A weekend in SoCal

I have a week of work in San Diego, so I decided to fly out here on Friday and have the weekend free to play around a bit.

It is almost impossible for me to fly three time zones on one day and teach the next day, so this makes sense from a work perspective as well.

Yesterday was Joshua Tree National Park. It is a long haul from San Diego (two plus hours) but I love the desert and had never been to this park. I got up reasonably early and got on the road by 9:30am. I didn’t rush at all and got caught in a completely inexplicable traffic jam in some little town along the way. It was a beautiful day but as I got into higher elevations it started to get quite cold. I got to the western park entrance about noon.

Normal highs in the park are mid-sixties this time of year. It is the desert, after all. When I got to the park, it was 42˚. Even the rangers were commenting on how cold it was. I was equipped for the cold but not for the very high winds. I would guess that the wind chill was in the twenties or below.

This ended my plans for walking a lot within the park. My tour was going to be mostly in the car.

Still it was a beautiful, sunny day. I did manage a short hike around a box canyon called “Hidden Valley”. Apparently rustlers used to use the canyon to hide the horses and cattle they had stolen.

Peregrinos will recognize this little sculpture. Apparently other peregrinos proceeded me.

A short but fun walk. If I stayed in the sun and out of the wind, the cold was not too bad. I drove up to the highest point in the park that you can get to by road, Keys View at 5187 feet. I don’t know what the wind speed was but it was hard to stand up. I would guess 40-50 mph. I would have had frost bite in just a few minutes. I retreated back to the car.

I left the park by the southern entrance and my GPS directed me back to San Diego by a different route from when I came. It was a dull ride until I reached this road (partial satellite shot below). It is called the “Pines to Palms Highway”. Ahh, to have the Mini for those miles and miles of hairpins.

I finally got back to my hotel at about 6pm.

This morning I got up early and went to the famous San Diego Zoo. I am ambivalent about zoos. I mostly just don’t get much out of them. All the animals just look sad and bored. As good as the San Diego Zoo apparently is, they still just looked sad and bored.

I took a few shots of the more charismatic creatures.

This last is a California Condor. The zoo played an important role in bringing them back from the brink of extinction.

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