A trip through Joshua Tree National Park, Ca. (dialup warning)

[frogcycle]

For those who have never had the experience - and for those who have, and just want to lose themselves in the splendor of our planet for a few minutes.
Click here to view as slideshow


Twentynine Palms -Joshua Tree National Park
Most of these will speak for themselves


Granite in the central part of park is highly homogeneous - patternless


This HAS to have been a riverbed


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I'm heading for that notch at center


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A pretty little waterfall millions of years ago


Layer of quartz separating masses of granite

continues through notch


and in opposite wall - also visible many other formations

Looking back from the notch


Looking ahead - I'll put feet on wall and hands on that wedged boulder - inch sideways to traverse that section

Life finds a way


Hello! Don't let me disturb you!


Mohave Rattlesnake - venom 20 times as potent as Western Diamondback


"Looking back up at the notch (Mo is just beyond bush at lower right - I'm glad I was not tromping along in the notch at that stage)"

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Dry creek beds make nice paths

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Those are crumbled bits of that quartz layer
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Joshua Trees

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If this were a movie set nobody would believe it

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Now THAT's an obelisk!


View from Keys lookout - Salton Sea in distance

From Keys lookout

From Keys lookout

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Best specimen I could find

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'Cap Rock'

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Desert Primrose and Cholla

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Chocolatey-looking granite on north edge of park similar to that around base


granite on south edge of park retains some sedimentary patterns


More 'cooked' but still not homogeneous

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Pinto valley

Pinto Mountains

Cholla Garden

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Ocotillo Garden


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Tell me a big truck didn't just dump that pile of rocks!

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Mt San Jacinto from I-10

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[Maestro]

1. Thanks for the trip.

Great landscapes or should I say rockscapes? :) That place must be a geologist's dream. I wish I knew how to read all those layers. The granite strip separating rock formations is amazing.

[Crabby Appleton]

2. GREAT PICS - THANKS!! NT

[lost-in-nj]

3. Wow

awesome pictures... some of those rock formations look like
someone sculpted them.....
amazing

thank you for sharing


lost

[yellowdogintexas]

4. that is a place I would like to visit and those were awesome

shots.

But I have to know: did you see the Queen of the Desert? I was shown a photo of this formation by an NPS ranger from Joshua Tree several years ago. A most interesting formation, I must say

[frogcycle]

9. don't know of it

I tried googling, found a nice article about the Mojave. It makes reference to "Queen of the Desert" but is referring to the town of Barstow.

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/04.28.99/desert1-9917.html

The last few pp are about the 29 Palms Inn and the Joshua Tree National Monument*. It has a heading over It has a heading "Queen of the Desert" but is talking about the town of Barstow.

The house** we rented that I mentioned in another reply in this thread was immediately adjacent to The Inn. I used to go in there to explore the Oasis of Mara. I ate dinner there on my trip last year. It is exactly as described. It is the premier place to dine in the entire town. The dining room is in what was once the eatery for the pool. About 6-8 tables, as I recall. I asked a waitess where the men's room was and she answered in a rapid fire staccato: "out the door, to the right, lizard on the wall." Sure enough, the restrooms are the ones that serve the pool, with those swinging louvered doors. And there was a wooden stylized lizard on the wall. I forget what the symbol was for women.


* It became a National Park in the early nineties. I called it "the Monument" several times and people immediately pegged me as an old "desert rat."

** It was the nicer of the two places we lived before the base. The other belonged to Kenny Van Tassel, brother of George Van Tassel of Integratron fame Kenny's brother. Kenny told my parents stories of his brother's trips to Venus, that he and friends frequently were flown by the aliens to NY for the weekend. Kenny had never gone, but his wife Mazie had. Mazie disappeared right after the local bank was robbed. Kenny said "she's layin' low." That's all we ever learned about it. I ate dinner in the restaurant that now occupies that bank building, sitting very close to where I went at age 7 to retrieve my ~ $8.00 in federally-insured passbook savings as the bank was going bust.

I have many fond memories of Twentynine Palms! I've always felt bad, though, that when we rented "Van Tassel's House" (you didn't use street addresses - the other one was "Gordie's Old Place") Kenny had a project going to raise worms to sell as bait for fishing. He had a big wooden box full of manure in the yard, and he asked me to water it so the worms wouldn't dry out. I forgot, and when I remembered some weeks or months later, there was no sign of worms. He never mentioned it though. Probably had not found a market for the worms in the FREAKING MOJAVE DESERT! Maybe the aliens wanted worms.

[lildreamer316]

5. Thank you. That is beautiful.

I want to go out there so badly...

[frogcycle]

6. A couple of notes...

I lived in Twentynine Palms in the early fifties; my family were actually the first dependents to occupy the then-new base housing. We left in 1958 and I got a chance to visit last year - 48 years later! I was astonished at how well I knew the place - recognized particular shapes in the mountain ranges in all directions from the base, and many of the rock formations in the park where we used to go for picnics. I joked to myself that "the place hasn't changed a bit" - nobody had rearranged the rocks! It was a special homecoming - I guess I bonded with old Mother Nature when running around there as a barefoot kid.

