A park in a Desert

It's been a while, and for all those worried that I threw my accident-prone self over a cliff or shared a shoe with a scorpion or poisonous spider of sorts, I apologize. Yep, I am still alive, and that's good too, because now I can tell you about Joshua Tree National Park (vital information to all that would have gone undigested had I gotten lost in the desert- trust me, there's no way you can get this from a brochure, book, t.v. show, film, song, verbal story, poem, bathroom stall wall, friend, family member, associate, stranger, history lesson, map, internet, journal, newspaper, blog, dream, doctor, historian, painting, etc).

To a non-expert of a given field of information such as myself, Joshua Tree looks like a desert, just a bunch of rocks stacked up one on top of the other with a few trees around that give a frustratingly inadequate amount of shade. But, to a kid who likes climbing things just to climb things such as myself, this place is a paradise. And it is not like when you're little and your mom says not to climb things because it is impolite or you'll get hurt- You can climb and get hurt all day long without anyone to tell you better! Word to the unwise: don't just climb to the top without thinking about how you are gonna get down. Getting up is easy, but getting down is harder if you are afraid of heights whenever you look down. I'll pretend I wouldn't know anything about that though.

The brutal landscape looks dead and completely unwelcoming at first, but what you (really me, but potentially 'you') learn is that it is actually extremely temperamental to small changes in weather and the collective interaction between the landscape and living things is really fragile. Joshua trees (not actually trees, but yuccas- I know, why call it a tree?) are scattered everywhere and are considered 'life-giving' trees because they provide lots of resources for other living organisms that rely on the trees. I was not sure why they got the name 'Joshua' in particular, but I looked it up and trusty wikipedia said that Mormon settlers gave it that name because the shape reminded them of some biblical mumbo jumbo where Joshua was reaching up towards the heavens. Not the reason why I would name a tree, but to each their respective own.

The piles of climbing rocks I was talking about look like a kid with an inability to put LEGOS together just haphazardly started placing incongruent ends together to compete with a better, slightly more skilled LEGO builder. LEGO building is fun, but that will have to wait for another blog. What actually happened was this: Volcanic activity deep below the Earth made these large pieces of monzogranite. Over time, these massive slabs were forced upward and as that happened, surface conditions (wind and rain) forced cracks in the previously singular chunks of monzogranite. The cracks widened and deepened, and presto, one piece becomes many pieces. if you look at them long enough or brief enough with a keener eye, you can see how one pile of rocky puzzle pieces actually makes up a single puzzle of puzzle-like rock pieces. And it is easier to see than those puzzles who's contents include about 500 blue pieces (of all the same shade) that all look the same because they make up the stupid sky.

Next we went to the Grand Canyon, and now we are in New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. I'll talk about the Grand Canyon in my next blog, and the same goes for Enchanted Land. Goodbye for now.