One of my favourite parts of the trip to visit Rick and Eve was our day at The Joshua Tree National Park. Rick was our tour guide and the Park is not very far from their house. It is huge however so I am going to take up two posts with the pictures and comments of that day, partly because of how diverse the geology and flora is.
Click here for
Joshua Tree link
We entered the park through a huge, high valley surrounded by folding, chocolate coloured mountains. This is part of the Colorado desert and covered with sparse, low scrub undergrowth. Mostly creosote bushes, low lying yucca and Ocotilla bushes.
 |
Ocotilla bushes look like a bunch of dead sticks. When it rains they quickly grow leaves and flowers
and then quickly lose them again. They may do this 5 or 6 times in a year. |
As we started to climb out of the valley we came into an area covered by very strange looking cacti. They are called Jumping Cholla cacti as, supposedly, if you get to close they will "throw" their spines at you.
 |
| They have a woody core |
There was an area to pull off the road and walk through the cacti and they looked surprisingly cuddly, not that we tried that out.
As we left the Jumping Cholla and continued to climb Bruce suddenly stopped the van, reversed and pulled over. He had spotted this "lovely" (I don't think) example of local fauna.
 |
| Next to Bruce's shoe you can see how big it was. |
I don't know for sure but it looked like every picture I have seen of a Tarantula.
No comments:
Post a Comment