Joshua Tree National Park (Part I)

About a month ago, Alex and I flew to California to explore Joshua Tree National Park. During the 1930’s, Minerva Hoyt, a desert lover and community activist, recognized the human threats to the ecosystem of the area and persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim Joshua Tree a National Monument in 1936. It was renamed in 1994 to Joshua Tree National Park and protects over 790,000 acres - mostly wilderness - where the Mojave and Colorado Deserts converge.

We flew into Los Angeles and from there, it’s only a 2 1/2 hour drive to the park. You can purchase a park pass online (which is what we did) and printed it out before we left New York. It was a bit colder than I originally expected with temperatures being in the low 40’s in the morning and rising to the 60’s in the afternoon. It was also way windier and there were two days while we were there with winds blowing upwards of 40 miles an hour!!

Before checking into the Airbnb on the our first day, we checked out some shorter and more popular hiking trails. We read the weekends can see a surge of visitors, so I wanted to explore some of the higher trafficked areas on Friday before the crowds arrived the next day.

Our first hike was Split Rock Loop. The 2.5-mile loop trail is short and was a great introduction to the park. There were some incredible rock formations and beautiful Joshua trees (where the park gets its namesake) all around.

Skull Rock is another favorite stop for people visiting the park. There is a short trail, but you can see the Skull Rock directly off the road, so it makes for an easy view point.

The last walk we did for the afternoon was Cap Rock Nature Trail. This trail is short (only 0.4-mile loop), but it really packs a punch. There are beautiful Joshua Trees, interesting looking cactus and large rock formations. It reminded me of something out of a Dr. Seuss book!

On our first full day, we woke up early (the time change really worked in our favor here!) and completed the 7.2-mile Willow Hole & The Wonderland of Rocks Trail. This was probably my favorite trail of the week. The hike started by walking through the expansive desert before meandering through the large monzogranite rock formations. Monzogranite is formed by molten liquid, heated by the continuous movement of Earth’s crust and then leaked upward and cooled while still below the surface. This all took place about over a million years ago, although some of the oldest rock formations in Joshua Tree could be 1.4 to 1.7 billion years old!

On Sunday, we explored another region of the park and hiked the Lost Horse Mine Trail. The loop is about 6.6-miles and took us about three hours to complete. The trail passes by an old mine, Lost Horse Mine, where between 1894 and 1931, over 10,000 ounces of gold and 16,000 ounces of silver (worth approximately 5 million today!) was produced! This hike was one of the only we did that had some elevation and birds eye views of the surrounding area. There was even a bit of snow on the ground when we started the hike!!

Before visiting Joshua Tree National Park, I was a bit nervous about hiking in the desert. Most of the hiking Alex and I have done has been in forests or mountainous areas (Banff National Park, Newfoundland, Big Sur State Park, and in New Zealand to name a few). I was afraid the trails would not be clear and it would be easy to get disoriented in such an expansive space. Thankfully, the park service does an amazing job using markers to indicate hiking trails and keeping things clear. These included rocks, tree branches and markers with arrows. We also brought plenty of water, snacks and started our day early so the sun was not at it’s highest point as most trails offer little shade.