enjoyable.

It was only when we drove more west on the park road that the park finally lived up to its name.  Large expanses of Joshua trees filling entire valleys.  We learned that this park contains both some of the Colorado Desert and the Mojave Desert.  The Mojave Desert is above 3000 feet in elevation and contains different vegetation than the Colorado Desert, including Joshua trees.

So our lack of Joshua trees simply meant that we were in the wrong desert.

In addition to several trails with “Rock” in their name, we hiked to Ryan Ranch, the ruins of a cattle ranch on the edge of a sea of Joshua trees.  Hard to imagine making a living out here.  It would be pretty desolate.

We also drove to one of the highest points in the park, the Keys View, which offered a commanding view of several cities to the south, including Indio and Palm Springs, 20 miles away.  The cities could be seen today, but often are enshrouded in mist and smog that drifts over from the west.  On this clear day, the mist was quite evident; and today was better than most.  From this vantage, I managed to squeeze off a couple of texts using the barely-registering signal on my phone.  No updating the online version of this yet.  That will have to wait until we leave the park.

We also drove to Hidden Valley, a 55-acre natural valley flanked by large ridges of rocks.  This valley was a favorite of cattle rustlers, who would herd other people’s cattle into this valley through the narrow opening and hold them there to be rebranded.  They would then drive them to nearby towns and sell them as their own.

The valley is surrounded by and full of lots of imminently-climbable rocks, which are just begging to be climbed.  We saw a couple families with boys that were scrambling all over the rock formations.  That would have been our boys also.  We did some scrambling also, although not with the same youthful energy.  Sixty years has a way of slowing things down and making the joints less flexible.  One thing nice about this valley, however, there were plenty of rocks which are climbable by someone of just about any age.

Joshua Tree National Park is also a favorite destination for the more serious rock climber, as it contains numerous vertical faces with differing heights and difficulty levels.  In one of our drives through a campground, we saw several people camped along with lots of rope and climbing gear.

We could have stayed here all day in this climbing playground but it was getting to be time for dinner.  We drove back to the same campsite we stayed in last night to make dinner and spend the night.  Rather unprecedented for us: two nights in one place.