Do you know what this is?
If you said a tree, you're wrong. Joshua "Trees" are not trees, they are succulents.
While much larger than the cute little plants found in nurseries, they are not the biggest in succulent family, that honor goes to the African Baobab which can reach heights of almost 80 feet.
First Palm "Trees", now Joshua "Trees", the desert is full of lies.
This didn't stop us from visiting Joshua Tree National Park however. Barely an hour away from Palm Springs it was a given we would mark this barren rugged landscape off our National Parks checklist.
An unusual national park sitting at the intersection of the higher Mojave Desert with it's Joshua Trees and the lower Colorado Desert with it's cacti, two distinct desert environments live side by side here.
The Mojave side has large boulders, rock formations and what can be called random Joshua Tree forests.
We spent most of our time driving through this section, stopping for the occasional hike. We were surprised to learn this is a very popular place for rock climbing, although upon reflection, we probably shouldn't have been. The rock formations are perfect for such an activity and there were climbers everywhere.
We did a little rock scrambling ourselves when we stopped to see Skull Rock, a hot tourist attraction.
The rocks here are grainy like coarse grit sandpaper making it easy to be scratched up but it also makes your shoes stick to the surfaces so well you could easily climb the most vertical of surfaces Spiderman style if you dared.
Of course, we were more interested in the parks off-roading trails which, while not technically challenging, are a lot of fun to go on.
We started with this...
...but quickly ran into this sign.
We naturally made the right decision and discovered the road wasn't nearly as bad as the sign made it out to be. Seriously, this was about the worst it became.
In fact, we were led into a beautiful canyon on the way to the Colorado Desert side.
It was evening when we reached the Ranger's Station; he was closing up. We opted to not worry about seeing this side of the park as we're quite familiar with its type of terrain. Instead we took the indirect route home along dirt roads, through another canyon, and along the Salton Sea which provided us a lovely sunset to enjoy while airing up our tires.
Plant names may be misleading out here, but desert beauty rarely is.
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