Joshua Tree

Lauren and I went camping a few weekends ago in Joshua Tree National Park, at the Black Rock campground. Aside from some highly annoying neighbors we had a great time. It wasn't too cold, but it was extremely windy - it took almost 2 hours to get a fire started, and one time we left a chair alone and the wind blew it right into the fire! As for actual sights in the park, we saw a lot for only being there about a day:

• Scrambled around in the Jumbo Rocks / Skull Rock area.
• Checked out the Ryan Mountain Ruins. There were some rock climbers there that we watched for a little while.
• Hiked around the Barker Dam loop. Saw some petroglyphs here that had been vandalized, but still pretty cool.
• Visited the Cholla Cactus Garden.

We had come into the park in the northwest area but since the cactus garden was halfway through we decided to just drive through to the southern exit. The desert really changes as you move south, you don't see any Joshua Trees down there at all really, it is pretty amazing how different the two types of desert are in terms of plant life.

We just bought our first video camera, a Panasonic PV-GS300, and we put it through the paces on this trip. We shot around 20 minutes of video which I'm learning to edit, and took a lot of pictures, check them out on Flickr.