Of even more interest was the fact that although there have been some changes, the town is essentially the same as it always was. Oh, some of the stores have been converted to different use, but nearly all the buildings downtown (if you can call it that) are still there; little or no sign of any new construction. The vacant lot across the street from the house we rented before moving to the base is still a vacant lot. I walked the dry creek bed running through it where I used to prowl for hours on end on a futile mission to catch a lizard.

It does seem like the town has evolved to be closer to "its marines." Back then, the base was new, and the influx of families was really new; there was a little bit of a feeling that we were an invader species. Not hostility, just not open arms. Now it seems like a lot of townspeople have adopted every one of those kids training in the Mojave for duty in the Iraqi desert.

The town has murals on many walls - something they adopted somewhere along the line to spruce the place up, add some local character. They have various subjects. Here's one that you can't miss if driving from the base toward any destination in the real world:


Full Size Zoom


The intersection of the two main roads - the state highway that passes through town, and the one that leads from it out to the base - what would have to be considered the most-central part of the "business district" is here:


Full Size
Zoom

Yes, it is a vacant lot! Had been for sale for quite a while, according to the the B&B proprietor. The town council was trying to see if they could acquire it, put in some sort of memorial park. Families post "welcome home" signs when a unit is returning from deployment. The town encourages it, has a budget for cleaning up in due time. They don't publicize when a convoy is coming from LAX, but people know what day it is, and the local radio station gives updates on their progress up the Morongo Valley so people know when to go out and wave.

It's been eighteen months since I was there, so some of those names on the welcome home signs may be back over there by now. Some may be on my KIA website; I haven't dared to check. But there are definitely several from Twentynine Palms on my website, some with wives and children who were living in the town.

Those of us who don't live near a military facility, don't see the troops off duty, but just as anonymous creatures in photos all covered in body armor, helmets, goggles and such can easily slip into thinking of them like we do all those Empirical Stormtroopers in a Star Wars movie. I got a haircut while I was there in an off-base barber shop. There were some 8-10 gyrenes waiting when I got there; I started to leave and come back later - then I looked closer and realized they didn't look like they needed haircuts - they must be just waiting for buddies and all would be gone quickly. Well, I was wrong - and right. They WERE waiting for "haircuts" - but they were gone quickly! :)

Anyway, they were quiet, dignified, acted toward me as if I were a sr. officer (marines do that, just in case!) Nobody barked Ten Hut! When I entered, since it is not called for out when of uniform, but there was a discernible stiffening that shot through the room. It was reminiscent of accompanying my dad into an office. I nodded briefly and sat down and everyone relaxed a bit. And I can still see their faces, and I still brace myself when I look for photos of KIA from "The Stumps."


On another note, every time I look at the Pinto Mountains I wonder how long it will be before the Smokies look like that. If we do not stop our foolish abuse of the planet, aside from all the dire warnings about sea level rise, which seems to be the only thing that gets anyone's attention, the conditions everywhere will change, and the current vegetative patterns will be no more. Like the ancient waterfall in one of the pictures above, the streams in the Smokies may one day be just dry creek beds. And it won't take as long as it took for the Southern California climate to change. When you look at the water streaming down the mountainsides in the Smokies and learn that the rate of flow is down significantly in the past couple of years (I was there last week - a stream in the Chimneys picnic area I used to play in was just a dry, rocky creek bed), that the bears are showing up in towns due to lack of food (we saw one who looked emaciated) you quickly realize that it would take only a year or so of significant change in rainfall for the watershed to just empty itself. Like turning off the sprinkler and watching the runoff stop. We could fiddle around just a few more years and start to see the mountainside die, like a dried-up lawn.

[Arugula Latte]

7. Great photos!

I've seen Joshua Trees before, but did not have time to stop at the park. Someday ...

Some of the rock formations remind me of the "drip" type of sand castles you make by letting very wet sand dribble through your fingers.

[frogcycle]

8. they do indeed

The literature at the Park Hq says the formations were created underground. The entire area was a single big block of granite miles across that cracked due to seismic activity*. Cracks formed in parallel patterns, both horizontally and vertically. The water seeping into the ground following the cracks opened them up, gradually turning sharp-edges cubes and rectangular prisms into these rounded blobby shapes. Then, finally, as the surface dropped with further erosion, these formations were left sticking up. Thats how structures like the "cap rock" formed- the "cap" gradually settled down as the ground beneath it eroded away, until it was sitting on the chunk below.

That crack where I met "Mo" shows this in closeup. It is a channel cut through one large rock; the one wedged in there that made me (fortunately) traverse on all fours dropped into the gap as whatever was supporting it tens of feet above gradually washed away.

The layer of quartz formed by having material wash in and gradually fill a large crack where a seismic shift created a "slip plane" crack.

* The "tour" pictured above crosses the San Andreas fault, along with many lesser parallel faults.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

10. Fantastic!

Thank you so much for sharing these wonderful pics! :toast: