A few more photos:
Palm Springs was partly fun because of the suburbs and the people, in Joshua Tree we stayed on the border of the national park, on a dirt road away from anyone else. Our stay was marked by the landscape, the wildlife, and our tiny house
From the house the landscape is filled with piles of boulders, desert sand, cactus, rugged grasses, Joshua Trees, and hidden wildlife
The house is an open box, with a shower on an outside wall and a bathtub away from the house
In the mornings cotton tail rabbits and quails play around the house, during the day lizards and snakes warm themselves on rocks, in the evenings we see roadrunners calling and running about and hummingbirds hovering around flowers. At night we can hear unnerving coyote cries in the distance.
I plan to take star photos both nights, using the first night to find the Milky Way and test different scenes and the second to setup and leave the camera to take photos throughout the night.
At sunset on the first night while scope around the boulders I suddenly get a snake-feeling and looking about I see a rattlesnake about five metres away. It’s pretty exciting, but also puts me on edge for the rest of the time that I spend walking around the desert.
At night, being suitably cautious, I spot a smaller snake on my way out to a photo spot. And again, when I’m finished and walking back to bed at about 2am I see a large rattle snake coiled up directly between me and bed. There are a lot of little friends out here.
We sightsee in Joshua Tree National Park the next day, tired from a short sleep. There are parts that feel properly prehistoric, like a dinosaur could rear its head at any moment and walk through the landscape, it’s beautiful and strange. We walk a couple of different loops and clamber over boulders to get better views, it’s hot and dry, and really fun.
The higher elevations are cooler and part of the Mohave (and where the Joshua Trees live), whereas lower down in the Colorado Desert the temperature rises and Chollo Cactus thrive. The Joshua Trees are all different shapes: a single upright arm, a full tree, even bent all the way over. They nearly always look like someone reaching up to the sky. Their age can’t be determined like a regular tree (they don’t have rings), so it’s determined by its average growth rate of 1.5in per year. That means many we saw were 50-100 years old.
The Chollo Cactus are strange fuzzing looking plants that are very very spiky (trust me!)
On our second night we soak in the outdoor tub and watch the sunset and then stars rise. I setup the camera and we sleep. Tomorrow we drive to LA.
One night we were bathing in the outdoor bath, and trying to take (tasteful) photos of Anna in the tub. It was fiddly to get the angle right, the lights from the house well balanced and the camera settings dialled in. I eventually took some okay photos, but with all the ins-and-outs I forgot to chock the door, and a wind gently closed it.
Naked, wet, in the dark, more than a kilometre from our nearest neighbour and with snakes around…shit.
While looking around for the key and grabbing a towel I become attached to various cacti. After a short panic, we realised there was an unlocked door to the house. It was the one for the shower. But in its path is a wall with glass on top. With a mixture of fear and glee Anna watches on while I just barely manage to balance on top of the concrete wall and straddle the glass pane. The towel I had been using for modesty had long slipped to the ground before I gingerly I swept my other leg over the glass and gently lowered myself into the shower; and subsequently back inside.
The infamous shower