With a long weekend for MLK we decided to take advantage of some free time and take our first trip to Joshua Tree National Park to see what all the hype was about. Turns out that it actually is pretty sweet and is definitely near the top of my list as far as cool landmarks and lots of adventuring. Definitely a rock climbing hotspot…the park is dotted with massive rock formations jutting out of the earth that have smooth, massive faces that are perfect for climbing. Overall the park was moderately crowded, but nowhere near what we encountered over the summer at some of the other parks. A majority of the visitors were probably climbers, but even so we still explored a lot of areas of the park without encountering many other people.

When we arrived on Saturday around noon we discovered that all of the campgrounds within the park were full..major wildcard. I was expecting most of them to be empty and assumed it wouldn’t be a busy weekend because it’s the middle of January. But apparently the park is super busy around this time because the weather is mild, and there was no fee to get into the park this weekend. This was actually really awesome because we forgot our National Parks pass at home :/ oops. So instead of camping in the park we drove a few miles from the park entrance to a place called Joshua Tree Lake campground and set up shop for our night in the desert!

Our sweet campsite!

After we set up our tent we headed back for the park to see what was in store. We entered through the North entrance and drove for about 10 minutes before we saw cars parked near a large boulder field. We decided to stop because we had been seeing some awesome rock formations that we wanted to play on and this looked perfect. The main attraction was Skull Rock, but the boulder field was just as cool. Some of the rocks in this park are just massive and incredibly immense. We were lucky enough to get to scramble around on them for the weekend.

Near Skull Rock

The road approaching Skull Rock

Playing in the rock field

Looking tiny on that huge rock

Some awesome snow-capped mountains in the distance

KB scrambling up some huge rocks

A sweet rock cave we discovered within the Skull Rock boulder field

a sweet view of the distant mountains

After messin around in the huge boulder field we decided to drive a little further into the park and see what else we could before the sun went down. We decided to check out a short loop trail called the Hidden Valley trail, which turned out to be a short walk through an even larger boulder field! We walked the trail and scrambled around on the rocks quite a bit. By the time we were done adventuring it was nearing sunset so we snapped some excellent photos.

KB chillin on a rock at sunset

Sunset right outside of Hidden Valley. Props to the sweet rock climber who basically posed for a few minutes up there while a bunch of us on the ground snapped photos of him with the sunset as the background.

A Joshua Tree at sunset

After the sunset we called it a night and headed back to our campsite to make a fire and eat dinner. We slept through a rather chilly night out in the desert and got up early to head into the park on Sunday morning.