Joshua Tree

Before the kids returned to school. We made one last ditch effort to go do something. The weather was still questionable, but we decided to try to tough it out. We drove out to Joshua Tree for the day.

We headed out to the Barker Dam area. It was cold, windy and pretty miserable...and yet, it was unbelievably crowded. 

We headed out to the dam first. There was actually a decent amount of water there from all the recent rains.

Christian and Emily scrambled around on some of the rocks surrounding the area to see if there was anything interesting to climb.

Caitlyn and I stayed with our gear and huddled down to stay warm and attempted not to get run over by tourists. 

We attempted to find a climbing route near the area, but when Christian finally found it, he didn't think anyone would actually want to climb it. It was just too miserably cold and windy. For as miserable as it was, I just couldn't get over how many people milled around out there. The camping sites were all full and we could barely get any parking!

We had some lunch and tried to come up with a plan with what we would want to do next. In the end, we headed out to Keys View to walk around and decided to try to catch the sunset. 

We got lucky and got a parking space. There were just non-stop cars coming up, trolling for parking spaces. At some point, some idiot pulled up in pack of our car and blocked us in. We were up on the hill above the area. When they finally left, we thought that it was best to leave while we could. It was neat on the hill with the clouds and mists blowing through, but it got old and cold after a while and the sunset was less than spectacular.