California USA, 3 October 2016

(Click on any image for a larger view).

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We continue further through Joshua Tree National Park.

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The first half of images in this post are from Jumbo Rocks.

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There is a campground nearby.

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The rocks are granite, originally created many eons ago by volcanic eruptions and subsequently smoothed by water during immersion in an inland sea.

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Not so much more to say so I’ll mainly let the images speak for themselves….

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If you look closely, you might see a sign on the right.  It is a Keep Out sign.  This is after all a fragile desert environment.  During the Government shutdown in 2019 and the early impact of COVID in 2020 when the rangers were absent but the park was still open, there were many instances of vandalism.  These included illegal off-roading, creating new roads, cutting down the rare Joshua trees and excessive littering.  The park was subsequently closed and hopefully better control will be maintained in future.

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We have now moved on further and this is Hidden Valley, featuring here a magnificent specimen of a Joshua Tree.

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If you look closely on the right side of the rock (perhaps you need to click on the image for a larger size) you will see there is a person climbing it and another below him.

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A somewhat mangy coyote near the car park.

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And back through the park and on a main road again.

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For some reason, the images from this day (this post, the last one and the next one) have all been lost and recovered.  Perhaps it is from when I had two disks in my PC and one in my Drobo backup fail in a week and found there was a hole in my backups.  Though that would affect presumably more than one day.  In any case, the images were all lost until I later realised it was possible to recover full-sized jpegs from Lightroom previews (using a Jeffrey Friedl plug-in).

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