A couple of weeks ago, I stopped at Joshua Tree National Park while on a road trip to California. It was late in the day when I arrived at Yukka Valley, so by the time I headed into the park, the sun had already set. The next morning I headed to the park, arriving just as the sun was rising above the granite hills. I made my way along a trail where I found this yukka plant, adorned with a long stem that flowered in some earlier season.
The park is named after the Joshua Tree. Here is one of the first images that I made of a Joshua Tree that morning.
I found a pair of Joshua Trees. In this image, the sun was low in the sky. Moving around, I made sure that the sun was located behind the trunk of the tree and created a silhouette of the two trees.
The higher elevations of the park are formed over granite intrusions. I found this granite boulder lit by the morning sun against a wall of granite that had vertical fractures resulting from erosion over the ages.
This was my second season visiting the park, so I headed down a track that led to Wall Street Mill. While exploring the area, I had a familiar tapping sound. Soon I discovered this Ladderback Woodpecker feeding on bugs in a Joshua Tree. The woodpecker was working up through the tree, allowing me to approach closely. Soon the bird reached the tree top, where it perched awhile before finding another tree.
At a lower elevation of the park, which is much warmer that the higher Mohave Desert area, is the Cholla Cactus Garden. On this visit, I reached the garden in the afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky. The Teddy Bear Cholla look like a forest of cactii! I like how the low sun lights the cholla spines in this image.
I made another closeup image of one of the cholla plants.
I had decided to leave the macro lens at home for this trip. However, I did bring a Lensbaby lens that allows a softfocus image to be created. It also had a limited macro capability. I used this to get close to a shaded area of one the cholla, where the remains of the flowers and fruit were located.
Teddy Bear Cholla have nasty spines. Occasionally, a ball of spines fall from the cholla, and roll around the ground. One got attached to my boot so I had to work it off without touching the spines. They can be very painful! In this image below, I decided to focus on the distant cholla heads, leaving the closer cholla soft and fuzzy.
As the sun sank lower in the sky, I headed to a location where a roadside Joshua Tree cast long shadows on the tarmac road. This road was especially busy at that time of the day, so I made several images. This was one of the images made in between the passage of vehicles along the road.
I did manage to capture some with cars passing, but those were deleted!