Cholla Cactus Garden Parking Area

• Khalil Gibran.

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Joshua Tree National Park was one of the first National Parks we visited after moving to the west coast. At the time, my location scouting was mostly based on google maps street view, and to be honest, and I was a bit disappointed with what I saw. The park didn’t look anything special other than its namesake trees. I was sure we could see everything that worth seeing in 3-4 days. I admit not a lot of planning went into the trip.

But boy, was I completely wrong. Joshua Tree NP is a park that sneaks up on you once you cross its boundaries. There are multiple valleys and at least two different desert systems within the park limits. So the scenery keeps on changing along with the plants and the rock formations. Here is also where I learned about the change in NP infrastructure design. While they designed the National and State Parks on the east coast, accessibility is a prime factor, and it's pretty common to be able to drive right up to a scenic view. It's not the case for parks on the west. Accessibility was not the prime concern; it was to keep the parks wild. You can see this change in thinking even in parks like Yosemite and Grand Canyon. Their famous and easily accessible sections constitute a tiny percentage of the park's total area. One of my biggest regret about Moving out of Socal was that we didn’t get enough time to explore Joshua Tree NP.

The Jumbo rock section of the park is the subject of today’s post. We did a small hike here called the skull rock loop. While hiking the short loop trail, we realized that jumbo Rocks is a location that can easily take one couple of days to explore and still go home with the feeling that you haven’t gotten all the possible compositions. Unfortunately, I could only afford a couple of hours here during our trip. I sincerely hope that one day I could return and explore the park a bit more.