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20060823(000)b.jpg | Travelling out to the park on the highway, past hills covered in yellow burnt grass. |
20060823(001)bg.jpg | The road also went by this massive wind farm outside Los Angeles. |
20060823(002)bg.jpg | Row after row of windmills. |
20060823(003)b.jpg | A better picture of windmills, but they ran out here. I don't know why one of them only has one blade. Not all of them were going round at once. |
20060823(004)b.jpg | Piles of rocks will become a recurring theme of this trip. |
20060823(005)bg.jpg | Trying to get a picture of the rocks but the bendy road sign got in the way (a lot of these were taken from the car window while moving). |
20060823(006)bg.jpg | The first of the famed Joshua Trees (which only grow in this area) that we saw. |
20060823(007)b.jpg | A bigger pile of rocks. |
20060823(008)g.jpg | Some things in the desert are larger than they at first appear. I got to watch Roger, Grahame and Chris (left to right) dwindle into the distance until they were dwarfed by this Joshua Tree. |
20060823(009)k.jpg | Roger was excited at seeing this bird in the desert. Before it flew away, I took this photo which shows that the bird exists, if not much else. |
20060823(010)b.jpg | A desert plant with flowers. |
20060823(011)b.jpg | A nice view from the car as we drove further into the park. |
20060823(012)b.jpg | The rock piles here were characteristically rounded and had a rough eroded granite surface, making them ideal for climbing. |
20060823(013)b.jpg | In the slightly moister 'Hidden Valley', there was this miniature desert variant of the Oak family. |
20060823(014)b.jpg | The valley also contained different cacti, such as this old and manky one. |
20060823(015)bg.jpg | Boulders lead up to a high peak, with a variety of plants growing between them. |
20060823(016)bg.jpg | The valley was bounded by these high rock walls. |
20060823(017)bg.jpg | Dead wood doesn't rot away very fast in the desert, instead becoming dry and blackened. |
20060823(018)bg.jpg | Some rocks with a hole. |
20060823(019)bg.jpg | Coming out of the valley there was a good view of the plain of Joshua Trees outside. |
20060823(020)b.jpg | By the time we got down onto the plain for lunch, a thunderstorm had started up and it was threatening rain. |
20060823(021)bg.jpg | From a viewpoint we could see many miles of desert but it got increasingly obscured by smog blown up the valley from Los Angeles with distance. |
20060823(022)bg.jpg | Looking from the viewpoint in another direction, across a more barren part of the desert. |
20060823(023)b.jpg | Driving back from the viewpoint meant going back through the rain, which was by now quite intense. |
20060823(024)bg.jpg | It didn't seem to soak into the ground, instead forming pools of water. |
20060823(025)bg.jpg | The road was filled in places with several inches of water. |
20060823(026)b.jpg | At one point we had to stop for half an hour until a flash flood in the form of a torrent crossing the road had subsided (the one shown here was shallow enough to drive through). |
20060823(027)bg.jpg | I think this was meant to be called "Skull Rock", or something. It doesn't look much like it in the picture so maybe I took the wrong one. It was around here that we had to stop. |
20060823(028)b.jpg | And now for something completely different. It hadn't rained here and you could feel the heat coming up from the ground into your shoes. |
20060823(029)b.jpg | The reason for stopping was the colony of vegetatively-reproducing cacti, such as this fine specimen. |
20060823(030)bg.jpg | There were quite a lot of cacti. |
20060823(031)bg.jpg | This didn't come out well but what I think I was trying to show was that the rock piles here were more pointy and fractured than the ones earlier on, but you will have to take that on trust. |
20060823(032)bg.jpg | I'm not sure why this was there. |