Friday - Joshua Tree day 2

Woke up early, early being 7:15 or so, my general wake up time on this trip, to a cloudy but cool day. Hiked around a bit and started bouldering, and ran into some other boulderers. Joshua Tree is made up of granite. Or rather, the rocks JT is known for is grainite. The surrounding rock in some 1.6 billion years old - about 85 million years ago, there was an upswelling of magma, which while it never broke the surface, had been eroded down to over the last 85mil years. Quite distinctive! Anywho, the granite is interesting - it has alot of friction! but is quite crumbly in some places. I never did truly get used to it. I blame a bit of this of course, on being still tired from the amount of climbimg I've done on this trip.

Took a drive in the afternoon to other places in park, including down below 4K feet where the Mojave desert runs into and meets the Colorado desert. The Mojave is where the jtrees grow, the colorado being much drier and hotter. Saw a field of Cholla (?) cactus and spent a half hour walking amongst them reading the signs. While I did take a bunch of pics, I forgot to take one of the kangaroo rat's nest which looks like a 4' diamter pile of cactus bits. Supposedly these things can be thousands of years old, continuously reused. Bouldered a little bit that evening, and then hiking some more.

I found myself particularly happy that I can't lock my front doors without using the key to do so - a park ranger was trying to open the door of an SUV whose owners locked their keys inside. Walking back to my car, I hear 15 2, 15 4, 15 6 and walk over to a campsite mentioning that I was walking by and found myself listening to the sounds of cribbage. These nice folks offered to let me play, and better yet, offered me some of their beans and rice which was very nice, having grown tired of energy bars and peanut butter!! Played 3 games with them, talking of this and that. Happy and full, I eventually went off to bed.