Three Days Later...Back to Camping at Joshua Tree

Who doesn’t love Joshua Tree?

• 📍 Joshua Tree National Park

• 🚙 134 miles

• 📈 Elevation Change: 4,000 feet

Favorite moment: Bonking a Coyote on the nose!

Apparently, eight days of camping wasn't enough.

I'd been home for exactly three days before I packed everything up again and headed to Joshua Tree National Park.

I've been to Joshua Tree before, but that's one of the things I love about this park. No matter how many times I visit, I always seem to find something different.

Different light. Different trails. Different rock formations.

And apparently, different wildlife experiences.

How Are Those Rocks Still Up There?

Joshua Tree is one of those places where simply driving through the park can keep me entertained.

The Joshua trees themselves are magnificent, but then there are the boulders. Huge piles of rounded granite seem to appear everywhere, and some of the formations don't look like they should be physically possible. Massive rocks balance precariously on top of one another, sometimes with what looks like almost nothing holding them in place.

You can't help wondering: How is that still up there?

Wind and weather have done some amazing things to this landscape, shaping the rocks over time into formations that sometimes look more like sculptures than something created by nature.

And for a photographer, they're everywhere.

Camping Among the Rocks

This time I camped at Jumbo Rocks Campground, and the location was amazing.

You're not just looking at the rocks from a distance. You're camping right among them.

There are trails all around the campground, making it easy to leave the campsite and start exploring without even getting back in the truck. You can wander through the boulders, climb around the formations and even follow a trail over to Skull Rock.

It felt like there was something to explore in every direction.

Then the sun went down.

Coyotes in the Night

Throughout the night, I could hear coyotes calling in the distance. That's not particularly unusual when you're camping in the desert, and for most of the night they stayed far enough away that I could simply listen to them.

Until about 4:00 in the morning.

Suddenly, they didn't sound so far away anymore. They seemed to be all around the campsite.

And then one got really close.

I was sleeping in my tent when one came right up to the screen. Close enough that there was basically just a thin layer of mesh separating the two of us. So I did what apparently seemed logical at four in the morning.

I bonked him on the nose through the screen.

That seemed to get the message across. We didn't hear much from the coyotes after that.

Definitely a first for me.

A Desert Sky Full of Stars

Long before my early-morning encounter with the coyotes, the night sky had put on its own show.

The stars were unbelievable.

After spending so much of my eight-day road trip hoping for clear skies and repeatedly getting clouds instead, it was wonderful to finally stand beneath a sky filled with stars. Of course, there was one catch.

The moon was too bright for the Milky Way photographs I'd hoped to get.

At this point, I'm starting to think the Milky Way and I are playing some kind of game. First clouds. Now the moon.

But at Joshua Tree, it really didn't matter.

Between the stars, Joshua trees, massive boulders and endless possibilities for compositions, there were plenty of other things to photograph. Sometimes it's better to stop chasing the shot you planned and pay attention to the ones the landscape is giving you instead.

Worth Waking Up For

After the coyotes finally quieted down, morning wasn't far behind. And the sunrise did not disappoint.

The desert slowly began to light up, bringing color back into the rocks and silhouetting the Joshua trees against the morning sky.

It was beautiful.

There's something about sunrise in the desert that always feels worth getting up for—even when you've already been awake at 4:00 a.m. negotiating personal boundaries with a coyote.

Standing there watching the first light of the day spread across Joshua Tree, I was reminded again why I keep coming back.

I've visited before.

I'll visit again.

And somehow, Joshua Tree always manages to show me something I haven't seen before.

This time it gave me incredible stars, a beautiful sunrise, endless rocks to photograph...

...and a coyote nose to bonk.

Not bad for a camping trip I started only three days after getting home from the last one.

Thanks for journeying with me!
~ Bridget