Desert hiking – Memoirs From The Trails

This hike was one of the most eventful hikes that I have ever done. I don’t mean that in the normal, there were really cool rocks (even though there were), I mean it in the sense that we got into some dangerous situations that we were not prepared for. Just like with Joshua Tree, I wanted to hike within an ecosystem that I was not used to. So my friend and I made the hour drive North East from LA to Agua Dulce on a rainy Sunday afternoon. We passed giant fields of oil drills as we weaved in and out of the canyons. Since the rain was just a sprinkle, we didn’t worry too much about rock slides or anything of the like as we drove to our destination. Continue reading “How to Survive Getting Lost in the Desert: Vasquez Rocks Hike” →

My friend and I decided to go hiking in an environment we rarely got a chance to experience during our time in California. Joshua Tree is unique because it hosts two different types of desert ecosystems, the Mojave and the Colorado. This creates a beautiful mix of vegetation and wildlife. It took a three hour drive in an unreliable car to get us to the desert location of Joshua Tree, but we knew it was an adventure worth the trip. Driving inland from Los Angeles was an interesting experience. As the palm trees faded away, windmills began to take their place. Soon, we were surrounded by hundreds of them towering over us. It was an extremely windy day so they were ferociously spinning. I felt like I was in a Don Quixote story. For a long stretch of time, those windmills were the only things that related us back to civilization. Everything else that surrounded us was desolate. This felt a bit eerie, but soon we found ourselves driving in between hills that eventually opened up to a small desert town. Continue reading “Avoiding A Rainstorm While Hiking Joshua Tree” →