Today was the day of deserts. After the 113 degrees of Palm Desert yesterday, we decided the smarter thing to do was to wear shorts, lots of sunblock, and start as early as we could before the day heated up. We were on the road to our first stop, Joshua Tree National Park at 7:30 and it was already 86 degrees. The Joshua Tree is cleverly named after a kind of tree that grows only in a desert environment called a Joshua Tree (Also the name of a U2 album). They're a very twisted up, multi-branched kind of palm-like tree, and they make for great pictures.
     The park itself is a combination of rocky mountains and flat sandy valleys with very little vegetation other than sage brush, some kind of desert pine tree, Joshua Trees and some other weird palms . It's amazing how strange plants will get if they need to survive where there is very little water. In talking with the ranger yesterday, evidently since it is a desert, there is very little annual rain, but when it does fall it tends to create flash floods. Since the floor of the valleys are mostly sand, the flash floods tend to move the sand into the road. Also, just the wind blowing through the park will deposit some sand on the roadways. It's a desert, there's lots of sand around! The reason she warned me is that evidently there had been several motorcycle accidents in the park over the summer, and most were attributed to the sand.
     As soon as we entered the park, it was obvious what she was talking about. While most of the roadway was fine, there were spots, especially where the roadway dipped, that had significant sand deposits on the road. There were usually tracks where the cars had passed, and as long as I stayed in the tracks, it was not a problem. The sand problem wasn't confined to the park, it looked like all over the local area they would periodically plow the sand off the road to the curb, There were sand banks similar to snow banks on the side of most of the roads in the area .
     Motorcycles will ride on sand, it's just if your leaning into a sharp turn and the front tire encounters a lot of sand the bike may slide out from under you. I've had a front tire slide on sand at speed in Orlando before, where it caught traction on bare pavement before anything bad happened, but it will get your attention. Needless to say, we were in no particular rush, so we just took it easy and stayed on the sand free parts of the road.
     Joshua Tree is really a spectacular park. Since this was our first encounter with the desert, we weren't quite sure what to expect. It's certainly barren, but there's a strange beauty to the barren landscape. There are huge rocks around, and the climbing would be awesome, if it weren't so hot. There were many trails laid out in the park, and you could easily spend a week here hiking. We drove through some of the campsites at Jumbo Rocks, and the campsites were in between these huge rocks that were everywhere.
     The real problem is that this isn't really the right time of the year to be hiking in Joshua Tree National Park . There were a few hard core hikers out there, but they typically headed out early in the morning and got back before the day really heated up. Most of the good hikes involve some kind of rock climbing, and it's just not that much fun when the rocks are too hot to touch. We did try a couple of the shorter hikes, and they were really spectacular.
     There was one spot in the park where you rode 5 miles down a dead end road to a place called Keys View. During that 5 miles, you rose an additional 1000 ft in elevation to 5300 ft, until you were at a spectacular scenic overlook of the mountains and the valley below. We took lots of pictures!
     While we were at Keys View, I ended up needing to use the rest room. Since you're out in the middle of nowhere, the park service is very accommodating by providing what they call a "pit toilet" which is basically a small building with a hole in the floor and a toilet seat mounted above the hole. As I entered the building, I heard a buzzing sound, but didn't think much about it until I noticed a few bees buzzing around . I remember reading the warning back at the ranger station that there were colonies of africanized bees looking for water and to keep water covered and not to swat the bees because you would only make them mad.. As I lifted the toilet seat, a swarm of bees flew out of the pit and I knew I was in trouble if I thought I was going to use this pit toilet.
     But, I really had to go, and I didn't think I would make it to the next one down the road, wherever that might be. So I left the toilet seat up until I didn't see any more signs of bees actually flying out, and I wandered around the room until it look like most were outside the door, heeding the rangers warning not to swat at them. I quickly closed the door, and did my business as quickly as possible, always staring down into the pit through my legs, looking for another bee to come flying out. If I got stung while in that position, in any of the areas that are not typically exposed for possible bee stings, I wasn't sure how I would explain my injury to either Jody or the paramedic . But I made it through the ordeal without any stings and got out of there as quickly as I could probably never realizing just how stupid that was, or how much it would have hurt, but glad the ordeal was over.
     The rest of the ride through Joshua Tree was much less harrowing, We didn't see a lot of wildlife activity, mostly because the wildlife is smart enough to sleep during the day in someplace sheltered and to only venture out at night when it gets cooler, But as we were checking out a huge rock formation we saw a pair of Desert Longhorn Rams up on top of some of the rocks just checking us out. I was able to get out the camera with the telephoto lens and snap a couple of pictures before they moved away.
      As we left Joshua Tree, out the north entrance, we came down this long hill and could see the entire town of Twentynine Palms i front of us. It reminded us of the view from an airplane. The next journey was to head north through the Mojave National Preserve, It was about 50 miles to the preserve, about 60 miles through the Mojave Desert, and another 50 miles to Henderson . It was 11:00 by now, and the temperature was climbing into the upper 90's. Still not too bad for a couple of Floridians, and every once in a while, the sun would go behind a cloud and the temperature would drop a few degrees. As I rounded the corner onto Amboy Rd, there was a big blue sign that said "no services for the next 90 miles", so we turned around and headed back to Twentynine Palms to to off the gas tank.
     The Mojave National Preserve was not nearly as interesting as the Joshua Tree National park. We did ride by the Amboy Crater, and the Kelso Dunes, but mostly it was mountains in the distance and sand and sage brush for miles. There was even an area of salt flats that was even flatter with no vegetation at all. In the center of the Mojave National Preserve was a small railroad town called Kelso. The train station had been converted to a Visitors Center, and we were able to get our passports stamps and watch the obligatory 20 minute movie. It turns out most of the things to do in the Mojave require a 4-wheel drive vehicle and lots of time . So we just passed through and admired the beauty. Once we got north of Kelso, there was a huge forest of Joshua Trees, and when we looked out in the valley, we saw a little dust storm just spinning around in the sand.
     We finally made it to the hotel at about 3:30, just in time for a dip in the pool to cool off before dinner. There was a Red Lobster next door and a Wal-Mart across the street. This Red Lobster had swordfish on the menu, so it was blackened swordfish for both of us for dinner. As we left Red Lobster to walk over to Wal-Mart, it actually started to rain! Now here we had spent 5 days in Seattle with no rain, and our one day in the desert and it rains! Fortunately it didn't last long , it was over by the time we got out of Wal-Mart.
     Tomorrow we head over to the Hoover Dam for a tour in the morning, and we want to ride through the Vegas Strip in the afternoon, and hopefully at night when it is lit up. We were going to take a paddle boat ride on Lake Mead in the afternoon, but the boat place is closed on Fridays in July and August.

238.8 miles today
13,470.8 miles total

4.012 gallons today
322.281 gallons total