After leaving Palm Springs, we headed about an hour north to camp for a night in Joshua Tree National Park. Talk about being out in the middle of nowhere. There are numerous different campsites within Joshua Tree...it took about 35 minutes from entering the park to reach any of them...so that should give you a little bit of an idea as to just how remote you are inside this massive park. After talking to some friends familiar with Joshua Tree we had received a few recommendations and decided to stay at White Tank Campground which has its campsites spaced out nicely and tucked away in between numerous large boulder formations so you never really feel like you are on top of the neighboring campers. As we were getting our campsite setup I asked Shauna to take the car and drive back into town to get some firewood...an hour later she comes back with one small bundle of wood...about 6 logs. If you know anything about the desert...it gets pretty dang cold at night and six logs weren't going to cut it (no burning of local vegetation). So we fired things up, grilled a few hot dogs, drank a beer or two, burned the rest of our remaining three logs, took a short walk to check out the absolutely amazing amount of stars and then ended up heading to bed around 8:00pm because without a fire there wasn't much else to do but freeze.
In the middle of the night we woke up to numerous coyote calls off in the distance...Personally, I really enjoyed hearing them...Shauna though...not so much. Since we went to bed so early, it wasn't too hard for us to get up before sunrise, pack up camp, and head out to enjoy some early morning light and check out more of the park before heading up to Los Angeles.
And again...if you have got some naked walls and want to spruce things up a bit all of these photos are available for purchase here.