Over the Thanksgiving Day (for Canada anyway) long weekend, I took the family on a trip to Joshua Tree Nation Park. Actually, it was my wife who recommended it. She told me I can test out my new Sony A7R II by taking pictures of the Milky Way.
The park was initially created as a National Monument on August 10 1936, after Minerva Hoyt led activism aimed at persuading the state and federal governments at protecting the area.The park was elevated to a National Park on October 31 1994 by the Desert Protection Act. The park was named for the Joshua trees that grows there.
Straddling the San Bernardino County/Riverside County border, the park includes parts of two deserts, each an ecosystem whose characteristics are determined primarily by elevation: the higher Mojave Desert and lower Colorado Desert. The Little San Bernardino Mountains run through the southwest edge of the park.
The park is popular with rock climbers and was originally a winter practice area while Yosemite Valley and other parts of the Sierra Nevada were snowbound, but later became an area of interest in its own right. There are thousands of named climbing routes, at all levels of difficulty. Since they didn’t have any climbing gears, Sally and her friends stuck to the easy routes. Still, it was a job trying to keep up with them! You can see more photos from our Joshua Tree trip at my Flickr page.
Yes, I made money while I was climbing rocks at Joshua Tree National Park. That’s one of the advantages of living the Dot Com Lifestyle!