We woke shortly after 6am,in time to see a beautiful sunrise. We are only allowed to run our generator from 7-9am, 12-2pm, and 5-7pm, so right at 7am we turned the generator on and got the coffee pot started and oatmeal cooking. After breakfast, we grabbed our walking sticks, a bottle of water and headed for the High Mountain trailhead that starts at the edge of the campground.
Our campsite is at 4000 ft elevation and it was a steady climb of a 1 1/2 miles up to the trail summit. What a great view from the top. See if you can spot our MH.
After we got back to the MH, we packed a picnic lunch, grabbed Mollie and headed out in the car to explore the National Park itself. The actual park is about 5 miles from the campground with an admission fee of $15. (good for 7 days). The park is HUGE and we had a good time exploring some of what it has to offer. Of course there are plenty of Joshua trees as well as desert plants and cacti and incredible rock formations.
This is also a favorite place for rock climbers to do their 'thing'. We enjoyed watching some of them climb while we ate our lunch. On the park map, we saw a road named Geology Tour Road that was about 18 miles round trip. It also said the road was not maintained and only 4-wheel drive vehicles were recommended. So off we went to explore. We noticed on the map that this road branched off and would lead us to another main road that we could take back to the campground. The road was very bumpy, and literally washed out in spots but still passable until the road narrowed and became nothing but rock.
At this point, we decided that we weren't in the mood to risk getting stranded in this vast desert so we turned around and headed out the other way. The other way wasn't much better but eventually led us back to civilization.
We live to explore another day.
1 comment:
Way to live on the edge Mom and Dad...let's not have another 'off-roading' incident, though.
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