Continuing on our Christmas road trip (see part 1), Felix and I drove from Tucson, AZ towards Joshua Tree National Park in southern California. Since we had to spend most of the day driving (it was a 5 hour drive), and Felix was still sore from our 8-mile hike the previous day, we decided to save the park for the following day and just check out some nearby attractions. 

I really wanted to go to this place called Pioneer Town because it was featured on the show Selling Sunset, which is a reality show about LA realtors. On the show, one of the realtors said she owned Pioneer Town. We looked this up and it turned out to be false: she owns a minority interest in an entity that owns 6 out of 35 parcels in the town’s Mane Street (they spell it “Mane” not “Main”) area, and she later apologized for her statement that she owns the town, saying she just gets so excited talking about Pioneer Town. Pioneer Town’s Mane Street is a group of buildings that look like an old timey western town. Apparently they used to shoot a lot of western movies here but now it’s just used for occasional photo shoots and music videos. 

Me attempting a western pose?

Pioneer Town does not have much to do. I don’t know what that Selling Sunset realtor was so excited about. It has a teeny tiny museum you can enter for free, a restaurant, a bar, a couple of shops, and a bowling alley that wasn’t open. Felix and I did try on some cowboy hats. 

The one absolute gem of Pioneer Town was this petting zoo that you could enter for $10. They had so many animals: goats, pigs, sheep, a donkey, turkeys, and a ton of different chickens, including some with weird fluffy heads. The animals were quite friendly and would come up to you hoping to be fed. 

But the BEST part is they had a separate area with bunnies and a very friendly man who showed you how to hold them and would put bunnies on your lap. The bunnies were so cute and soft. The bunnies were clearly very well socialized because they were so tolerant of being picked up and would sit in your lap for a long time while you petted them. I was in heaven. 

After Pioneer Town, we had about an hour of daylight left so we decided to go to the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum, because it was free to enter and not too far away. There were a number of art galleries around–I guess living in the desert is in artist thing. The museum is a collection of sculptures (it seemed like there were 100 of them) made by an artist named Noah Purifoy who moved to the desert and made these while he was in his 70’s and 80’s. The sculptures are large and made out of random junkyard materials–a few of them were built out of toilets. Honestly, seems like a pretty fun thing to be doing in your 70’s and 80’s. 

At least half of the art was untitled and there were no descriptions of the pieces besides the titles. I would’ve liked more explanation because without it, the art just seemed chaotic. There were some areas of the museum where I think there were just stockpiles of materials, but it was honestly hard for me to tell if it was art or not. 

As the sun set, the museum felt kind of spooky. It had the feeling of walking through something that was abandoned. I was afraid the ghost of the artist was going to pop out and turn me into a sculpture…We headed to out hotel after that. 

The next day we headed to Joshua Tree! We went to the visitor center and then headed into the park where I DID get to use my national parks pass at the entrance station. Driving through the park we saw tons of Joshua Trees, which I learned are not trees but are actually agave, and many big clumps of boulders that looked fun to climb on. 

We started with a hike called Hidden Valley which is a short, loop hike through a valley of rocks. The path doesn’t require any rock scrambling but it takes you by so many climbable looking rock formations. We did stop at one point to climb some rocks and get a better view of the valley. 

We also stopped at one point that had an open patch of sand to do a hand-to-hand. This whole trip we’d been too surrounded by rocks and cactuses to safely do any. 

Next we did another short hike called Barker Dam which took us to a dam constructed by cattle ranchers. It didn’t have any water in it when we went but I learned that the collection of water has essentially made an ecosystem pop up around the dam. There were some boulders around the dam that were fun to scramble around on. 

As we were leaving, Felix wanted to stop for a picture with this tortoise crossing sign because he got a little tortoise hand puppet from the visitor center. We named the tortoise Xing (pronounced Zing). 

We did Hidden Valley and Barker Dam early in the morning because they’re both very popular hikes in the park. Even so, they were more crowded with families than I would have liked. I forgot to mention in my post about Saguaro and Chiricahua that there were very few other people at those parks. I suppose this is the trade off of going to the more popular parks: more interesting attractions = more people. 

Next we went to the Keys View lookout, which is a high point you can drive to that looks out over the Coachella Valley. It was a nice view, also a popular spot. We learned that the far mountain is on a different continental plate than the one we were on. Felix wanted me to include that. Nerd. 

We considered going to Skull Rock, which is a skull-shaped rock formation that also has many fun, climbable rocks around it, but there were so many cars parked near it that we decided to skip it. We found a picnic area for lunch and then decided to drive the long park road towards the other side of the park. Joshua Tree is pretty large, and it takes about an hour to drive from the northern side (where we started) to the southern side. 

The informational signs throughout Joshua Tree love to talk about the fact that the park is on the boarder between two deserts: the Mojave desert, and the Sonoran desert (the one Saguaro is in). The park road goes through a transitional area of these two deserts and it was interesting how we could see the plants around us changing significantly. In the northern part of the park, there were Joshua Trees everywhere, but as we drove this road that goes down in elevation, the Joshua Trees disappear, and then suddenly you’re in an area where Cholla cactuses are the dominant plant and they’re EVERYWHERE. There’s a hike amongst the Cholla but it was closed. 

There’s maybe five minutes of driving where there are Cholla everywhere and then they’re gone. The road leads down into a big flat basin that’s bordered by barren-looking mountains. It reminded me of Death Valley. 

We drove all the way to the Southern side of the park, went to a different visitor center, and then did a short walk to the Cottonwood Spring, which is a desert oasis with huge palm trees. There were signs around saying how indigenous people and settlers used the oasis but no explanation of why it was there. 

