Although located in So California, the Joshua Tree National Park is a convenient daytrip away from Cibola NWR in Arizona, so we made our way there on a lovely February Saturday. Joshua Tree protects 794,000 acres of the California Desert - the Mojave and Colorado Deserts meet here - and provides spectacular scenery and plenty of trails to explore. Our first stop was at the Cottonwood Spring, a lush oasis in the desert, where native palm trees flourish.
After stopping at the Cottonwood Visitor's Center for some postcards, we moved onto the long and interesting drive through the Park. Here we take a stroll through the Cholla Cactus Garden, an area that is densely-populated with these cactus, that look like they are glowing in the dark when the sun hits them just right. To survive, the needles on these cacti will stick to anything that brushes against them and then travel with the carrier to be re-seeded elsewhere. So be careful not to get too close!
Another interesting piece of the Joshua Tree Park is ALL of the GIGANTIC boulders that lay around the landscape. It is known for being a great place to rock-climb, for all abilities. Oliver really enjoyed climbing around the various formations as we moved through the park. If you look closely in some of these photos, you will see his red shirt way up on the bluffs and tops of some very high places. Perhaps this will be a new hobby for him....
The Joshua Tree is really not a tree, but a species of yucca that can grow up to 40 feet tall. Like the Saguaro Cactus, the Joshua Tree grows at a very slow rate; one inch per year. This is one reason that this park exists: to give this plant a safe and vast space in-which to thrive. We had a ball walking amongst them, taking photos of them, and looking at all of the different and very unusual shapes and sizes of these plants for-which a National Park was founded.
We took a few hours to hike Ryan Mountain, the only place from-which you could get a 360 degree view of the Park.
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