California - Day 4 - Joshua Tree National Park, Palm Springs and environs

Banning KOA, Banning

Friday, 4 March 2022

The national park campground allowed us to use generators at specific times, which is reasonable, but the start time in the morning was 7:00.  Of course I got up really early as usual and wanted to use the microwave to heat up my coffee to take with me on the road.  So I left my campsite just before 6:00 and drove a mile down the road to the visitor center.

There was nobody around so I could walk the dogs there and use the generator to start the microwave to heat up my coffee.  While I was waiting, I saw a nice sunrise.

It started like this . . .

. . . and then became this.

And I noticed this "alpenglow" across the road.

 

A ranger told me yesterday that there are coyotes here and jackrabbits, but that it was "unlikely" that I'd see any Bighorn sheep.  At 2 AM today, we heard coyotes howling, so Dext decided to howl too, but we didn't see any.  When we went out walking, I was surprised the sky wasn't particularly dark and realized there was a lot of light coming from behind the hills in the west.  We're a long way from Los Angeles, but there are so many towns that spread out from there - maybe this was light pollution from that gigantic urban area?  Then, for an hour at 4:30 we got a bit of hard rain and some strong wind.  And that, plus the cactus, is all the Nature we got here at this park.

today's route

In Joshua Tree National Park

We left the visitor center at 6:25.  I hoped that by getting on the road early, we might be able to see some wildlife, as has happened in other parks - like the Badlands in South Dakota and the T. Roosevelt park in North Dakota.  I'm sorry to say that we saw no critters at all, except maybe 8 birds.

The brochure the park service hands out explains that this park is actually partly in the Mojave Desert and partly in the Colorado Desert, and that one area is a sort of melting pot for the two.

These explain characteristics of the Mojave:

And these explain characteristics of the Colorado:

I passed a large cholla forest, but it was on a double s-curve and it was impossible to stop anywhere for photos.  Impressive sight.

Some of the yuccas I saw were beginning to flower.  After a while I noticed that some of the Joshua trees were also beginning to flower, and that those flowers looked very similar to those of the yucca.  I managed to get a photo so you can see for yourselves.

And later I learned that the Latin name for the Joshua tree is Yucca brevifolia, which explains the similarities.  Farther along the road I saw this sign that explained how the Joshua trees contribute to this environment.

see details enlarged below

And this is a Joshua tree:

Oddly, I had to drive almost halfway through the park before I saw more than just a scattered few of these.  But the farther north I got, the more I saw, including several places where there were forests of them.

You may remember the ocotillo plants I saw at the Organ Pipe National Monument.  Those oddball things that look like dead sticks with thorns sticking out from every available surface.  Well, there are plenty of them here too, and because time has moved on, plus a little rain has come along, they're starting to put out leaves.

Those are thousands of tiny
tiny leaves all over those
dead sticks (see right).

Not all of them have
leaves yet.

There are enough of them here that the park service put up an explanation.

details enlarged below

It was nice to see the green leaves, but I'd sure like to see those red flowers sometime.

The park's brochure included a section about piles of rocks, and I had no idea why, until I got far enough north to find them.

If you look very closely, you can see the man in the dark
shirt almost in the middle of this photo.  That's how big
these rocks are.

There were some much larger than these, and there were campgrounds right among them.  I saw some campers who were parked immediately next to the rocks, apparently in marked campsites (not just picking any old spot they wanted).  Strange sight.

These are the rocks I saw . . .

. . . and this is what the park service had to say.
details enlarged below

This shows how far these rocks have eroded.  Staggering, isn't it?

All the park's campgrounds were full last night except the one I was in, where I counted only 3 vacant sites.  Not something I expected for a Wednesday night in early March.  I was equally surprised by all the people and cars I saw here before 8 AM - some parked by sights like these rocks and some parked at trailheads.  

The sun was nice but the air outside a shelter (like the RV) was very chilly, and people were wearing seriously winter-style coats.

On the road

We left the park at the town of Joshua Tree (pop. about 7,500), where I found the least expensive gasoline I saw today - $5.39.  Quite a range of housing - from avant-garde and clearly expensive down through ordinary to hovels.

From there I went southeast and lost a lot of altitude: Joshua Tree National Park sits at 2,612', while North Palm Springs, which you can see on today's route map is where I turned from southwest to southeast, sits at 870'.

As I came down the last incline before I made that turn, I saw a vast wind farm.

Most of them were turning;
there was a lot of strong wind in that area.

