Tribute to Joshua Tree National Park

2019 Government Shutdown

With the partial lapse in the 2019 US government shutdown, some US National Parks are not only open, but staffed as well. During the shutdown, parks remained accessible, but not staffed much at all. I wish I had more faith in humanity. After learning about the vandalism and trashing of Joshua Tree National Park, my heart broke. How can people treat nature like that? Cutting down trees and illegally off-roading destroys the habitat. The wildlife must be so traumatized, and the damage will take over 300 years to repair, according to the former superintendent of the park.

I applaud the people who rallied together to help the park during this time of need. You can help by donating to the park as well, if you like. Other parks are affected, but Joshua Tree National Park is one of the most heavily impacted by the shutdown. Therefore, I’m dedicating this post to the beauty of the park. These photos are from a trip we took in the first half of December 2018. Here are some of my other posts about the park:

• Hidden Valley and Cholla Cactus Garden
• Wonderland of Rocks and Barker Dam
• Lost Horse Mine, Mastodon Peak, and Pinto Basin
• Perseid Meteor Shower

Barker Dam during Different Seasons

Barker Dam is one of the iconic places to visit at Joshua Tree National Park, especially when there’s a bit of water. It’s a quick hike, and the water offers beautiful reflections of the stereotypical rock formations found throughout the park. When we went in December, the yellow colors were on full display. It was crowded, and I decided to keep the people on the left of the frame in the image for both scale and mood.

Walking around to the back of the reservoir offers a different view. The following image on the left shows Barker Dam in May. The image on the right shows a similar view during December. It’s crazy how much the park changes depending on the season. Beautiful either way!

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Some Park Wildlife

When I think of the impact of the irresponsible people during the government shutdown, I think of the wildlife in the park. There are hundreds of animal species here, including mammals, reptiles and birds, amphibians, and invertebrates. Some species are even considered “of federal concern” and the carelessness of some people isn’t helping their status at all.

For me, it’s always fun to see animals in the park. I like to observe them from a distance and try and identify them later. Here, an extremely adorable White-tailed Antelope Squirrel is enjoying a snack. To get this shot, I zoomed in to 300mm and exposed for an additional stop of light to bring out the rock in the foreground.

There was a male Phainopepla teasing me by quickly flying around a few of the trees. I shortened my shutter speed to 1/1600sec to capture it.

Cholla Cactus Garden

I love Cholla Cactus Garden. Two of my posts are about it, and it continues to be one of my favorite places to visit. Here’s a shot of a cholla during blue hour.

Cholla Cactus Garden is one of the easily accessible darker areas of the park. As the sun set, I tried my hand at getting some light trails. Minhan drove slowly from the exit to the entrance of the parking lot. I shot this at f/2 and a 10sec shutter speed. I love the texture of the clouds in the background. It almost feels like the light from the car is illuminating the sky.

We parked the car and carefully used the walkway to get deeper into the garden. I set up my tripod really low and wanted to get the Orion constellation with some chollas. To keep the stars from trailing, I only lengthened my shutter speed to 15sec.

I love creating star trails and am getting to the point where I want to play around with the composition a bit and not always include Polaris in the shot. However, looking at the PhotoPills app, I saw the opportunity for some great composition including Polaris and took full advantage. The moon was at 70% behind me in this shot, which lit the cacti nicely. I shot this using Live Composite mode on my camera. After editing out a lot of airplanes, I’m pretty happy with the resulting image.

Final Thoughts

I usually end these posts with a bit of history, but I’ve covered a lot of the history of Joshua Tree in my previous posts. Instead, I’d like to end this post with a reflective activity for you. Take a second to think about nature. About what nature has to offer, and the human impact on the environment. While it’s inevitable that we leave some sort of carbon footprint on our earth, what are some ways we can minimize that? In the spirit of compassion for nature and it’s beauty and to offset a small part of the damage done by more careless people, I invite you to share 1-2 new actions you will take to give back to nature, or at least reduce your carbon footprint. Here are my two new actions:

• Use mostly cloth diapers for Baby M instead of disposables
• Use my car more efficiently. I’ll to this in two ways. First, by driving more conservatively. Second, by walking more to run errands that are close to home.

What about you?