The Cohen Chronicle: Mystery Trip 2015: Joshua Trees & Giant Rocks

The next day of our trip began with us waking up in our cute bed-n-breakfast in Twenty-nine Palms, a tiny town on the north border of Joshua Tree National Park.

After a delicious breakfast of praline French toast, we headed into the park. I can list out a bunch of adjectives, but you really just need to go there. Seriously. Go. Experience the awesomeness of Joshua Tree National Park for yourself.

There are giant rocks you can climb on.

Looks like a prehistoric landscape.

Can you spot Andy?

And then there are the Joshua trees. Technically they are Yucca brevifolia, but Mormon settlers crossing the Mojave Desert felt the trees reminded them of a story from the Bible where Joshua raises his arms in supplication. Many of them do look like they're reaching for the sky.

If you're a tree, I'm a tree. (Bonus points for whoever knows what movie quote I just tweaked.) An old man tourist took a photo of us posing. Thankfully it came off more cute than awkward.

Many of the trees were flowering, and they smelled really good!

This is the Joshua tree's cousin, the more well-recognized yucca plant.

We took multiple hikes, including one to an old dam. (No, you're not missing anything, this photo does not show the dam. It wasn't particularly exciting after seeing Hoover Dam.)

And one to see more petroglyphs.

One area of the park is called Hidden Valley. It's a relatively flat, not-as-rocky area surrounded by a ring of rock walls. One settler whose name I can't remember blasted a hole in the rock wall so his cattle could graze in the valley. Nowadays, the area is used by rock climbers.

Half of Joshua Tree National Park is in the Mojave Desert and the other half is in the Colorado Desert. The Joshua trees only grow in the Mojave. Once we crossed over to the Colorado Desert side, we saw different plants, including a whole natural "garden" of these cool fuzzy ones.

We left the park and made two pit stops on the way to our final destination. The first was at the Salton Sea, which was formed accidentally when water overflowed an engineered canal. It used to be a hopping place where people came to play in the water and on the (fake) beaches, but now it's been abandoned and is very sad-looking.

The second pit stop was to the tiny town of Borrego Springs, where A said we were taking a sort of scavenger hunt. I wasn't sure what I was looking for until we saw them.