Roadtrip Updates : Mar 21-22 -- Joshua Tree Natl Park & San Jacinto State Park

I admit I'd never really heard of Joshua Tree National Park before I looked at a map of all the national parks when I was planning this trip. And I really didn't know what a "Joshua Tree" looked like either. But I figured if we got in the area, we'd stop and on March 21st that's where we ended up.

For the record, a Joshua Tree is not a tree - it is a cactus. A strange-looking one. Legend has it that the Mormon settlers, some of the first non-natives in the area, named the tree after the prophet Joshua, seeing the limbs as outstretched arms. According to a park ranger we spoke with, there's no exact way to age a Joshua Tree as they don;t have rings at the core like a real tree. They can only estimate based on the size/height of the tree but admit that it's very inexact.

In fact, it's a really nice national park with lots to see. It's high desert and has lots of cactus but also a lot of really interesting rock formations that I didn't expect. Mostly we drove from one scenic spot to another but we did manage to take a couple of short hikes. It was a pretty warm day - hot in the sun, actually. It's a surprisingly large park (around 792,000 acres) and it's one of the newer parks, being elevated from a "national monument" to national park status in 1994.

There's a "hidden canyon" where legend has it that cattle rustlers used to hide their stolen herds before driving them off to market. The entrance to the canyon was expanded by a local rancher who dynamited open a section just days before it gained protected status as a national monument. The same rancher once ran a gold ore processing facility adjacent to his ranch (which is federally-owned and sits inside the current park boundaries). There are several sections of rock cliffs in the northwest part of the park, one area is called the "Hall of Horrors", which are frequented by rock climbers.

There's a vista at one point which overlooks the Coachella Valley where you can see the San Bernadino Mountians to the west northwards to San Jacinto and San Giorgino (the highest point in southern California), and the Salton Sea to the south.

Factoid: The Salton Sea was created in 1905 when flooding overcame an irrigation canal and poured many millions of gallons of water into this basin which, at it's lowest point, is just 5 feet higher than the Badwater Basin in Death Valley (the recognized lowest point in North America). After WWII, the Salton Sea was then promoted as a new recreational area and had numerous beaches and marinas. In the 60s, celebrities like Sonny & Cher and The Beachboys vacationed at Salton Sea. Since then, it's fallen on hard times since, without any new freshwater flow other than occasional rainfall, the salinity has risen to the point that the sea is more salty than the oceans, resulting in the die-off of all the fish that once lived in the lake.

In the southern section of the park is a large cactus garden which we found in bloom - something which hasn't happened around here in several years! As you might know, California was in a drought situation for several years and in dry years, many (most?) of the cacti species will not bloom. But over this past winter they've had above-average precipitation (rain & snow). Accordingly, the desert is in full bloom this year. And the word is out and people are coming from all over to see it. I've captured some of this in the pictures below.

Joshua Tree

Hidden Valley

Joshua Tree in bloom

Vista Panorama

The day after Joshua Tree, we went to Mount San Jacinto State Park, a mountain-top California state park which most reach by riding up in an aerial tram. Set just at the edge of Palm Springs, the park is at an elevation of about 8500 feet (10,834 at the peak), so temperature differences of 30-degrees or so between the desert floor and the mountain-top tram station are normal - but many visitors obviously don't pay attention to this detail based on the numbers of people in tee-shirts, shorts, summer dresses, flip-flops, etc. While the temps in Palm Springs got at least into the 80s, there was plenty of snow still at the mountain-top.And as you can see in some of the pictures, the mountain-top was occasionally cloud-covered both before we went up and while we were there. We just walked around the valley at the mountain top and enjoyed the several vistas pointed out to us by a local old-timer when we were standing around trying to decide which way to go once we got to the top.

Factoid: The areial tram, the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, to be exact, was once billed as the "Eight Wonder of the World" when it was being constructed. The cable towers built into the side of the mountain required 23,000 helicopter trips over 26 months to ferry the men and material for construction. The tram cars are some of the biggest in the world and hold 80 passengers at a time and rotate a full 360-degrees twic in each trip up or down the mountain so that all riders can enjoy the view.