Joshua Tree National Park

12/09/08
Weather was becoming an issue. My campsite at the White Tank Campground in Joshua Tree National Park was 3800’ compared to the 1930' or so at Kelso Dunes. Temperatures would be dropping to below freezing at night, and the wind was inescapable. On the other hand I could choose from many open campsites, as the place was nearly empty.
Friday morning looked like immanent rain, so I drove a bit around the park and walked some of the short trails. Apart from the hilarious Joshua Tree itself (not a tree at all, it turns out, but a yucca), and the spring flower show that I would not be around to see, the main feature at Joshua Tree is the widespread exposure of White Tank Granite, or Monzogranite depending on the source: large boulders sculpted into amusing shapes and often balanced in seemingly precarious positions. It was quite reminiscent of the Alabama Hills actually, though the rocks here were generally brighter and more glowing.

As it happened, some of the best exposures were along the Arch Rock Nature Trail which lead straight out from my campground. This particular granite is fine-grained and wears into a fine-grained pebble called grus. Nice. I cannot deny that my studies lean less toward the geological and botanical and more toward the cartoon-like visuals the rock formations and sometimes-hilarious Joshua Trees provide.

Joshua Tree

Jupiter was getting smaller and further away (yeah, I know…). The moon was full. The weird beauty was off the charts. Easily the weirdest campsite I’ve ever had. Downright hallucinogenic under the full moon. I was actually glad it was cold, or else I'd have been up to my mucklucks in mystics.

I got little sleep on a rough windy night and was up for better or worse at 5:00AM Saturday. Dawn was lovely, surreal in fact, and with adequate windblock it was warm enough to read outside for awhile. Oddly, amid all these enormous rock outcrops, finding adequate wind block was not easy. The problem seems to lie in the rocks’ tendency toward roundness - the wind just wraps around them. After a good sunrise the horizon clouds took over and soon I was in my car, blowing heat.

This chronology says I camped four nights at White Tank. Neither my notes nor my memory provide any hint of what I did for four days. I know I read a lot, hunkered down in wind cover or stretched out on the front seat of my car. Late one afternoon I got lucky with some low sunlight. The whitish granite turns a golden yellow in the low winter sun.








I know I spent a fair amount of time in Twentynine Palms.There was a whole lot of military there, as a huge Marine base, the world’s largest Marine Base, in fact, is located just outside of Twenty Nine Palms. More barber shops than Bayonne has bars. Despite my lifelong antipathy toward US military policy, I felt no discomfort. The soldiers bring another component into what is not an overly busy mix. They act with a courtesy and professionalism that matters to me, and the racial and gender integration is almost inspiring. I know life beneath the surface is more difficult than that, still the military does project an image of racial equality that is at least on par with the more liberal bastions of society.

I do support our troops, through my taxes obviously but also emotionally. I feel the government has treated them disgracefully, putting then under absurd and inhuman pressures in the name of serving their country. I know most of them would thoroughly reject this characterization, particularly coming from a draft-resisting anti-war guy like me, and obviously I keep my mouth shut. But I feel respect is due and in whatever small way available to me I show it. And hey, let’s fact it, I’m getting old. I don’t have that old self-righteousness. If I’d been there another day I’d have gotten a haircut.

I woke up Monday to dark skies and decided to bail, and it’s a good thing I did. I got a room at the Motel 6, took a shower and headed back out. I spent an hour at the Joshua Tree library and then drove up to Yucca Valley and found myself in snow. Big heavy drops of snow. Not an extraordinary occurrence here at 3300’, but uncommon enough that people stood around gaping. A cold front was slamming the entire country. Both the Northeast and the Northwest were getting hit with some pretty rough weather. I would have liked to send my friends and family an ungloating note of sympathy from the warmth of the California desert. I wasn’t counting on sharing their pain.

 What was annoying rain in 29 Palms was apparently a winter storm anywhere I might try and get to, so I was stuck there another day At first I was afraid I was being too cautious but the weather soon validated my concerns as the rain turned to heavy snow. Roads were closed. Schools were closed. I would be holed up in the motel for another 24 hours. One night in a motel is a luxury. Two seems decadent. The third begins to feel like prison. The next day Joshua Tree National Park was closed due to snow and I thought I might be stuck for yet another day. But I learned that SR 62 out of the basin was open and safe. Driving over the low pass was surprisingly easy and in no time I descended into Morongo Valley with no sign of it ever having snowed at all.

An enormous artillery of wind turbines covered the cliffs above the highway. This was the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm, I later read, deploying over 3000 turbines, each 80 to 160 feet tall, to utilize the winds roaring through Gorgonio Pass (1500’), a deep narrow slot through mountains ranges rising over 10,000’. Interstate 10 utilizes the pass as well; west over the pass lies Riverside, the San Bernardino Valley, Los Angeles. I headed east on “the ten”, as they say in California, skirting Palm Springs, which I was tempted to visit but drove on by, cutting south into the Coachella Valley toward Salton Sea. I thought I might come back to Palm Springs, for a movie, maybe see some Christmas lights, but I never did.