![]() ![]() I’m here on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-May and I breeze straight through, the temperature a high but far from unpleasant 30 degrees C or so (it can top 38 degrees in summer), and there’s precious little traffic to contend with. You need a pass to get in here, currently $30, but try to grab one online – a good idea if it’s holiday season as queues for the ticket booth can be so lengthy. Fractured grey asphalt rolls out before me under a chalk-blue sky, disappearing to a hazy point in the distance like an aspirin dropped in water.Īt Cactus City, Highway 10 begins to trace the southern edge of the park, and soon after I turn in and head north on Cottonwood Springs Road, then north again up Pinto Basin Road. I leave from Palm Springs with its gridded street layout and single-storey art-moderne homes built in the Sonoran desert, before heading along Highway 10, aka Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway. If you’re really unlucky, you might tick off all three. Get stuck out there and you might freeze at night, get bitten by a rattlesnake or run out of water. You’ll see a visitor centre here or there, but there are no petrol stations, no restaurants, no hotels, not even any mobile phone coverage, just space and silence and a landscape so beautiful it’s hard to reconcile with its inherent inhospitality. ![]() Today the park stands as a legacy of Minerva’s vision and perseverance. Ever since, 591,624 acres of the park’s total 792,623 have been designated wilderness. She succeeded in 1936, creating Joshua Tree National Monument which officially became Joshua Tree National Park with extra protection in 1994. Located where the Colorado and Mojave deserts merge, people have been here for at least five millennia, notably Native American tribes, but more recently cowboys, miners and what the information boards term ‘teamsters’ – ‘driver of a team of horses used for haulage’ to quote the Collins Dictionary that saved my blushes.įor much of that time the desert hummed along in perfect harmony, but new roads and the mines and demand for garden cacti motivated a lady called Minerva Hoyt to campaign to get it protected. But I’m certainly glad I visited, because road-tripping through the Joshua Tree National Park is like nothing I’ve experienced before. I might as well have been listening to Abbey Road while touring the zebra crossings of Liverpool. But Bono, Edge, Larry and Adam? Not here. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |