Joshua Tree National Park

As we noted in last week’s post, our 2025 wrap-up is based on three trips we made during the year and blogged about. The first was Hawaii, which I posted last Monday. Today’s post features our Southwest journey where we wandered through the Southwestern US for five months visiting national parks, state parks, and national monuments. Next week’s post will cover our three week leaf-peeping trip through New England in the fall.

The photos used in the three posts are all from ones we selected to include in three calendars we developed for our extended family, each focused on one of out trips. (Not all of the photos here made it into the calendars, but it was a flip-of-the-coin type decision.)

We discovered the towering rock above in Chiricahua National Monument, which is located in southeastern Arizona. The monument is named after the Chiricahua Apaches who roamed the area prior to it being occupied by pioneers from the eastern US. A couple of notes. One, the park is filled with a fascinating variety of rock structures. Two, we have discovered over the years that national monuments often include scenery, geology, history, plants and animals that easily match those found in national parks. They are definitely worth visiting and are usually far less crowded.

Petrified Forest National Park is found just off of I-40 in eastern Arizona. There are thousands of logs like the one above found in the park. You can still see the bark on this petrified wood that was once a tree that fell 200 million years ago.

While most people come to the park to admire the petrified wood, there is also much beauty such as the colorful ‘Teepees’ found on the main road. Each color has a different story to tell representing millions of years in geological history.

The Blue Mesa side road includes many other interesting and colorful land forms such as this. If you visit the park, be sure to take the short detour. A walk out in the desert on well maintained trails is definitely in order.

Ancestral Puebloans and other indigenous tribes left a view of their ancient world in Petrified Forest NP in petroglyphs on Newspaper Rock. While our understanding of what they were communicating is limited, there is magic in contemplating the possibilities.

While we are on the subject of petroglyphs, we found this unique one staring out at us in Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, NM. Over 20,000 petroglyphs have been discovered in the monument. Peggy has plans to include this one in the revision of her word search book: *Artistic Word Searches, Unique and Magical: Discovering Petroglyphs from the Southwest.*

Canyon De Chelly (pronounced shay) is located in northeastern Arizona. Jointly operated by the Navajo Nation that owns the property and the National Park Service, Canyon De Chelly features striking canyon views plus Ancestral Pueblo ruins and petroglyphs left behind by both the Pueblo peoples and Navajos.

Our trip this past spring and summer took us into Califonia where we visited family and friends in San Diego, LA, and Sacramento. We also took time to visit Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, known for its strange trees, after which it is named.

We found the rock structures to be of equal, if not greater, interest. Some of which could be said to possess personalities.

In addition to being known for its outstanding rock forms (think of the Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce and Arches— plus what we visited this year), the Southwest is noted for its deserts and cacti, none of which is better known than the Giant Saguaro. We’ve often stopped to admire these huge plants in Saguaro National Park but have never been in Arizona when they are blooming. Things were about to change. Note the buds popping out on top of the arms.

This time we were lucky. The blooms are almost other-worldly, in addition to being a source of food for numerous insects such as the bee coming in for a landing.

A number of other cactus flowers also lit up the desert.

Like plants, animals adjust to the deserts of the Southwest. Several birds choose to nest among the needles of various cacti including the curved bill thrasher Peggy found raising her family in a cholla cactus. The thrasher was not happy when she sneaked up to it and her hatchlings to catch a photo with her iPhone. It’s probably a good thing Peggy couldn’t understand what momma was saying.

Bandelier National Monument, located mere miles away from where the first atom bomb was created at Los Alamos, New Mexico, features the ruins of homes built by Ancestral Puebloans that included natural and carved caves (cavates) with pueblo structures once built up against them.

Peggy and I climbed up to one of the cavates. It was quite cozy inside. “Honey, I’m home.”

Just beneath the cavate, this outcropping of rocks overlooked the large Tyuonyi Pueblo at Bandelier. A corner of the ruins can be seen here. It was built in a circle and contained contained 400 rooms.

This tall rock was among the rocks in the outcropping. My first thought was wow! Nowhere in our travels though out the Southwest have we seen a statue like it carved by Ancestral Puebloans or any other indigenous tribes. We had a guide to the trail we were walking on, but there was no information on the statue. Nor was there anything in the information center. The emphasis was all on the scenery, cavates, petroglyphs and pueblos. Human or nature carved, I would think that the park’s literature would at least comment on it. That’s it for today. Next up:

We wrapped up our year of travel with out trip to New England so it’s proper that we finish off 2025 with the trip.

Happy New Year to everyone and thanks for joining us on our adventures in 2025. It’s much appreciated. Costa Rica, Bali, and Scotland are coming up in 2026! Curt and Peggy

Joshua trees are a bit strange as trees go. They are actually monocots, more closely related to grass than trees. If that seems weird, up until recently they were thought to be lilies, related to onions and other members of the family. The park sign still claims the relationship.

As much as the trees are worth blogging about, we found the rocks of the park even more intriguing.

Massive piles of monzogranite boulders reach for the sky in the park. Originating far under the ground as lava oozing up from the earth’s mantle some 80-100 million years ago, the lava cooled and hardened into a batholith of granite. Nature in the form of earthquakes and water cracked it into rectangular blocks while mountain raising and erosion brought it to the surface. Along the way, erosion also wore the rectangular blocks into the massive rounded boulders that visitors admire today.

This was our second visit to the park. Peggy and I spent a whole day driving 30 miles through the northern portion of it. We stopped a lot.

An information board at the beginning of the park, made the following observation: “Look around you. Perhaps you see a stark land that nature never got around to finishing. Or you may see potential mineral wealth, defense testing grounds, alternative energy sources, or a vast recreational playground. Or maybe you see the desert for what it is— a diverse, thriving, ecosystem.”

I would add that deserts are a place of rare beauty and endless fascination, the equivalent of any of the other natural wonders we find in the world.

A quote from Edward Abbey was also included on the board: “It seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock.