Joshua Tree

On our way to Arizona for Christmas we drove down the east side of the Sierra, spending one night in Alabama Hills before heading to Joshua Tree for a second night of camping. Dad doesn’t like huge, long drives if we can avoid them so we decided to go further south than the more dog-friendly Mojave desert, so we could get a chance to pass through Joshua Tree and break up our drive to Arizona so Lolo and I wouldn’t get too stir-crazy.

Momma had planned ahead of time for us to camp at a site just outside Joshua Tree National Park. It’s a good thing we did that since it was just after the government shutdown and no camping reservations were being honored in the park, which is to say it was a complete free-for-all with people just taking any camping spot they could, whether or not they had the site reserved.

Momma reserved the site on hipcamp.com, but it was a property owned by someone she knows. It was a fun little property that they had built an epic outhouse on!

These kinds of sites are nice because you aren’t camping with other people around you! The majority of the property is a boulder garden, which you can see in the photo above here. Past our tent it just goes up, up, up hill! You can see the outhouse if you look carefully about halfway up the hill behind me.

Momma and Lolo were able to climb up all the boulders on the property, but I was in my boot and thick foot wrap, and was unable to maneuver safely and chose to sit out for most of their explorations.

We had a full moon for our night here, as you can see it was seriously bright!

The golden hour wasn’t too shabby, either.

In the morning momma and Lolo went all the way to the very tip top to have some coffee. She said the views were very beautiful, but that it was indeed far too treacherous for me in my compromised condition.

After she and Lolo came back down we packed up camp and drove through Joshua Tree on our way to Scottsdale. Like any National Park, dogs are not allowed on trails, so we had to stick to taking pictures just off the side of the road. I think we still got to have a few beautiful photos, although too bad I’m wearing antlers in almost ALL of them!

Because we couldn’t do any exploring, we don’t really have good pictures that capture the beautiful boulders and rocks that Joshua Tree is full of – there is a lot of climbing here and after driving through you can definitely see why! So you will just have to trust me that if you are into climbing and it’s a good season for doing so (i.e. the winter) you should consider Joshua Tree for sure.

Lolo is lucky his little head doesn’t quite hold the antlers on! He hardly ever has to wear them.

Oooh wow, one picture without me wearing them!

No-one else was allowed out here by these crazy Cholla plants pictured below – they basically throw needles out wildly! Even to get a picture from the edge momma totally got prickered up!! After a few hours driving through the park we made our way down to Scottsdale where we got to meet our beautiful cousins Lily Ann Marie and Prada Elizabeth Marie for the first time and spend the holidays with our family!