After making some improvements on our Borrego Springs home, it was time to leave the area and do some exploring. We are on a quest to visit as many National Parks as we can, so our obvious choice was Joshua Tree National Park, about 2 hours away from us. Joshua is actually a new National Park...it was upgraded from a National Monument in 1994, and enlarged to 794,000 acres. We spent the majority of our time hiking in the northwestern half of the park, at elevations above 3,000 feet in the Mojave Desert.
What signals you that you are in the Mojave Desert is presence of the "wild-armed Joshua tree". It isn't really a tree but a species of yucca. Like other desert plants, its waxy, spiny leaves expose little surface area, efficiently conserving moisture. Joshua trees can grow to over 40 feet tall - at the leisurely rate of an inch a year. Its clusters of cream-colored flowers bloom February through April.
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| A Joshua forest.... |
Joshua trees do not flower every year and require a "perfect" combination of rain and winter freezes.
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| Seed Pods |
We set out to do as many hikes and nature trails as we could and were not disappointed......
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| Typical trail through the granite rock.. and well maintained! |
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| Known as Keys View at 5,185 feet and overlooking Palm Springs area. |
Common in this park are the "perched rocks"...a small quake would really change the landscape!!
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Happy Hikers......
Temperatures in Borrego Springs have been 100+ degrees, the high desert was a cool 80 degrees.....
Temperatures in Borrego Springs have been 100+ degrees, the high desert was a cool 80 degrees.....
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| Many very interesting rock formations...many with opportunistic plants as well. |
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| Barker Dam...built around 1900, miles from anywhere, to hold water for cattle and for mining operations... |
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| Petroglyphs along some of the trails.....too bad some people feel the need to damage them... |
The Desert Queen Mine was the largest and longest operating (1895 - 1961) gold mine in the park and one of the most productive mines in the southern California desert.
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| Remnants of a miner's rock "cabin".... |
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| Many visible mine shafts along the hillside |
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| Used to haul rock and equipment up the steep slopes. |
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| Remnants of the cyanide leaching equipment used to extract gold... |
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| Known as Skull Rock.... |
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| We'll be back..... |
2 comments:
Love that clear desert air, those colors. Your pics are great! Bit of a change of scene for you two, that's for sure!
Great blog... it's a very different place but you seem to have captured the essence of the desert.
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