Today was our one and only full day to spend at Joshua Tree. It’s an hour drive from Blythe to the park, so we wanted to be sure to get an early start. We went to the bakery next door for a breakfast bite just a few minutes after they opened at 7am, and we ended up splitting a pineapple crisp (which I liked a lot and Rich thought had a bit too much filling—which it probably did, but I still liked it). Soon we were heading west on I-10, feeling gusty winds and the vastness of the We arrived in the park around 9:15am.
We didn’t have a real plan for the day other than to poke around and do some light hiking, and get a sense of the distances involved and whether we would like to come back for a longer stay, which of course we do. We thought it would be best to go to the more northern points first, before everything filled up, and we basically did that (stopping at many of the pulloffs and attractions along the way tot ake photos) but since it was a gorgeous Saturday in wildflower (“petal peepers”! as R has dubbed them) season, everything got busy very quickly. Driving further north from Cottonwood Spring we gained elevation and started to see some Joshua trees, which are wildly bizarre and as unique as saguaros. In some areas there are vast forests of them that almost look like they were planted in orchard rows, they are so consistently spaced out. At one pulloff, we noticed a neat rock ledge with what looked like the bottom couple inches of a signpost embedded in it. My first thought, of course, was “witness post” but I didn’t see a survey mark immediately nearby. But a moment later I turned around and, in a small depression in the rock, there was one! So cool!
We made our way along to Jumbo Rocks—literally crawling with people—but the areas are so vast that you can still pretty much find spots to yourself to wander and climb around on the rocks. We found some interesting cacti here, and explored on both sides of the road. People were rock climbing and we watched for a few minutes; this particular group didn’t really seem to know what they were doing.
We had a great little hike at the Oyster Bar area. This is a climbing area but we mostly had it to ourselves until we got deeply into the rocks, at which point we heard some climbers (but it took a while before we actually saw them). Found lots of great cacti here too! Whacked my ankle on a rock at one point, but it seems to be OK.
Not wanting to venture too far since it was already around 2:30pm, we went up to Hidden Valley just to see what it was like. Very very busy, and nowhere to park eve if we had planned to! But we were simply planning to get a look at te place and then head back.
Along the way, we just had to make a stop at the cholla garden. We didn’t actually walk the trail, but we stayed a bit to the north just poking around among the cholla (and somehow neither of us ended up getting attacked this time!). This was actually fortuitous because R turned around at one point and saw the most beautiful Opuntia basilaris (beavertail pricklypear) with its rose-pink flowers! So unexpected. We saw quite a lot of these at a higher elevation at Oyster Bar, but they were just beginning to bud. We didn’t see any, other than some dead ones, at lower elevations. I guess we were just lucky to come across a healthy one at a lower elevation that was as a result blooming earlier than the others!
We had two more goals - to check out the supposed Chucky Cholla just off the Cottonwood Spring path we had hiked yesterday, and to see if we could find a USGS disk with scaled coordinates that was just a few miles north of the entrance.
We don’t know if we had any luck at Cottonwood. The coordinates di not lead us to a cholla but led tot he bench at the bottom of the hill near the oasis. No idea what happened there! We did continue on and took a photo of the first two chollas we saw, and we’ll compare them to the photo online. I think the first one might actually be it, but we’ll have to see.
And finally, we looked for the USGS disk which was extra interesting in that there were supposedly two gravity disks nearby! One was supposedly adjacent to the BM and the other was 65 feet to the south. We parked at the nearest possible spot to the scaled coordinates and hiked in, not expecting much. But it only took a minute of walking up a wash/ditch to spot he two disks on an outcropping boulder! The gravity disk is actually a hexagon, very unusual. R paced off 65 feet to the south and spotted the other gravity disk. This was a three-fer!
The drive back to town was as expected but at least there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic this time. We arrived back in town right around 6pm and the Mexican restaurant was very busy. We decided to do takeout instead, and got chile colorado with rice and beans, two cheese enchiladas, and we asked for chips and salsa (but only got the salsa). We ate int eh hotel lobby after purchasing two beers from the girl at the desk. (We got two more, plus two orange juices, for later.) Great day and a perfect way to end a perfect vacation!!!