At breakfast time this morning, we took full advantage of the gift basket that awaited us in our rental villa, enjoying bagels, “egg mcmuffins” and fruit salad.
We left Palm Springs about 9 o’clock, headed for the west gate of Joshua Tree National Park. We didn’t do any geocaching along the way and reached the park gates by 10.
Today we learned that the Mojave and Sonoran deserts come together within the park boundaries. It was cool(ish) in the morning, as we were at higher elevations in the Mojave desert. The wildflowers were beautiful: yellow, orange, white, pink, purple and red. Many varities of cactus were blooming too, including this beaver tail cactus…
We learned about several geological phenomena, including tafinos, aplites, pediments and bajadas, completing 5 earthcaches today. We also visited 5 virtual caches and a couple of them were very educational.
It was much hotter after we descended to the Sonoran desert. We had to do about a 1.5 mile (2.5 km) hike at this lower level and K did NOT enjoy it very much. But he did make a friend at the overlook.
The old mine site that we hiked to was pretty cool and we could see the quartz vein that the miners were following. C used one of the special features on his camera to take this picture of the mine remains.
