Mostly Plants

Saturday after returning from the dunes, we struck camp and moved south into Joshua Tree National Park, after stopping in the village to collect some firewood. The road between Mojave and Joshua Tree is barren, empty desert. Nobody lives there, nobody drives there. Nobody. Most of the nearby land is the playa of the Bureau of Land Management’s Old Woman Mountains Wilderness, a formless empty desert devoid of vegetation and surrounded by high, pointy mountains. You can imagine our surprise when we saw a sign that said “REALLY GOOD JERKY AHEAD.” Subsequent signs indicated that they also had olives and honey. We had to stop. The stand was an old Bluebird school bus, with a little farm stand set up outside it. The bus was flying the flags of the USA, Canada, Mexico, and Route 66. I got out and got some jerky samples, and sure enough–it was REALLY GOOD JERKY! So I bought some, and we went on our way as if this was a completely normal thing to find out in the playa.As we left the Jerky bus, we saw a sign that said “Amboy Crater” was just ahead. Curious, we went to check it out. Sure enough, out in the middle of the playa was a volcanic cinder cone, designated by the BLM as a National Natural Monument. We didn’t climb the cinder cone, but we did walk around the lava flows and get some pictures. The wildflowers were blooming, and made for a striking contrast against the black, igneous rock.

More crater, lava, and flower pictures at flickr–for the sake of your load time I won’t put them all into LJ.

At the crater, we met a middle-aged man who was living out of a ChevyVan with his two dogs. He’d been out camping for the weekend, and was headed home to the city (I think the bay area?). When we told him that we were headed to J’Tree he told us that “the rangers there are nazis” who hassled him for having his car parked on the side of the road (maybe in one of the “no stopping in roadway” areas?) and wouldn’t let him camp outside designated campgrounds. He was suspicious when we told him that we were going to be backpacking across the wilderness and camping wherever we pleased. He thought for sure we would get busted by the rangers. He didn’t know about the rule that camping is restricted to designated areas in developed corridors, and outside developed corridors is much less restricted. He seemed like the kind of person who isn’t a big fan of rules. I’m not a huge fan of rules either, but conservation rules serve an important purpose, and in this case if you know the rules you’re able to learn that they actually accommodate your purpose!

We finally arrived at our Joshua Tree campground close to sunset, and swiftly established our encampment in the extraterrestrial landscape.
As the sun set, the wind rose, and the temperature dropped. We built up our campfire, but we were quickly running out of wood when a pickup truck drove up and a local man offered to sell us a HUGE box of wood for $8. We happily accepted the deal, and between the wood, the $2 chuck, three pair of pants, two shits, a jacket, a parka, and my wool sheep… I was still a little chilly. Ginger, who packed for the average high rather than the record low, was huddling in her sleeping bag by the fire until she finally gave up and went to sleep. Dinner was Mel’s patented “pot o’ shit:” canned lentil soup with red onions, potatoes, garlic, and brats in. A heavier, heartier soup I never did see. I got to eat mine straight out of the lentil soup can, which made a nice little mini-cauldron. Only problem was that the label was all charred, and it took me two days to get the soot off of my hands.

When the problem of washing dishes arose, I had a ready solution: sodium carbonate, also known as “soda ash” or “washing ash” occurs in plant ash, and readily bonds to oil and grease, making it a good solution for cleaning dishes in the woods without adding artificial detergents to the environment. My successful demonstration of this process resulted mostly in me being marked as the crazy hippie on the trip, and in Ginger buying dish detergent in town the next day.

Stay tuned: in tomorrow’s installment, our intrepid heroes evacuate to the Sonoran Desert, where they explore Jumbo Rocks, Cholla cacti, fan palm oases, and a marine corps base!