Cam and Nancy: Joshua Tree National Park

It rained steadily all night and was still raining when we made our leisurely departure from La Paz County Park. For an area that doesn’t get much rain, we were drenched; we must have received at least an inch of rain, maybe more. The non-vegetated overflow camping area was a soup of mud/sand/gravel.

The water at La Paz was said to be not potable, however, according to the volunteers, it’s fine, just has some calcium in it, everybody around here drinks it. Our water at home has some calcium in it, we sampled it and it tasted fine, so we filled the Bigfoot fresh water tank. The first sign of trouble was Kirk whining in the middle of the night. Luckily, Nancy got up and took him for a walk, because he had The Mighty Squirts (or the Trots, as Mom used to say). Still dark, and Kirk is whining again. More squirts. Nancy says, oh yeah, some of the people at the dog park were giving their dogs bottled water, said the local water gave their dogs the runs. Nancy and I were both half a bubble off plum stomach-wise, as well. Hmm. Decision is to drink bottled water till we can drop the fresh water tank, likely alkaline, not amoeba, so we shouldn’t have to chlorinate all over again.

We headed west of Parker on Highway #62 and the rain tapered off soon after we entered California. The Mojave Desert sure has a big lot of nothing. Makes a lightly vegetated gravel pit look attractive in comparison. We turned south on Highway 177 and joined the I-10 freeway at Desert Centre. A climb up Chiriaco Summit and turned north into Joshua Tree National Park. The south entrance winds up a steep canyon 7 miles before you climb up onto the plateau, where the Cottonwood Visitor Centre welcomes you to the park. We pulled into the Cottonwood Spring Campground, very tight for the 29 foot Bigfoot, but somehow people had shoe-horned the odd 40 class A into campsites. The extended slides protruded into the traffic lane, and it took some care to get by.

The hit of the day was the Cottonwood Spring themselves. The park explains them as rock fractures where the ground water finds its way to the surface. In an arid land, when you see an oasis, you realize just how important it can be to flora and fauna (including humans).