[This is the continuation of California Trip, Part 1.]

The next day, which happened to be Easter, we drove about an hour north from Palm Springs to Joshua Tree National Park. This is the place where the Colorado Desert, a low-lying desert, meets the Mojave Desert, a much higher-altitude desert. (This is the place high on the desert plain where the streets have no name, if anybody was wondering.)

About two miles into the park, we just had to get out of the car and go hiking through the desert. Now neither of us had ever been to the desert before, so Sarah and I were totally amazed by the terrain and our surroundings.

The plain we were on was mostly flat and packed full of desert plants, except in various random places where there were giant piles of boulders, as you can see in the distance in the picture below.

Where we were hiking, we were near one of those massive boulder piles. Sarah was pregnant, but not too pregnant, so we took it easy but managed to climb up to the very top of the hill.

I call it a hill (instead of a pile) because we discovered the boulders only cover the surface; the hill is actually a single solid piece of rock. I can’t even imagine the force that would be necessary to force a piece of rock that large out from under the surface of the plain.

Fortunately, I was there to hold up this boulder when we took another hike later in the afternoon.

The San Andreas is actually visible from places in the park (it doesn’t run through the park, but it runs nearby). I can imagine an earthquake thousands of years ago pushing this rock up through the surface, like play-dough pushes out between your fingers when you squeeze it really hard.

This is a Joshua Tree. They apparently only grow in the Mojave Desert. In the park, there were plains that were absolutely filled with these things as far as the eye could see… I couldn’t even grasp the scale.

The ranger told us Joshua Trees will be extinct in about a hundred years, due to climate change. I’m glad we got to see them when we did.