3/5 - 3/11/05 Joshua Tree National Park, Take 2

3/6 - We're back at Joshua Tree, after an excellent sojourn through Arizona. We departed here almost 2 months ago with our systems in disarray & with doubt in our hearts. We return buoyed with confidence & with spring in the air. After stopping yesterday in Blythe to purge our waste tanks & take on fresh water, we headed for the south entrance of the national park. This would give us a chance to experience some areas that we had missed previously.

The road climbing from I10 north into the park was lined with parked cars on both sides. People were out walking through the desert, many bending down to take photos & it was no wonder. The desert here was a vast flower garden, yellows & purples, stretching as far as the eye could see. I joined the crowd to snap a few pictures & take Timmy for a walk. The air was perfumed with the sweet scent of wild flowers. We had been delighting in the desert bloom in Arizona, but this was really special.

We headed for Indian Cove campground near Twenty Nine Palms, but it turned out to be full of sheriff search & rescue units from all over the state & crawling with rock climbers. The ranger advised that there was still space at the Black Rock campground farther west, so we headed there & settled in. This was a crowded camp that lacked the scenic attributes the rest of the park offered, so we decided to just stay the night. It was a cold night too, getting down probably below 40° with gusty winds; we even got out the catalytic heater & ran it all night. The people in tents must have had it hard; they were pulling out early & fast in the morning. We headed back to Indian Cove where the crowd was starting to thin out. We had to wait for our spot to clear, so I got out my canvas chair & sipped a coffee, watching rock climbers doing their spiderman thing. Finally we moved into our site, the very site that we had left weeks ago after our satellite & solar systems both failed. No glitches this time. After I made a grocery run, we went for a hike, encountering numerous squirrels & jack rabbits. Chasing after them, Timmy got in trouble with cholla again.

The weather forecast from Friday indicated improving weather after weekend thundershowers & it did mostly clear later in the afternoon today. And it seems to be warming up too... fine by me.

3/8 - Definitely warmer, shirt sleeve weather today even though we're above 3000' here. I've been marveling at the Joshua Tree rock formations; how much in common they have with the Granite Dells near Prescott, although on a super-sized scale; the same weathered brownish granite boulders in similar piled and stacked formations, though the two areas are separated by about 200 miles. I wonder if the Dells are just the tops of a large formation like we have here, just not fully exposed by wind & water yet. The Dells had an intimacy that I really enjoyed, but the spaciousness here is also nice.

Now that we're back on Pacific time, it gets dark an hour earlier than we've been used to for the last few weeks. It also gets light earlier & I find that I am still operating as if we were still on Mountain time: early to bed & early to rise.

I've been plotting our course for the rest of the month. We're due back in the Diablos (near Livermore) by the end of the month & I have been planning on spending at least a week in Death Valley, where we'll head this weekend & hot weather is forecast for next week. I also want to stop by the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve either before or after Death Valley. I'm not sure if we'll want to spend 2 weeks in the Valley, so just in case I've been trying to identify another spot closer (but not too close) to Bakersfield where we might go. Red Rock Canyon State Park is a possibility. I like to keep things flexible, but I also like to know my options.

3/10 - Very pleasant weather here in the southern Mojave. Nice enough that we cooked outside, had a campfire & did some star gazing. I was thinking that out here the sky should be pretty dark, but I was surprised at how much light reaches us over the mountains to the south (Palm Springs) & west (San Bernardino & the whole megalopolis). The constant over flights of airliners heading to & from southern Cal airports was also distracting. Am I being whiney? Well, maybe, but I like my stars & this being a moonless evening, it seemed like it should have been better than it was. Any way, the fire was nice.

It has been very peaceful all week, with only a few rock climbers & occasional overnight campers. But the weekenders are already coming in even though its only Thursday. Several arrived at dusk or later, setting up camp by headlights or flash lights. I presume they got off work at 5 & headed for the hills.  It will probably be a zoo here tomorrow night.

I've continued to add to the desert wildflower slide show as almost every day we encounter another new bloom. Also today, I added some travel diaries from several years ago to the archives page. This was travel of an entirely different sort: international business travel. But those diaries (email to friends & family) still make interesting reading I think (IMHO).

3/12 - Our stay at Indian Cove ended on a high note, astronomical you might say. On our afternoon walk around the cove, I was drawn to what appeared to be a portable telescope with a rather large reflecting mirror. I stopped to comment & met Fred Badik, a serious amateur astronomer who invited me back later for some real star gazing. Fred's scope has a 20" mirror, I think the largest I have ever seen outside of an observatory. And it did not disappoint. I returned about 8 PM, well after dark & leaving Timmy to guard Gypsy... well, anyway to take a nap.

Fred started off showing me several open star clusters within the Milky Way, beautiful groupings of stars, glittering like so many diamonds, yet too faint to see without a good scope. Then we looked at a number of different nebulae; these are typically the debris from novas or dying stars & they take on all manner of forms. Following that Fred located a variety of galaxies of different configurations. At one point we had 4 galaxies within view at once. Jupiter & Saturn were both high in the sky & they were just stunning. We lingered over each. With Fred's scope you could see surface banding on both planets as well as several of their moons, 4 for Jupiter & 5 for Saturn. After 2 1/2 hours, I reluctantly called it a night, dazzled.

This morning I went back to take a photo of Fred & his scope. He showed me some of the details of his self-designed & built, computer-driven pointing system that he used to locate so many celestial objects so seemingly effortlessly. Then he put a sun filter on his small scope & pointed out several sun spots on the surface of our own star, something else I'd never seen except in magazine images. Thanks again, Fred. What a fantastic finish to this adventure.

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