Desert Hot Springs

Hey Guys! We spent one very hot, very windy week in the Desert Hot Springs area of California. We were there at the end of April and the daily temps reached a scorching 90* by 10 every morning.

We spent a day exploring Joshua Tree National Park. If you’re going to visit this National Park come in the winter. Winter daytime temps are in the 60s vs. summer when the day time temps exceed 100*. Everyone says the best time to visit is March and April. We were there at the end of April and it was already too hot.

We didn’t do very much hiking here. It was just too dang hot and windy. We wanted to see all of the gigantic boulders so we hiked the Hidden Valley loop. This area is very popular with rock climbers so it can be a bit crowded.

We made it out to Keys View. Guys…check out that view! If you look hard enough you can see the Salton Sea and the San Andreas Fault in the pic above. Keys View is a quarter mile loop…so it’s pretty short, but we found some of the best views in the park here.

Did you know…a Joshua Tree isn’t actually a tree? Its actually the largest species of yucca! What?!? Crazy, right? For the first ten years, the Joshua tree grows about three inches a year. They can live for hundreds of years but unlike the saguaro I told y’all about…Joshua trees only grow to about forty feet tall. Driving through this National Park felt a little like driving through a Dr. Seuss book. Ha!

Yup, we found a dirt road to explore while we were in Joshua Tree NP. Are you surprised? ;-p We drove the 18 mile Geology Tour Road. It was a pretty narrow dirt road, but it wasn’t bad at all. We never had to kick it up into four-wheel drive and the views were all pretty stellar!

Scattered throughout Joshua Tree NP are the remnants of old mines. The one above is what’s left of the Silver Bell Mine. Gold in the 30s, lead in the 40s, and copper in the 50s. There are several old mines you can hike to, but most of them are unsafe. So, this is as close as we got.

It’s not technically a sea any more, but a long, long time ago it was part of what is now the Gulf of California. The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake at around 35 miles long and 15 miles wide. It sits 235 feet below sea level. Most lakes have a natural outlet flowing to the ocean, but the Salton Sea doesn’t. The only water it gets is through rain and agricultural runoff.

The lake you see today is only the current form of the many different lakes that have filled this area over millions of years. Because of all of the agricultural runoff there is a peanut butter type sludge that sits at the bottom of the lake. Fishing for tilapia is a popular recreation at Salton Sea, but I don’t think I would eat anything that came out of this lake. You think it’s sand until you get closer. It’s the skeletons of thousands and thousands of barnacles and fish. Neat but gross at the same time. There are old motels and and boarded up yacht clubs all over the shores. If you go exploring here, do it in a safe spot. We’ve read horror stories of people sinking to their ankles and then having to throw their shoes away due to some residue on them that eats the shoe. We didn’t encounter that at all, but we didn’t stray from the state park head quarters.

Those…are date palms. The first date palms in the US were planted by missionaries in California in 1769. There are a few different date farms in the Desert Hot Springs area. We went to Oasis Date Gardens.

Oasis Date Gardens was established in 1912 and is a whopping 175 acres full of date producing palm trees. YUM! The Oasis Date Gardens doesn’t give tours but they have a video you can watch and there are dates set out for sampling! We had no idea there were so many different kinds of dates. And that they tasted so differently!

I had to try the prickly pear date shake. Had to. There just wasn’t any way around it. It was soooo good. If we’d found this place our first day in the Desert Hot Springs area…I would have gone back to Oasis Date Gardens at least four…maybe five times just for this shake.

We walked out with some goodies. The boys didn’t waste any time getting into the date bread. It didn’t last long.

Over in Palm Springs there’s plenty of green. Big palm trees…lots of lush bushes…but the rest of this area looks…well, brown. Along with some very nice shades of tan. We drove about 15 miles down this road and found a natural oasis. A spot of green in the middle of the desert.

There were several hiking trails here. We stuck to a short boardwalk hike because we were warned that the rattlesnakes were waking up and were very active. And…they like to hide in the trees. Um…nope. Nope. Nope. That’s a great big nope from me. It was bad enough to worry about danger noodles in bushes and near big rocks…but to have to worry about them falling out of the trees onto us…I’m gonna pass on that every time. We saw everything we wanted to see. It was really cool to walk among the huge fan palms. This particular oasis sits on top of the San Andreas Fault. The boys are standing on it in the pic above. You really can’t tell. If the sign didn’t tell you, you’d never know.

We were told of a different place to see the San Andreas Fault in it’s more natural state. It was out in the middle of nowhere and the whole area was in upheaval. It was something else to see it.

We stayed at the KOA. There was zero shade and temps of over 100* every day. It was a very very hot week. They KOA had its own hot springs spa. We didn’t use it because…we were hot enough as it was. The thought of getting into hot water was not at all appealing. We did, however, utilize the pool! Most of the time we were the only ones there.

I can’t leave out the pretties. Even in the desert there is color. Spring in the desert is so full of color and life. Not all of it from cacti! This palo verde tree (top picture) is lovely with it’s green bark and yellow blooms!

There was a surprising amount of things to see and do in the Desert Hot Springs area and if we ever go back… it’ll be in the winter. It was just too hot and too windy for us. While we thought what we saw was neat, it was kind of a looong miserable week.

See y’all down the road!

#westernloop2018