All of that was sitting at the base of a photogenic, cloud-wreathed snow-topped mountain.

The wind farm was just to the left of this photo.

According to signs I saw, this area at the base of hills/mountains is called Low Desert.  The National Park Service told me the Joshua Tree area is considered High Desert.  As far as I'm concerned, it's all still desert.

Another sign told me Dillon Road - where I was driving southeast between Desert Edge and Indio - was a "Scenic Route."  I wouldn't have said it was particularly scenic, even for a desert, but there were some points of interest.  For one thing, I passed a date farm, where they produce Medjool Dates, a particularly sweet date with a special texture.  They were originally grown only in Morocco and only for royalty, but in 1927 those date palms were threatened by disease with extinction, and the Moroccans shipped some of their offshoots to the US to try to keep the breed intact.  And now we don't have to be royalty to obtain them.

The town of Indio calls itself "The Place To Be."  It had 89,000 residents in the 2020 census and is considered the fastest-growing town in the valley.  This is the largest commercial date-producing area in the Western Hemisphere (they claim), and each year they celebrate the harvest with an National Date Festival (though Covid has interrupted that).  The area produces all the US dates.  Odd how specialization works.

Indio was established when the railroad came through the area in the 1870s; it was the halfway point between Yuma and Los Angeles, and the trains needed a place to pick up water.  It soon became an agricultural area, where farmers produced crops like citrus and dates that did well in dry climates.  We ate lunch in downtown and it doesn't look like a farming town but instead more metropolitan - maybe due to spillover from the fancy nearby cities of Palm Desert and Palm Springs.  There's only 23 miles between Indio and Palm Springs, but there're more than 262,000 people and apparently a lot of wealth packed into that space.

The small town of Indian Wells (pop. 5,400+), next to Indio, was gorgeous, with beautifully tended grass and huge beds of purple petunias and white ones, bright pink petunias and red geraniums.  Lots of blooming bougainvillea.  

In Palm Desert (pop. 53,000+), built at the base of huge mountains, even the Walmart and IHOP look upscale.  They have a Fred Waring Drive.  Dwight Eisenhower and his wife retired here.

In Rancho Mirage (pop. 18,000+), I saw the Bob Hope Drive and the Frank Sinatra Drive, both named for the celebrities who lived here.  Both Spiro Agnew and Gerald Ford retired here with their wives.  Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell are among the well known people who still live here.

A sign told me I was entering the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, which was hard to square with all the wealth I was seeing around me.

Cathedral City (pop. 51,000+) has Monty Hall Drive and Buddy Rogers Avenue.

And Palm Springs (pop. 43,976, according to their sign) has a Gene Autry Trail, named for a previous resident; Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the most famous current residents.  

From its long-time reputation, I'd expected to find Palm Springs the glitziest town of the bunch, but that's not the way it looked from the road.  I should say here that the "state highway" I was traveling was simply a main road through these various towns - 2 lanes on each side and traffic lights.  Anyway, I was surprised to see that Palm Springs looked among the least wealthy of this string, with Indian Wells and Palm Desert the most.  I smelled a skunk in the middle of Palm Springs, so it's rural enough for critters to be wandering around.

On the other hand, I passed a neighborhood called The Movie Colony, named for the movie stars who once lived here, including Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Benny and Dinah Shore.  So if I'd driven off the main road a bit, I might have seen more glamour than I did.

I came back to the giant wind farm and headed west, coming to Banning (pop. about 30,000) by 1:30.  That seems early, but I'd been driving nearly straight through since before 6:30, so I was tired enough to call it a day.  Of course, the dogs weren't, not having done much of the driving, so we went for a couple of walks.  I asked at the office if I could stay an extra night, but the only campsite they still had open was buried deep in the park, where it'd be really hard for me to take the dogs out without encountering a dozen other dogs, so I decided to keep going.

I didn't realize before planning my driving route today that I was very close to the Salton Sea, which is a place I've wanted to visit.  If you look at that route map at the beginning of this post, you can see a town called Mecca south of Indio; Mecca is at the northern end of the Salton Sea.

It's one of the world's largest inland seas, and it's one of the lowest points on earth, sitting at 227' below sea level.  For some years it was a resort area but, through natural events (e.g. a hurricane) and human lack of thought (e.g. farm runoff), it became a place of massive fish and bird deaths.  The stench was noticed in Los Angeles.  In recent years several entities are working on mitigation and restoration, with at least some success.  Here's the Wikipedia page explaining all of it.   https://en.wikipedia.org/Salton-Sea