Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Joshua Tree Ramblings

I'm on the way home from Arizona. As usual, I drove thru Joshua Tree National Park. And, like last year, there are a lot of fine spring flowers after a wet winter. The winter was also cold, so the blooms are a bit late. A lot of cactus are not yet blooming, but this beavertail was a spectacular exception!
JTNP has flowers in the spring, and cool rocks all year round. Here desert dandelions carpet the ground with a big ol' rockpile in the distance.
The various types of hardy plant life in the desert are often bizarre and artistic when viewed close up. Here a cholla cactus bristles at the photographer. Not good to get too close!
The Lizards, of course, love the desert; it's their natural habitat. And here Lizard and Verde have found a friend...a real lizard! The picture is a little deceptive...the lizard in the background is actually on a different rock. The Lizards enjoyed hanging out with a fellow member of the species.
JTNP has a lot of big rockpiles. Actually, these stones were once underground. They were split by magma intrusion, then exposed by erosion, and then weathered by millennia of freezing and thawing. JTNP is one of my favorite places...it's beautiful and surreal. I was thinking of staying here another day, but it's supposed to turn cool and windy tomorrow so I probably won't. Sometime, though, I''ll come back and poke around for several days instead of just passing through.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Jerome

Ol' Dave and The Venerable Pinniped took a road trip to Jerome earlier this week. It's an old mining town about 120 miles NW of Sun City, 20 miles W of Sedona. Copper, gold, and silver were extracted here from the late 1800s until 1953, when the last copper mine closed. In its heyday in the 1920s there were 15,000 people living here, but by the late 1950s the number was less than 100. Now it's about 400-500, not counting throngs of tourons. However, most of them are daytrippers, crowding the streets during the afternoon but leaving the town quiet in the night and morning hours. This is the main drag.
We stayed at the Jerome Grand Hotel. The building was a hospital from 1927 to 1950; then it was mostly abandoned til the mid 1990s, when it was purchased from the mining company of Phelps Dodge and converted into a hotel. The hallways are decorated in period furniture. There's a cool old style cage elevator, too.
Here's a view of the hotel from outside. Rumor is that it's haunted, but all Dave and I heard was each other snoring.
The hotel sits high on a hill overlooking the town and the Verde Valley, 2000 feet below. The entire town is perched on the hillside. There are lots of good restaurants and saloons...Jerome is highly recommended!