joshua tree - day 3
This post is part 4 of the "joshua_tree-2007" series:
On the final day, we got up early (5:30AM), and drove to nearly the southern most part of the park to hike to to the Lost Palms Oasis. This was a 7 mile (roundtrip) hike, and wanted to get an early start to avoid the warmest part of the day, as well as take advantage of David's typical energy boost in the mornings. We got to the trailhead at 8AM, and headed off. This trail leads to the largest California Fan Palm oasis in the entire park (there are several others), but its also arguably, the most remote. However, the trail was very well designed, and other than a few really rough spots, was alot of fun. The terrain varied alot, which kept things interesting, and the flora was gorgeous. About the first mile & a half was over a mostly level desert plain, crossing the occasional dry river bed. Following that, the trail became progressively more hilly, descending into (and climbing out of) a few narrow slot canyons and dry washes with moderately deep sand.
We saw wild-flowers, an assortment of different cacti (including numerous ocatillo), and much yucca & creosote. In the wildlife department, we saw several zebra tailed lizards.
This was the view just past 8AM, less than a mile from the trailhead, looking back towards the parking lot. Denise had a particular fondness for this patch of ocatillo which was sprouting up on both sides of the trail. The oasis itself was at the bottom of a rather steep, narrow canyon, which took alot of effort on the descent. I'd like to say that the oasis was this beautiful, lush paradise, but in reality, it was alot more sand, about a dozen huge palm trees, and some really nasty looking stagnant pools of water with insects flying about.
David was nothing short of amazing. In the past, he's typically hit this mental & physical hiking wall just past the 5 mile mark where he complained about leg pains, and we had to literally drag him to the end. Not this time. He was in good spirits the entire hike, and took an avid interest in the terrain, and surroundings. While we only passed two people on the hike out, we passed well over a dozen hikers on the way back, and David was, by far, the youngest on the trail. Its great that he's now demonstrating the ability to handle longer hikes (like this 7 miler), since we'll likely be doing more of them in the future now that we're going to be camping.
I think this hike was easily the highlight of the entire trip for me. It had alot of variety and went rather smoothly. We did the round trip (including a stop at the oasis to eat lunch) in about 4.5 hours.
The only problem on this trip was hardware failure. The laptop that I had brought along started overheating (getting as high as 95C before shutting down). It seems that the CPU cooling fan just wasn't working.
This post is part 4 of the "joshua_tree-2007" series: