Joshua Tree
The day after the Palm Springs conference was over, I headed out of town on my way to Los Angeles, with a detour to Joshua Tree National Park. Joshua Tree is right across the San Andreas fault from Palm Springs. Very convenient.
The road from Palm Springs to Joshua Tree goes through a series of junky, trashy, trailer park towns. The road goes up -- Joshua Tree is at about 4,000 feet in the Little San Bernardino Mountains; Palms Springs is at sea level or maybe even below. On the way up it gets cooler. People in Palms Springs say, "Oh! You'll like it up there, it's 20 degree cooler." Which on the day I was there meant it was only 95 degrees in Joshua Tree compared to the 116 degrees in Palm Springs.
Joshua Tree turned out to be a surprise. For one thing, it was blooming -- the entire park was covered in yellow and red wildflowers. When I got to LA later that night, Cara Maggioni told me that Joshua Tree apparently hasn't bloomed in decades. The rains this winter made it bloom so I guess I saw a more interesting park than the average traveler.
But the blooms were the least interesting part of the park. And the Joshua Trees themselves were not that interesting either. As Cara's sister Al and I remarked over dinner that night, "okay, we've get 17,000 acres of Joshua Trees and little yellow flowers here. Next?" The most interesting part of the park was the geology. Scattered throughout the park are massive rock formations that come straight up out of the desert. They are hundreds of feet high. Some of them are pillow basalt -- hundreds of round, smooth rocks piled up on top of each other like marbles. Some of them are igneous rocks that came up out of fissures in the earth under high pressure. These are columns of tall straight, skinny rocks pressed together, like a stack of pancakes turned on its side. Some of the formations are dome shaped and smooth and big enough to qualify as hills. Sometimes you see the pillow basalt piled around and on top of the pancakge stacks. You can also see the layers of rocks in the hills at Joshua Tree, which shows you the tilt of the crust it slammed into the west coast of the US after cruising across the Pacific on the tectonic plate. I took an entire roll of films of the rocks at Joshua Tree. I want to go back there with a geologist.
The other surprising thing about Joshua Tree is there is a place you can drive up to and look out over a large swath of southern California. From the Keys View, you can see the Salton Sea, which is only 30 miles from Mexico. On a clear day you can see Signal Mountain, which is actually in Mexico. You can see down over the valley across the San Andreas fault to Palm Springs and the San Jacinto Mountains. And you can see north to the San Bernardino Mountains and the Big Bear ski resort, less than 100 miles from LA.
On my way out of the park I passed another surprising thing about Joshua Tree. Out among the pillow basalt and the wildflowers and the Joshua Trees, 10 miles easily from civilization, was "pedestrian crossing" sign. It was just stuck in the scrub for no apparent reason. No intersection, no hiking trail. Just acres of wildflowers and stones and the sign. I took a picture of it.
posted by Anonymous @ 7:42 PM
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