Today we ventured to our first America National Park, but not without an eventful start. This trip kinda entails Kirstie driving and organising, Kenny chilling and cooking. So when Kenny decides to help me the morning we are leaving by finding out the visitor centre address, and comes across the fact that their has just been a flash flood and some of the park is closed, I'm like, 'why couldn't you have helped me last night?' So back into the hostel we go, trying to research a bit more about it, finding somewhere to stay outside the park if necessary and considering going to Phoenix instead. Eventually we just stick with the original plan, frig it. Being glad to have left the crazy San Diego drivers and slip roads behind, we arrive at the visitor centre 3 hours later, not a bad wee drive. The nice wee ladies there tell us it's not as bad as we had originally thought; just a few closed roads and campsites, but all the main attractions still open. We purchased our annual parks pass from the rangers and tips on which campsites to use and we were off. Straight to hidden rocks campground, chose site 39 because it had some softer ground to pitch the tent, ticket bought and displayed at sight, and we were off to explore, as we only had one day here.
First impression of Joshua Tree... WOW!! It's not like anything we have ever seen before. It's huge rocks just fallen anywhere, on their own or in mounds. Set amongst dessert of Joshua trees, Yucca plants and Cactuses. We saw very little wildlife here apart from the odd raven, very different than the coast, where we were tortured by squirrels.
Our first trail was Hidden Valley, a short trail telling you about how this valley was shielded by the rock surrounding it and how years they could actually keep cattle there... In a desert, how weird. Saw a few lizards, but apart from that everything around us was just soo dry; definitely no water left from the flood. Biggest dreads were rattlesnakes and scorpions, keeping my hands and feet to myself!! The next stop was Ryan's ranch; basically an old ranch that was just abandoned, parts of the old sand house, shed, machinery, all just left there. Interesting place. Any time we left the car, we had to have a good amount of water with us, it was hot. Other features we saw along the way, was Split rock (basically as it says), Live Oak (a rock that looked like an oak, with a big band around its middle), Skull rock (which Kenny took pleasure climbing). We travelled as far as we could in the park, 14 miles of nothing but sand and rocks, until we got to Cholla cactus garden. These were the real article; seeing them at each stage of growth and wing warned not to touch; Kennys like a big kid. On the way back we noticed Ocotillo patch, which were a group of plants that actually flowered here, bringing some colour to the desert. On reading the newspaper together with some info from the rangers, we understood why some of the park flooded and the rest didn't. Joshua tree sits over two deserts; the Mojave (part we were in) and the Colorado (the flooded part.) it's due to the difference in elevation that one will receive more rain than the other, but as the ground is so dry, it can't hold the water and floods easily. Makes me which I had studied geography in school. We'd been recommended to visit Keys view for sunset and we are glad we did. It's higher elevation, and had great views over San Andreas Vault. It's like seeing a crack made into the earth. We were able to get some beautiful pictures, job done.
Head back down to our campsite to did that there is someone in our sight... Ok, so they say they didn't realise someone already CLEARLY had their yellow tIcket stuck on the post right beside them but also because they're in a big campervan, they find it hard to get a site that it will fit in. I was NOT impressed. So I said we'd drive around and see if there were any other sites we liked and if not, they would have to move. In the mean time, Kenny had lost the power of speech funnily enough. So we did the obligatory drive round the campsite and to be honest, we probably could have chosen another sight, but it's the principle... We were there first, we had soft ground to pitch the tent and we had shade in the roasting desert. So back we went and if course I had to do the talking...
'I'm afraid we cat find another site with soft ground and shade; site 33 is free and I'm sure it would fit your van.'
And that was it, they were off. Pretty proud of myself, but hey, you don't realise how uncomfortable attempting to sleep on uneven ground is until you've had a few to many sleepless nights doing just that. We thought we'd wake up in the morning to our tent in around us or our tires slashed, but escaped unhurt, so it's all good. We were awakened though in the middle of the nights by a pack of coyotes howling, pretty cool but also sounding pretty close by. Also by a few very noisy birds that sounded like they swooped over our tent; I was really hoping Kenny didn't bring any food in....
Made it through the night, back On to our granola and yoghurt breakfast and then off to try to fit in some more site seeing before we left. When the trail then said a 2 hour round trip, we decided to give it a miss. But we were greeted by a chipmunk and a coyote up close when we were leaving the park!!
We'd been lately relying on Kennys google maps print out of average driving times, sometimes when we compared it to the sat nav, there were large time differences, today being one of them. Instead of google maps 5 hours 45mins, sat nav said 7 hours 30mins... Looked like it was a long road ahead. So off we went on our journey to the Grand Canyon :)