A long-awaited meeting with absolute silence. That’s what I was after. I drove out from L.A. on a Monday morning, probably beating morning traffic by just a few minutes, and 3 hours later, arrived to my destination: Joshua Tree National Park. My companions this time were my camera, tent and backpack (and of course some water,food and clothing).
My original plan was to hike in the back-country for a few hours, set up tent, spend the night with the wind, and continue hiking, return to the car, and drive back in time for my flight Tuesday night. The Park Ranger warned me that the winds will be gushing that night at 30 mph, 40 degree temperature… I didn’t want to mind that, but I took a mental note… After all, he said HE wouldn’t do it (where it = camp in the back-country)… he recommended I set up tent at a campground.
With this idea still brewing, I parked the car in the “Pinto Basin”, and started hiking toward the top of Pinto Mountain… The scenery looked like this:
Pinto Basin
So I kept hiking and hiking… For those of you who have not yet hiked in the desert sand, believe me it’s not sweet for the heels or the calves… Let’s however leave the physical endurance out of this, and focus on the feeling of being so close with the Sun, the Wind and the Earth.. The only element missing from the scenery is water, as you probably guessed.. The hike became both more pleasant and more strenuous as I started to hike up the rocky mountain one hour later.
Accidents happen, so I broke the screen of my GPS device as I was sitting down to take a break, and rendered it useless, and reduced my hopes of setting up tent on the mountain (basic instinct of survival there). Here’s a view from around that spot:
Pinto Basin from Mt. Pinto
I continued the hike up but then had to turn around and get back to the car in time to go to the campground, get some sleep, and do some trail hiking the next morning.
And then at night, when there was supposedly nothing to see, and only the wind to listen to, I get out of my tent and see all of them. All the stars that one could see in a single sky were there. No city lights to hide behind, they were just out there, like a carpet of white dots hanging above. With the strong winds, the camera wouldn’t sit still to take a long exposure of the sky, but I managed to get a post-sunset view of a few trees:
Desert Sunset - Joshua Trees
Overall, a great place to be and spend some quality time with silence. This is what it felt like:
A shadow in the Sun
