Joshua Tree Day 1

We spent a day and a half in Joshua Tree National Park before heading to Death Valley. Donna has visited briefly many years ago, but Steve has never been there. It was a bit less expensive at Death Valley to delay our arrival a couple days and put Joshua Tree first.

We started the day at 5:30 am with breakfast to get over to the Oasis of Mara to see birds.

We drove to Split Rock, but decided we did not have time to hike there. We are trying to see most of the park in one day, so we’ll only hike if we think we have time.

Skull rock is a quick stop along the road.

The namesake Joshua Tree grows at higher elevations in the park.

We drove up to and hiked the Barker Dam trail as it is a good place to see birds in the park.

Here’s the moon

There are some petroglyphs along the Barker dam trail.

We ate lunch at Hidden Valley then hiked the Hidden Valley trail after lunch.

A raven watched us eat for a bit.

Rock climbing is a popular activity at Joshua Tree National Park. We saw some climbers.

Key’s View has an amazing view of the valley to the southeast.

On the way back to the main road we stopped and did the Cap Rock hike. It’s a nice short hike through the desert.

Next we did the long drive to Cottonwood which is the southeastern entrance to the park. This goes down into the valley viewable from Key’s View. We didn’t stop anywhere on the way down, saving that for the way back. It took nearly an hour to drive there.

We stopped briefly at the ranger station to see what exhibits they had and then went over to the Cottonwood Spring hike. It’s a short trail that goes down into the riverbed which is dry this time of year.

On the way back we stopped briefly at the Ocotilla Patch. Some Ocotilla were in bloom, which normally doesn’t happen this time of year.

We also stopped at the Cholla Cactus Garden.

We stopped and did the Arch Rock hike. It’s a nice hike over there. The actual arch was fairly crowded. It was hard to get a photo without lots of people in it.

We got back to the parking lot at Arch Rock just before sunset and stayed there to watch the sunset.

We then drove to the Ryan Mountain parking lot for Dark sky gazing.

Driving back to the hotel in the dark, we saw a small tan rodent with a long tail and a bulb at the end of the tail. It crossed the road pretty quickly, in about two seconds. We think it was a kangaroo rat, which we’ve not seen before. We got back to the room after 9pm, making it a long day.