Death Valley is the land of extremes, it has the record for the hottest temperature in the world: 134˚F in 1913, and it’s the driest climate and the lowest elevation in North America. The National Park has a page with some interesting facts about why it is so hot and dry.
Though the Wonder Valley turned out to have an appeal all it’s own, the reason we rented a house in Twentynine Palms, California was its proximity to Joshua Tree National Park.
We got to White Sands National Monument just after it reopened and drove through the park (parts of it were, and still are, closed from the drone crash).
We drove through the Mojave National Preserve at sunset and into Joshua Tree, California in the dark. We were excited for daylight when we would see Joshua Tree National Park. Sadly, the next morning Pearson’s Mom passed away. As we made plans to fly back east, we took an hour and drove into the west entrance of Joshua Tree and I snapped these pictures. I was struck by its otherworldliness; a desert landscape filled with enormous boulder fields and valleys filled with joshua trees (yucca brevifolia).
The whole experience was a blur and we said that someday we would come back. Neither of us had plans for when that day would be, I assumed it would years from now. But we were drawn right back here, to this warm and peaceful desert.
We drove west through Las Vegas and further into the Mojave.
