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| Quilted Sunrise |
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| Our Camp next to Little Box Canyon |
The sunrise this morning was
exquisite. The sky was quilted with pink
and orange which gave the bare canyon walls a warm glow. We packed up early and drove the few remaining miles
to Joshua tree. Katrina went for a run
and I explored the park a little on my own.
The Live Oak picnic area caught my attention and I was surprised to
find a full sized oak in such an arid park.
I am uncertain exactly what kind of oak it was, perhaps a Shrub Live Oak (Quercus turbinella) hybrid with Valley
Oak (Q. lobata). The leaves had pointy tipped lobes and the
acorns were an even tan color, lacked any fuzz, and were 30-40 mm long and
14-18 mm wide. The acorn caps were in
clusters and had warty tops with short felted hairs. The Barker Dam area has a number of Shrub
Live Oaks, but they had already dropped all of their acorns, were much
scrubbier, and didn’t have lobed leaves.
We also encountered Single Leaved Pinyon (Pinus monophylla), which is a scrubby little pine tree with robust
needles in clusters of… 1. I never knew
there were any one needled pines. We
played around on the rocks, photographed the shapely boulders, and jealously
watched climbers (I wish I had brought my climbing shoes).
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| Shrub Live Oak hybrid (Quercus turbinella x lobata) |
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| Shrub Live Oak hybrid (Quercus turbinella x lobata) acorns |
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| Katrina in her element(s) |
We wanted to find a quieter place to camp,
so we left the park before sunset and drove north towards the Mojave National
Preserve. Just after the sunset we past
the expansive salt flats at Bristol Lake and stopped to collect a few of the
massive salt crusts. You can see Katrina
was pretty happy about it. We continued
east a little further until we found another flat chunk of desert to tie up our
horse and poke at the fire while our can of beans cooked.
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