Desert Variations: Joshua Tree to Quartzsite
From Lone Pine we traveled south on US-395 to the town of Joshua Tree, via Barstow, Lucerne Valley and Yucca Valley. It was more easy desert driving, with long straight stretches, minimal other traffic, and little to no services. When you have your whole house on your back, these desolate, remote places don't feel so imposing and fearsome. Long as you can find a place to pull over and have plenty of fuel and water, there's a lot you can weather. We're thankful for the many safety nets - cellular phone coverage, roadside assistance, safety gear - that make travel like this feel like adventure and not foolishness.
We passed a fair number of other RVers out in the boondocks enjoying the abundant free camping out here, but we won't be doing that for a while yet. We're sticking to hookup sites here in Joshua Tree where we can enjoy electric heat and long hot showers.
The RV park for this week - the Joshua Tree Sportsman's Club - isn't much of anything special, just a big sandy lot with hookups. Well, in ordinary times it would be a big sandy lot with hookups, a game room, and a bar with ana outdoor patio. But, you know, COVID, so all we get is hookups and a quiet park. Which is fine - we wouldn't fit inside Joshua Tree proper with our rig anyway, and this place is a block from the main entrance, so we'll take it. Beats being stuck at home!
The appeal of Joshua Tree is considerably more subtle than the Redwoods. Maybe that sounds obvious if you write it out, but it took a while to sink in. The eponymous Trees are present along several sections of the drive there, not just inside the park. Unlike the Redwoods, it's not a uniquely well-preserved section of the landscape. So much of this area is undevelopable desert that even the parts with houses are difficult to distinguish from the protected natural landscape. (On our way out, we would spot signs marking the NE border of the park that are 50 miles or more from anything but a road.) In this way it feels like a young park, protecting an ecosystem that is delicate, not currently under threat of development, but in the long term could easily be overrun. Only a small corridor through the park is developed at all, and the vast (vast, vast) majority is pure protected wildland, impossible to see from a car and accessible only to the bravest of desert backpackers. (Hope you like water carries!)
While the trees themselves are the most visible attraction, it's the landscape that holds them that is in some ways the "true" park. Apparently the park (called "the monument" by the locals) is a haven for rock climbers, and indeed the rock formations are a joy to climb. We thought when we left the Alabama hills that we'd see the last of these distinctly rounded, rough textured rocks. But the park here is packed with them, in a huge variety of sizes and shapes. All are a joy to climb even for amateurs like ourselves, and the rewarding views at the top are worth the scramble.
Even as close as we were to the park entrance, it was about 40 minutes to get into the the park due to the wait times at the gate, so going into the park was something of a commitment each time. But as we learned more about it and how to explore it the vastness and beauty of it became clearer. It's a wonderful park that I'd definitely visit again if I could stay inside.
From where we were staying, errands were all 5 miles east in the town of Yucca Valley, which had the shopping and things. The town of Joshua Tree seems to have sprung up mostly around the park entrance and had mostly small shops and hippie artists and outdoors folks trying to get by. Kind of reminded us of Portland neighborhoods from a few years ago.
After a fine week at Joshua Tree we headed east to Quartzsite, a haven for RVers of all stripes in the wintertime, and home to the Quartzsite RV Show. This expo claims to be the largest such RV show in the world, and every supplier, manufacturer, dealer, and service business that can show up, does. We're definitely not here for the expo, however. It sounds like such an obvious COVID superspreader event that I wouldn't go near it. But necessity brings us here.
After the long, rainy weekend traveling from Myers Flat to Bakersfield, I started looking into slide topper awnings. These are little vinyl awnings that just cover the top of the RV slideouts, and protect the slide roofs from rain and sun. They're standard on higher end rigs and aa good thing for lots of reasons, but our interest is mostly in quieting the rain noise in the bedrooms. Audrey in particular sleeps right next to the ceiling of the bunkroom slideout, and on rainy nights has to move down into the "lego cave" bunk under Luke to get some peace and quiet. On top of that, the seals on that slide aren't great, so bringing it in on rainy days results in puddles on the kids room floor. This quickly became tedious for all involved, and some topper awnings seemed like a good solution. We found a good installer that served southern CA and AZ, but because the expo is such a big event they were sending all their staff to Quartzsite for most of January. We could meet them there easily enough, and planned to do so. We'd show up for measurements Jan 9th, they'd install on the 12th, and we'd head out of town on the 13th right before the expo started.
That worked out well enough, and they showed up for measurements soon after we arrived, but I guess the scheduling was more busy than they thought, as they won't be able to actually install the things for 2 weeks! They'll catch up with us in Tucson. Thankfully we're not leaving their service area... so now we've got extra days in Quartzsite we don't really have to be here for, but our next stop is boondocking in Winterhaven, CA for the solar install and well, there's a reason we're upgrading the batteries. We don't want to spend more nights dry camping on our existing batteries than we have to, so we'll stick around.
Quartzsite is a curious place, which seems mostly to survive on expo events and RV services. There are many, many miles of free-camping BLM land surrounding the town, and lots of RV pit stop services and parks for said free-campers here. There seems a lot of mining and old-west history here, and a lot of folks left still making it work in the dust and the heat. Everyone we've talked to has been super nice. Their park (there's one) has a cool skate park and two good shaded playgrounds that we enjoyed, and the pizza place had some excellent gluten free pizzas (a luxury!).
