February 7, 2005 - Joshua Tree National Park, California

We didn't get quite as good a night's sleep as we had intended because the propane tank was exhausted during the night. The heater failed to heat, of course, with the net result that the system kept running continuously and the battery wore down. It was pretty chilly in the morning, but after I switched to the other propane tank and plugged in our portable battery, the heater worked fine and warmed the trailer up quite quickly. Using the portable battery to charge the RV's battery, I figured our battery power would last another night and we decided to lay over another day at Joshua Tree NP to really see it well.

So after breakfast we signed up for another night at the Visitor Center and asked about road conditions for the unpaved roads in the park. Deciding to do the Pleasant Valley loop road, we drove north through the Pinto Basin, stopping to take pictures of bushes with yellow flowers all along the road. And as we passed the Ocotillo cactus patch area, we noticed more wildflowers blooming along the side of the road and made another picture stop. In fact some of the ocotillo cacti were also blooming spikes of brilliant red flowers on the ends of their branches, and the contrast with the clear deep blue sky was marvelous, so naturally we took a picture of that too.

Some of the flowers we found were so tiny and dainty that I had to use a super-macro setting of the camera to create a decent sized image. Other flowers, although very tiny, were blooming in clusters sufficiently large that I could at least take a picture of the clusters. I was absolutely astonished at how many wildflowers were blooming-pretty much everywhere I looked-but even more astonished at the network of vegetation underfoot, almost like a thin and threadbare but continuous carpet of plants.

I was trying to avoid stepping on any of the plants, figuring that would be a breach of etiquette, but that proved to be remarkably hard to do because things were growing all over the place. Some desert! I finally walked on the tops of rocks and in a dry streambed, as those were the only places really free of plant life. Other folks that stopped there did not share this penchant and went blithely around crunching the dainty little flowers and plants underneath their boots. They did not seem to care or empathize with plants that struggle hard to survive and live for this brief moment after the rains when they can flower. I, on the other hand, could not stop caring for the fragile yet beautiful plants, so we all continued to behave in our very different ways, each one thinking the other quite odd, I expect.

After the ocotillo patch we turned west on the main park road and stopped off to see Skull Rock, a rock that has been eroded into a remarkable resemblance of a human skull. This was just one of many truly unique rock formations that we saw as we drove around the park, ranging from huge jumbled piles of cracked and eroded rock to isolated stones or clusters. One formation I saw looked precisely like a gigantic loaf of sliced bread, and although it did not have a designated name that is what I personally called it. Another formation Monika called, "Dinner for Mommy and Daddy Boulder at the Hard Rock Café", and once she made that suggestion the rock formation almost leaped into focus with that interpretation.

We turned off the paved road to take the "Geology Tour" road trip through Pleasant Valley, and along the way we saw even more of these startlingly unique rock formations. One was a slab of rock as flat as a tabletop perched on another rock just like a table on a pedestal. Another was a rock that had been eroded into a spherical shape and resembled nothing so much as a huge rock marble.

The geology tour had numbered stops with explanations that we enjoyed very much. I would stop and Monika would read the description or explanation of what we were looking at. Sometimes we got out to walk (me) or limp (Monika) around, and that offered some unexpected surprises. A "tank", by the way, means a rock catch basin for water in desert lingo, and at Squaw Tank (stop #9) we found rock climbers practicing their hobby. Some of the nearby rock surfaces had apparently been used by generations of the Native Americans to grind grains, and we could see the resulting depressions in the rocks.

Right next to that I found some very pretty wildflowers including a desert daisy, with bees busily humming around pollinating them! Where in the world would bees live in a desert? I really had not expected to see bees in the desert, but there they were.

The marker for stop #10 was missing, but we found the place where it should have been and I walked up to look at some Indian petroglyphs that had been chiseled into the rock patina. I find it interesting to look at art that comes from people long since gone and try to figure out what they meant to do with it. Right below the petroglyphs was a wildflower with a deep blue bell shaped blossom and heart shaped leaves that I thought exquisitely pretty.

The last part of the drive looped around a dry lakebed area that had once been the site for attempts at gold, silver, and lead mining. We had a grand panorama with Joshua trees in the foreground, verdant desert in the valley, basalt domes t the left and a ring of rocky hills in the distance on the right. What a view! But alongside the road we also found 2 beer cans that I stopped to pick up. What kind of a galoot would have the sheer effrontery to chuck his been cans into a pristine desert wilderness to spoil everyone else's view? About the same as the chuckleheads who would heedlessly stamp all over the wildflower beds or run generators in a campground in the middle of the night, I guess, but I do wish they would stay at home rather than ruin the park for others.

The truck, by the way, seemed to enjoy having its 4-wheel drive engaged and bouncing along the rutted road. I should advise any of you coming this way to be extraordinarily cautious about this road. The first 2 or 3 miles might be doable in a normal car, but after that you should NOT, repeat NOT attempt it without a good, repeat good, 4-wheel drive vehicle. Not only that, I personally would say you need a vehicle with at least 9 inches of clearance under the axles or else you may get hung up on the deep ruts. The sand was at least 6 inches deep in many places, and our truck's fat tires floated over it very nicely, but again a vehicle with skinny tires or 2-wheel drive would very easily get stuck in it. That all being said, I had a blast driving along; it was my first real almost-off-road driving with the truck and probably a good learning experience. It was also satisfying to finally use the truck as I had planned to do when I purchased it for these trips two years back.

We were getting hungry by this point, so we drove north out of the park to 29 Palms where we had a quick lunch at a McDonalds. The girl at the counter was quite nice and told us where the nearest food store was located (over the next hill, as it turned out), and we went there after lunch to buy orange juice, milk, luncheon meat, and eggs. On the trip back to camp we stopped off at the main Visitor Center on the north side of the park to see what was there. It turned out they had a room full of exhibits about the park's geology, flora, and fauna that was very informative, plus a cactus garden out front with labeled specimens of each type, which for me was a bonanza.

Monika had spotted a Joshua Tree just ready to blossom earlier in the day, so we stopped there to take a picture before resuming our drive back to Cottonwood campground. We worked on our respective computers until it was dark and then Monika fried up some of the eggs for dinner. My computer's batteries were almost discharged, so in order to keep working on stitching together panoramic shots after dinner I had to shift the portable battery over to the 120-volt AC inverter and then use that output to power Baby. It was a circuitous transfer of electrical energy at best, and a pretty Rube Goldberg setup at worst, but it did allow me to work on the computer for the rest of the evening.

Monika continued to crochet the bonnet for Peanut's little jacket for a while but switched over to playing solitaire for the rest of the evening. It was a form of solitaire I had never seen, where the basic arrangement of cards is 4 rows of 13 cards, all dealt face up. The aces are removed and the object is to re-arrange the cards in the rows such that each row has a single suit ordered from 2 to King. You move cards around starting with the 4 free spaces left by the aces, and there are complicated rules for what is a legal or illegal move. Apparently Monika's father had played that when she was a kid, and he was very good at the patient advanced planning that this form of solitaire requires. She was happy that she won the game with only one "schummeln" (German for cheat but just a little bit), which she said was pretty good because usually she had to do 4 or 5 cheats to win! I retired soon after finishing the picture stitching as that type of mind numbing detail work always makes me tired for some reason, and Monika followed after she had read and checked over the new journal entries.