Joshua Tree National Park

we woke up in Palm Springs this morning; not a surprise since we have been here since Sunday night.
Here are some pictures from Joshua Tree National Park, where we spent Friday night to Sunday night....

Here are some pictures of the Joshua Trees - they dot the landscape, and there is not much else!

and more close up....

we camped there, which was an adventure - while it was very pleasant (about 18-20) during the day, it was close to freezing at night - we wore all of the ski clothes we brought with us. and you couldn't get pegs in the ground, and one night it was very windy so we had to get up in the middle of the night and find more rocks (luckily there are lots of those!) to help keep the tent stable. here is our site...

in the park, you can overlook the San Andreas fault, which kind of makes you think of where exactly what you are standing on.....

The Joshua trees are in the north of the park, in the higher elevations. In the south there are other kinds of strange cactus plants, like cholla...

and ocotillo...

and some more traditional cactus...

we pondered this sign for quite some time.....

then I asked a ranger at the visitor centre, who told me that a "wash" is a dried up river bed, and "fried liver" is just the what they chose to name this one; why? we will never know...


We did a couple of hikes in the park, one up to about 5800 ft for a great view of the desert

and another down into a canyon where there was a palm oasis

Outside of the park, in the same general area of the state, and in middle of nowhere is Pioneertown, built as a movie set for Westerns in 1947 (I think they still use it now and again for filming). One of the things they filmed here was the Cisco Kid TV series (that bit of trivia is for Mom!), and several Roy Rodgers movies; in fact there is a bowling alley there that was built for him because he spent so much time at this location
Here's a shot of the town.

that's it for now...!