We drove across the Santa Monica Mountains and into Hollywood on the Hollywood Freeway, then we took a motor tour of downtown Hollywood. It was certainly a disappointment. The town is run down, and we had little desire to get out and walk around there. We saw the famous Chinese Theater (from our car) and drove on.
We spent a good deal of time driving around in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, looking at the houses that belong to people who obviously have a great deal more money than we do. We agreed that they were surprisingly close together, considering the vast amounts of wealth spent on these properties. We saw some incredible architecture, too. We were also tickled by the signs advertising maps that showed which movie star lived in which house. We decided we weren't that nosy, so we didn't buy one.
Then we went to the Hollywood Hills, where there is a subdivision built on the side of the Santa Monica Mountains. We followed the switchbacks until we reached our destination. My brother was also there, and we had a nice visit with this branch of the family. The house has a very impressive view. If you look toward the mountain you look right up at the famous "Hollywood" sign, and if you look the other way , you are looking towards Los Angeles. You can see it if the smog is not too bad.
While we were enjoying our visit and the view, out on their deck, a red-tailed hawk flew overhead, very low and close to us. This was a harbinger, it turns out, but we didn't know it then.
I did not take any pictures today, either here or later in the desert. I merely reformatted a stock photo of the Hollywood sign, to keep this part of the page from being too dry.
Soon it was time to go, and we were heading away from the big city. We can only enjoy most cities in fairly small doses, and besides, we wanted to get to the desert. At this time of year (April), we were expecting many of the desert plants to be in bloom, and we wanted to see this.
We headed east on Interstate 10 past San Bernardino and through the San Gorgonio Pass. This pass forms a gateway between the Los Angeles basin on the west and the deserts to the east. It is located between the two large Mountains, San Gorgonio to the north, and San Jacinto to the south. Once through the pass, the climate is totally different. We came to Palm Springs, and this is where the desert starts.
We had planned to go to Joshua Tree National Monument, so at this point we turned north on route 62, and started driving through small towns. There were these strange little trees along the road which caught our attention, but we did not know what they were. We turned off the road to the south at the town of Twentynine Palms, and entered the National Monument, right near the visitor center.
At the Joshua Tree visitor center, we found that the National Monument had been redesignated as a National Park two years ago, by President Clinton. I asked about those strange trees we had seen, and felt somewhat foolish to find out that they are "Joshua Trees". They are not true trees, but are very closely related to the Yucca plant. They grow much taller than any Yucca I had ever seen before, but you could easily tell that they were in the Yucca family when you inspected them closely. Sadly, I forgot to take any pictures of all this. Fortunately, you can view Paul Carlin's excellent photos of Joshua Tree National Park.
We picked up some good information at the Visitors Center, but by then we had little time left to enjoy the day. We planned to drive through the Park to the south. They suggested a number of things to look for on the way. First they recommended that we go to a lookout point called Keys View. This was the Mojave desert, higher (3000 feet), cooler and more moist than the Colorado Desert to the south and east. The Joshua Tree only grows in the Mojave desert. At Keys view, you can see out over the Colorado desert below.
We had to go out of our way to get there, but it was certainly worth it. You can see for an enormous distance there at the top of the cliff separating the two deserts. We could see the San Gorgonio pass, back to the west. We could also see that there was great deal of smog coming eastward through the pass from Los Angeles into the desert. The smog blocked our view of a number of the features down below, in fact. It was a very dramatic demonstration of the pollution of Southern California.
We resumed our route, and descended to the southernmost part of the Park. We stopped to investigate a garden of cholla cactus, and also a grove of Ocatillo trees. These are also desert-adapted plants (but they're not true trees). They had lots of red blooms at this time of year, but again I was not taking pictures. We stopped just before exiting and took a quick hike in the dusk before twilight, visiting cottonwood spring, a natural oasis.
As the day came to an end we were quite in awe of the differences we had experienced. The previous morning we had awakened and gone snowshoeing in the Sierras at 8000 feet. Today we had been through the Mojave, and were now near sea level in the dry Colorado Desert. We headed west to the nearest town large enough to offer a dinner and Motel (Indio, CA, in the Imperial Valley) and went to bed.
We continued our drive southward, past the Salton Sea. This saline lake has no outflow, and is situated over 200 feet below sea level. We passed date farms, and noted that the palm trees in these places have ladders attached at the top that go partway down. We guess that when it comes time to harvest the dates, workers must climb up portable ladders until they can reach the permanent ladders attached to each tree, which they use to get to the top of the tree. We had never seen farming like this, so it was interesting.
We then turned right onto route S-22, and began driving away from the Salton Sea, into a pretty desolate looking desert. We were entering Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest (600,000 acres) state park in the State of California.
This area appears to be so desolate because there is a lot of bare reddish rock visible, with little growing on it. This desert averages about 6 inches of rainfall per year. The temperature was moderate, but that was because it was April. In August, the average high temperature is 107 F (42 C). The land was not totally bare, either, as there were creosote bushes, ocatillo, some cholla cacti and a few other things growing. But it was much sparser than what we had seen in our earlier desert travel.
Our destination was the town of Borrego Springs. It was easy to spot from miles away, as it is a patch of green with a ridge of mountains behind it. This town is where the Park's Visitor Center is located, and we wanted to visit it in order to learn what we could about this barren ecosystem.
When we arrived, we found that there was a trail leading through a garden of cacti and other desert plants. These plants all grow naturally in the park, although they were planted here together in one spot for easy viewing. The best part of this delightful trail is that a large number of the plants were in flower at that moment. I began to make up for shunning my camera the day before. I took pictures of all of the blooming plants I found there, and you can see these starting with the aforementioned indigo bush.
There was one disappointment, though, and that was the desert agave. This plant is a large low succulent plant that sends up in spring a single very tall flowering stalk. The disappointment came from the fact that we were too late to see the flowers. All that was left was the dead or dying flowering stalk. To show you how tall they get, Steffi took a picture of me, shown here at right, standing right in front of two agave plants which grew near the walk.
It was difficult to tear ourselves away from all of this flowering beauty, but we did plan on driving down to the San Diego area that day. The park ranger in the visitor center suggested that we cross the mountains to our west via route 78, which would pass through some scenic areas in the park, before exiting the park and continuing on to the towns of Julian, Santa Ysabel, and Ramona. We followed his advice and were not disappointed.
At one point, Steffi looked out to the right and then told me I had passed something that she wanted to see. So we went back to see what she had spotted. It was another desert agave plant, but this one was still in flower. So we walked over to it, and I snapped this picture of Steffi with her flowering agave.
Once we made it through the mountains, there was no more desert. We made several other stops and took a few hikes, but by late afternoon I was getting tired, so we decided to just get a motel room in Escondido, and relax without trying to do anything. I took a short nap. This was the halfway point of our vacation, and we needed to do a laundry, too. Our desert exploration was officially over.
[Intro] [Sierras] [Desert] [Zoos and Beaches] [Redwoods]
