Day Trip to Joshua Tree National Park

Right.  ‘Been a while.  I was about to whip up a post about my holiday travels, only to have it dawn on me that I haven’t posted anything since September.  So instead of going all Dr. Who on you and skipping around in chronology, I’m going to spend a few posts catching up with myself.  First up is a day trip to Joshua Tree National Park back in November.

The park is two hours and change from downtown LA.  I got into the town of Joshua Tree midmorning looking for breakfast.  The only place I found open was The Joshua Tree Saloon, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.  One of the regulars was wearing a t-shirt with the text “In dog beers, I’ve only had one.”  At one point, he was talking about getting thrown out of a series of bars in the early 70′s and explained, “That’s why I stopped drinking so much…  Oh wait, I didn’t stop drinking so much.  I stopped drinking so little.”

Anyway, they served a pretty decent impression of biscuits and gravy, so I ate my fill, and so engorged, found the park visitors center to rustle up a map or two.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time, and Joshua Tree encompasses over 1000 square miles, so I didn’t want to burn what few daylight hours I had left driving all over.  I spent most of the afternoon in and around nearby Hidden Valley (No relation to the salad dressing).  There aren’t any trails to speak of, but Joshua Tree has a fairly laissez-faire policy towards backcountry use, and Hidden Valley is a veritable playland for scrambling and climbing.

The road into Hidden Valley

"Where do these rocks go?"

"They go up."

Don't trip. It would hurt.

After I came back down to ground level, I got in the car and headed for the southern trailhead of The Boy Scout Trail.  The Boy Scout trail is a 16 mile path in the north of the park.  At about the midpoint, you can get off the main trail, hike another few miles, and find yourself in an area known as The Wonderland of Rocks.  So far as I’m concerned, anything called The Wonderlands of Rocks is worth visiting.

Along the Boy Scout Trail

At the doorstep of the Wonderland of Rocks

It was at this point that something somewhat unfortunate happened.  I was about two thirds into the background of the above photo.  I was, oh, 15 feet up on the side of a boulder, trying to get from one section to the next, and my pack was throwing off my center of gravity.  I thought about backtracking for 20 minutes and then spending an hour or more finding a different route, but determined that that was far too much trouble.  Instead, I decided to toss the pack the four feet or so it needed to go so that I could shimmy over and pick it back up.  Throwing you pack is never… a great idea, but in this case… whatever.  I knew that I’d be able to retrieve it even if I misjudged the toss; it would just take take time.  So I eased the pack off my shoulders, made sure my three points of contact were secure, and threw.  The pack went exactly where I wanted it to, and it landed exactly where I needed, except it did a kind of a funny twist in the air and landed face down… on my camera.  I clearly remember the distinct sound of something expensive slamming into a rock face.

So I made my way over, took the camera out, and sure enough, I appeared to have a paper weight.  It turned on fine, but gave some “PC Load Letter” style error message when I pressed the shutter button.  It was the kind of error message that may have been helpful if I was at a workbench with a soldering iron, set of precision screwdrivers, and service manual, but but no help at all trail side.  So I don’t have any photos of the two hours or so I spent in the Wonderland of Rocks. For shame.

However, later, on my way back to my car, I discovered that if I hit the camera fairly hard with the palm of my left hand while holding it with my right, I could coax three or four exposures out of it before it stopped working again.  Repeat as necessary.  The aperture kept misbehaving, and the auto focus was a bit wonky, but I did manage to grab the following photos on my way out:

I don't know exactly what these things are...

...but they seriously creeped me out.

I’m not sure why, but they kind of remind me of the Globolinks.

And that was it for that excursion.  I still had maybe 90 minutes of daylight left, but the weather, which had been spitting rain at me all day, seemed to be taking a turn for the wet.  I didn’t have much in the way of rain gear with me, so I called it a day.

Random Los Angelesishness:

Oh deep fried pizza, where have you been all my life?

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