25th January: A paradise of stones - Joshua Tree National Park

The 13th day of our journey, which coincidentally was a Friday, was the one I enjoyed the most. It turns out it doesn’t take much to make me happy – only a stone paradise.

After 4 nights, we left LA behind and went to the Joshua Tree National Park. At first, I was a little bit confused when we arrived. After all the Sequoia trees I also expected a forest of trees. But it was mainly a forest of stones. I commented that the stones looked like hardened dinosaur poo. But in fact, they were made of hardened magma that was pushed through the earth’s crust ages ago. The Joshua trees, in comparison, were pretty boring.

I cannot post enough pictures here, nor hide my excitement for this place. It may not look that spectacular from the pictures, but for me it was one of the best playgrounds on Earth. I simply couldn’t get enough of climbing around.

When we departed, I felt really relaxed and deeply happy. On our way to our next AirBnB we stopped on the side of the road when we spotted something that looked like snow, despite the temperature of around 18°C. 

It was “only” salt of course, but also here I felt the need to explore a bit and so I climbed the little hill next to the street – and found a river on the other side! It was incredibly beautiful, turquoise and very salty :)

The guys in the other car wanted to go home as quickly as possible, while Audrey, Enrique and I decided to make a little detour to one of the many ghost towns in the area, despite the risk that we’d arrive after dark. The Sun was already so low that our car’s shadow looked like a bug moving through the desert.

We found the ghost town hilarious. Instead of a deserted, abandoned place, we found a well-lit and renovated vistors centre. This however, was closed unfortunately due to the government shutdown.

Amused, we headed off to Needles, our destination for that night. It was almost completely dark on our way through the desert, so much so that we could see the Milky Way. Only trucks’ headlights and a glow far away on our left disturbed the darkness. We were wondering for half an hour what that glow was, until we concluded, it must be Las Vegas, even though it was still 100 miles away. Checking on Google Maps revealed that we were right. It’s incredible how the light pollution of a big city can still affect the clearness of the night sky, even at a distance of over 100 miles.

Written by Julia Heuritsch | Uploaded on 5th February 2019