23/02/2022

Who’d have believed it. When we planned our trip, our biggest worry was that we could hit snowy conditions in Utah and Colorado that would cause us to rejig our trip. The dilemma of the hire car is that you can’t really do snowy conditions. But as you will have seen, we were absolutely lucky with the weather all trip.

Until today. We put a few days of Palm Springs in the plan so that we could unwind for a few days with some warm weather, maybe spend a little time in the pool. But today we woke up to rain and about 5 degrees. What was going on?!

It seemed a cold snap had hit most of California, and our desert oasis had become a bit arctic. We didn’t have much planned but we had been talked about possibly going for another visit to Joshua Tree National Park. We had visited Joshua Tree a few years ago and enjoyed driving through the landscape. A quick check of the weather there suggested that it was not raining at all, but that we could encounter snow! So off we went.

On the way we decided to pop into nearby Pioneertown. We had also visited there in the past but only to the awesome Pappy and Harriets saloon. Alas, Pappy and Harriets was closed today, but we did get to see the town in ints glory.

Established for filming westerns, a small number of people live there. There was not much to see outside of a dozen or so old cowboy looking buildings. Fun for a quick visit on our way. Plus always a bonus to meet a gorgeous doggo.

We then headed to Joshua Tree, and it seemed a lot of people were drawn by the very rare snow, as it was quite busy going into the park. But once we were in, it was actually not too bad.

There is one main road that goes through Joshua Tree, with a few offshoots, so we just meandered our way through, stopping to get photos of the snowy Joshua Trees.

We also stopped at the Hidden Valley, my favourite part of the park. It is a great secluded area, surrounded by smallish cliffs where you can wander around, climbing rocks and generally just running amok.

Otherwise we just enjoyed driving through the park at our leisure. While the snow disappeared fairly quickly, it was a delight to experience the park in a completely different way to last time.

We got back to Palm Springs late in the afternoon. The weather was a bit better, so we just kicked around. Dinner was another burger from Stout Burgers (mine had prosciutto on it… mmm) before getting ourselves sorted to move on again tomorrow for our last few days.