In God's Country

Phew! After a day of basically complete immobility yesterday (seriously, I didn't really get out of bed until 2, and wouldn't have left the house at all but for the complete and utter lack of food), I am feeling refreshed, revitalized, and already a bit nostalgic about the days gone by. As in the last week, which I spent out in California.

It all began with a phone call from Stovie about a month ago: "Winter break. Road trip. Camping?" As plans go, it seemed a good one, and once J-ka agreed to come along, it got even better. So after an arduous journey to San Francisco (11 1/2 hours door-to-door -- why?), day-long supply gathering, and some madcap socializing (the formerly pregnant Utrecht + child, the really amazingly pregnant Mother of Fatima, and the never-to-be-pregnant-nor-impregnate-anyone The Stik, all in the space of just 6 hours), we were off.

After a brief sojourn in Palm Springs ("So clean you could lick the sidewalks downtown!" said J-ka, although she refused to do it), we ended up here, at our destination, for several days of camping and hiking. If you have only ever experienced the Mojave or Joshua Tree as a mediated experience (esp. if the medium involved is early-90s stadium alt-rock), then I strongly recommend a visit -- it is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. No wonder I keep on describing my puny mid-Atlantic hikes as "meh": they just can't compare to the splendor of the high desert, and it's unfair to even make the comparison.

For example, I present our campsite. Seriously, this was our campsite.
If you look closely at the bottom of the lower picture, you can see the top of the propane bottle for our camping stove. We were the last campsite at this campground, and except for the nightly wind (and excessively flappy tent),
the only noise we could hear was the howling coyotes and us (including some howling on the part of J-ka when little desert rats came to visit our campfire on the last night). J-ka was continuously reminded of Land of the Lost, and maybe because of Stovie's excellent Sleestak impersonation, it did seem likely that some kind of dinosaur would step out from behind one of the rocks. We climbed rocks a plenty, like this one just up the trail from the campsite (that's J-ka up top there),
but rather than dinosaurs, ended up seeing stuff like glorious desert sunsets.
Each day we went for a long hike, saving the (warmer, due to lower altitude) Colorado desert hike for the end. The terrain means that in most places you don't need a trail -- you just pick a landmark, walk towards it, climb up it, and walk back, and everywhere you turn it is beautiful. This was true in the upper Mojave,
the transition zone between the two deserts, overlooking the Salton Sea,
near the Eagle Mountains,
and in fan palm oases (that's a wee Stovie in the lower right down there).
Did I mention there was a lot of scrambling up and down rocks?
Despite the absence of dinosaurs, there was some nice fauna to be seen, like this raptor that we think was a golden eagle
and jackrabbits aplenty.
Some kind of desert creature very neatly eats the inside of these gourds that lie about the desert like bocce balls,
but we couldn't figure out who.

Desert plants grow in the most inhospitable seeming places.
And they are quite protective of their water supplies. Worst of all is the jumping cholla, which I had previously encountered when I spent the summer in the Sonoran Desert studying that language I tend to study. Cholla are mean and scary,
as both Stovie and J-ka were to find out, much to their painful surprise (I warned them!). On the plus side, the cholla is quite aesthetically pleasing, both en masse and separately
and was also in bloom.
Some cholla look like prickly golems,
but luckly proved inanimate,
which was a good thing. Also lovely are cactus skeletons,
other kinds of (scary!) cacti,
ocatillo,
and the beloved Joshua Tree itself.
Even though it got incredibly cold at night (lasting well into the morning),
and the sun set at 4:30, such that you could get exciting long-legged shadows at 2:30,
I got a tan!
That's how I know I was on vacation. Well, that and this vacation-style pic, even if I didn't quite make it all the way in.
I heart Joshua Tree!