I Will Walk into the Desert

It is conceivable, readers, that getting three hours of sleep on New Year's Eve, waking up before 3 am on New Year's Day, spending seven hours on two planes, driving a few hours through windy mountain roads, hiking up and down a steep mountain at sunset, rising before sunrise to hike up and down a rocky canyon before breakfast, and then driving several hours to the next destination could cause a few errors in judgment. Errors of the sort that might lead one to delete most of the first day's worth of one's pictures. Shit happens.

Most of my pictures from the second day came out just fine, and in some of them, you can even get an idea of how painfully blue the sky was in Anza Borrego State Park. But very few of them give any idea of the scale of the park. For example, if you look at the center of the picture below (click to enlarge), you can barely see the palm oasis that we hiked to this morning.


But you have to look at the next picture to get an idea of how tall those palms really are. They're big, and impressive, like almost everything else in the area. Throughout the area, there are tall mountains that erupt out of the plain in a way that's so abrupt that it's almost impolite.


I spent most of today in varying amounts of awe. At the beginning of the hike up the palm canyon, I had to keep stopping to admire how beautifully the early morning sun illuminated the mountains. The cute fiftyish guy in the picture below was awed, as well. I found him very attractive until we were finishing hiking back down the canyon and saw him come running by. Nobody likes a show off.


We're in Palm Springs tonight. I hear there's a lot of gay nightlife around here, but we're turning in early so we can hike through Joshua Tree National Park tomorrow. Perhaps in another post I'll provide some more detail about what went on today, but I probably won't say too much about the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, a park every bit as great as the man it's named for.