Joshua Tree

Saturday, February 14

We all woke up around 8:30am and got ready. We had some traditional Taiwanese breakfast and decided to skip lunch so we'd reach the park earlier.

When we got to the park, the line to enter was almost 30 minutes. But when we got to the front, instead of needing to wait more to buy the passes, we were able to enter directly on the side thanks to Terry's national park pass.

We drove another 15 minutes to the Juniper Flats parking lot and saw that it was full. Luckily while Terry was parallel parking, a couple came out and left, so we were able to get a proper parking spot. We all got ready and started the hike. The first couple of miles took an hour as we were dilly-dallying and eating snacks, but then we went through the rest of the hike towards the view very quickly. We reached the cliff view around 4pm, with enough time to spare for the sunset.

We enjoyed a big snack break, and even whipped out the chairs for some poker. Terry introduced his game mode but there was not enough table space (space on the back of his backpack) to properly play, so we instead defaulted to Texas. We decided to not play too much so we could get a good campsite (it was another ~ hour), and so we left. As we were hiking to the campsite, we went through a canyon crevice as the sun was setting, which was super beautiful.

We eventually found a really perfect campsite with a lot of flat ground and not a lot of rocks to move. As we were setting up our tents, we saw the SpaceX rocket launch and watched the streaks in the sky. That was super cool. Then we made and ate dinner, and then all 5 of us went into Terrance's tent to play poker. We used a super jank iOS app that was not registering our presses half the time, and all of us were hunched over. We played for an hour, and then all went to bed.

Sunday, February 15

We woke up at 5am for sunrise, and started hiking around 5:45am. As we were waking, the sky started to get bright, and we could see the mountain ranges light up and it was beautiful. After a while we found a short mountain that Terrance climbed, and then we got there and watched the sun rise across the horizon, and it was beautiful. We could see for miles and all the trees in the desert were an awesome sight.

We then continued to go and eventually made it to the car. We then decided to go to the visitor center instead of the heart-shaped rock (since that was 30 min in the opposite direction). Along the way, we saw a rock formation that we all climbed. The view from the top was super cool, and it was fun to climb. Then we realized that the visitor center was outside of the park, and the line to get in was super long. Meaning that after the visitor center we were going home.

At the visitor center, it was super packed. Devan and I bought some shirts and hats, and then we started the drive back home. Along the way Terrance stopped for McDonald's, and we sat and ate. Then right after we picked up some Dutch Bros for coffee.

When we made it home, we set up the tents to dry out in the backyard, and then played mahjong and poker for the rest of the night.

Monday, February 16

Today was the travel day back to the Bay. There was a crazy storm outside, with wind gusts up to 40mph. We left around 12pm, and it took a full 2 hours to get out of LA since the traffic was so bad. We all met up in Firebaugh McDonald's, and then all got home around 10:20pm.