Two Trails at Joshua Tree National Park

This is a throw-back to a trip I made down to SoCal in late March of 2015. I don't know exactly why I didn't post my pictures before, but Joshua Tree National Park has been on my mind recently. I went to my old album to look at my photos, and I was really inspired.

Joshua Tree is a huge park that has a surprisingly different feel depending where you are. It's situated where the Mojave and the Colorado deserts meet, and you can see the difference in the types of vegetation.

We stayed in Yucca Valley and drove into the park from the Joshua Tree Visitor Center to access our hike at Barker Dam on the first day, and then went to the Black Rock Campground area on the second day. We were hiking with an 18-month old baby, so all of our hikes were easy hikes. Her dad carried her in a back-packing carrier, and we wanted to let her out to scramble and cruise as much as we could. Here is a good resource from the NPS for planning your hikes at Joshua Tree.

Barker Dam Nature Trail Loop

The entire loop is 1.1 miles, but we did not make the entire loop. There were some boulders to scramble over to continue the loop, and it did not seem safe to do with the baby in the carrier. So we went as far as we could, and then we had a little picnic in the shade of the rocks so that the little one could play out of her carrier and the more adventurous adults could boulder on the rocks.  It was really fun!

Even though we did not complete the loop, it still felt like a workout because of all of the scrambling over rocks that we did during the picnic. This was a good hike for both the little one and the adults. Apparently it's one of the more popular hikes in the park, and I can see why. There are also petroglyphs in some of the caves along this hike, but not right where we were. (See here for some great shots of the petroglyphs.)

While we were in this part of the park we saw Mojave yucca blooms and also some Joshua tree blossoms. We also saw some variety of Indian paintbrush or Indian warrior.

Hi-View Nature Trail (near Black Rock Campground)

March is a prime time to see desert flowers bloom, and the H-View trail was recommended at the time because it was having a lovely bloom. In particular, some sort of desert star or daisy was blooming in abundance. This was actually my favorite of the two hikes. We did end up completing the whole 1.3 mile-loop (400 ft. elevation gain), and I just loved seeing the flowers in the desert.

This link offers a particularly nice write-up of the hike. I hope to come back to this part of California with my daughter one day, and I can definitely see us doing this hike again if we go during wildflower season.