It was time to leave Death Valley and head to Joshua Tree National Park to scout for next year’s alumni workshop.

We left one desert, and crossed another, the Mojave. While the landscape changed, it was still desolate and awesome, especially when one thinks of early settlers crossing this vast area.

I learned from my sailing days that objects on the ocean are closer than they appear, while on land, they are farther away than they appear. Thinking about the time it takes to drive across the desert these days in a car, and how far away those unforgiving mountains on the other side remain, I shudder at the frustrations those early explorers experienced.

We arrived in Joshua Tree and stopped by the Visitor’s Center. Anyone who visits our national treasures would do well to do the same.

There are maps, knowledgeable rangers, and books to give you an idea of what you might see, not to mention the “just another pretty postcard” you can send back to Great Aunt Minnie!

It has been over 20 years since I was last in Joshua Tree. It was a National Monument back then, not the National Park designation it has today. It was on that same trip that I also visited Death Valley.

And like Death Valley, little has changed over the years. Sure, a few more paved roads, definitely more loos, but other than that, there isn’t much in a landscape that was forming over a million years ago that is going to change in a mere 20.

Joshua Tree, of course, has a plethora of the strange and wonderful trees that gave the park its name. The geology, however, is what fascinates me even more.

Monzogranite that was pushed up through the gneiss (pronounced nice) has, by its nature, eroded into great blocks of once-horizontal-and-vertical lines.

I love the simplicity of the shapes. I kept thinking the rocks looked familiar. They did from the point of my prior visit here, but it was more than that. The more, however, kept eluding me.

Then the light bulb flashed. They remind me of the rocks a dear artist friend back in New Hampshire painted.

His rocks had the same block patterns that, to my knowledge, one does not find in New England.

In recent, more arid times, flash floods washed away the supporting rock around this monzogranite, leaving jumbles of rounded boulders perched atop one another.

Occasionally, a round one found itself wedged in a V, as here. We saw several examples of this, but this one caught my eye.

I cannot not introduce you to the Joshua Tree.

As we were exploring and marking locations for next year’s alumni workshop, we saw the nearly-full moon rising.

It was one of those times in the year when it appears that there are three full moons in a row.

Not true, of course, but this one was a raccoon’s whisker away from being full.

A raccoon’s whisker, you ask? It comes from a wonderful children’s book, one of the first I remember as a very small “small,” called Wait Till the Moon Is Full by Margaret Wise Brown and charmingly illustrated by Garth Williams.

Raccoon’s aside, this give you an idea of the somewhat alien landscape.

Alien to us, it is, but it contains such variety, both in types of rocks and species of plants. We saw many birds, coyote tracks, and terrain.

It made it fun to photograph, as there was always something to tempt the eye.

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