Finally, we did a short hike on the southernmost tip of the park called the Bajada Nature Trail. The informational signs said that a lot of plants grow in the bajada, which is a sloped area next to a mountain that can pickup extra water. The trail had lots of signs about the plants but they all looked dried up and it was pretty depressing. 

We drove back to the northern part of the park and wanted to find a cool spot to watch the sunset. We stopped at a random pile of rocks that looked climbable from the road but ended up being too difficult to climb. We sat there to watch the sunset anyway and I got a picture with my national parks water bottle that is now sporting TWO new stickers. 

We also stopped by skull rock for a second to look around, but even at the end of the day it was extremely crowded with families. I thought because we were going to Joshua Tree in the winter and on a weekday, it wouldn’t be crowded, but I guess I should have realized it would be popular because it was Christmas break. The rocks around skull rock seemed very fun and climbable but we didn’t stay long. Overall I would say Joshua Tree is low on my list of National Parks because of the crowds and it didn’t offer anything that seemed really fun and special. I probably would have had more fun if I had spent more time climbing around on the rocks, but there were so many rocks it was hard to chose, and when we did chose a random one, they turned out not to be fun. The obviously climbable rocks were too crowded. You see my issue here. 

We went back to our motel for dinner but headed back into the park in the evening to do some star gazing. The park has a couple of designated star gazing areas in the northern section but said anywhere in the basin would be the best skies, so we drove to a pullout just past the cholla cactuses. One benefit of the sun setting so early is we could do our star gazing at 7pm and it was completely dark. As expected, the stars were pretty great. Felix said it was the first time he could remember being able to see the Milky Way. I experimenting taking photos with my phone and found that I could get decent silhouettes if I pointed it at the portion of the sky where the sun had previously set. We drove back towards the northern part of the park because I wanted to get pictures of the Joshua Trees at night. We stopped at another pull out and I ended up wandering around the dark desert (not recommended), looking for shapely trees for my photos.  

I was using the long exposure feature on my phone, which made the sky look a lot brighter than it was. I was very excited to get a few good pictures.  

That was it for Joshua Tree. The next day we drove six hours to Morro Bay to spend Christmas with my family. Our only notable stop along the way was to see the Cabazon Dinosaurs, which are advertised as being the world’s biggest dinosaurs. There are two big ones you can see in the parking lot. I appreciated that the T-Rex was dressed as Santa–very seasonally appropriate. The park itself had more dinosaurs inside and I totally would’ve gone in if it was open. 

Travelling on Christmas day is hard because there are very few rest stops open. We ended up going to IHOP twice because it was one of the few places that was reliably open. Christmas with my family was good–we opened some presents, ate some good food. 

The next day was our one full day in Morro Bay so we spent it doing some fun stuff with my family. Felix, Ty, and I took out my parents’ small motor boat for a ride around the harbor. We saw so many good animals: a harbor seal, sea lions, and so many sea otters! Many of them had babies, they were so cute. 

We also took the boat out beyond the seawall to see the far side of the rock. The sea was pretty rough that day–there were (I estimate) 10 ft swells and I was pretty scared for us in our little motor boat, but we were ok. 

In the afternoon, Felix and I went with my mom and my aunt to a beach to go look at the tide pools. It wasn’t a super low tide but we still saw a lot of good stuff: many anemones, some sea slugs, and a few starfish. 

We took a stacks photo which made my mom and aunt very nervous because they thought we were too close to the cliff. This is nowhere near the most precarious place we’ve done this skill. 

The next day we had lunch with my family and then Felix, Ty, and I headed up towards San Francisco, stopping at Pinnacles National Park on the way. I got to use my national parks pass one last time! I went to the western part of Pinnacles last Christmas but this time we were going to the East side (the two sides are not connected by roads, only hiking trails). It was supposed to rain a bit that day so we decided to do just a 2-mile loop hike that goes through a cave. There was a cool, 6-mile hike to the high peaks (includes some steep, scary sections) that I wanted to do but we opted not to because of the rain and lack of daylight. I’d like to come back and do it another time though. 

The trail we took ended up being pretty crowded, particularly in the part that went through the cave. The caves at Pinnacles are formed from boulders from volcanic eruptions landing on top of each other. The cave was cool, but we got stuck behind a group of people who were slow and loud. I remembered from our last trip to Pinnacles that we should bring headlamps. Ty brought his but forgot it in Morro Bay. Me and Felix brought ours but mine’s battery died midway through the cave. They weren’t super necessary though. 

The cave we went through on the East side of the park was more of a scramble. This cave was more accessible and had clear paths and stairs and certain points. 

At the end, there was a very narrow staircase with a low railing that went out of the cave. My mom would not have enjoyed it. 

The loop stopped by a lovely reservoir with a nice view of some rocks. There were a lot of families stopped here. 

We continued the trail, hiking a ridge line above the caves. At one point, there was a diversion where you could walk out on some boulders on the edge of a cliff. These boulders were very high and triggered a primal fear response in all of us. I’ve hiked Angel’s landing and this was much scarier because there were cliffs in three directions and nothing to hold on to. I love to live on the edge but I didn’t want to stay on this cliff for too long. 

Got this photo of other people out on the cliff for context

The rest of the hike was uneventful. We drove up to the Bay Area where we got dinner and took an all levels acro class with Ty at the pole dancing studio he goes to. It was a pretty good class and Felix and I got too show off a bit. Afterwards Ty dropped us off at a hotel near the airport and we flew back to Boston the following day. We were happy to see the cats.

That’s all for this trip. Thanks for reading and happy new year!