After the adventures in the lava tube and such described in our last post, we enjoyed a wonderful sunset as you can see in the picture. It was so beautiful how the setting sun reflected off of the dunes and the incoming clouds. On our last full day in Mojave we decided to go to the far east side of the park and visit Hole in the Wall. We had to leave the park to the south, drive 30 miles or so east and re-enter the park and go 20 miles north. Like I have said before, some of these parks are big. We were able to listen to a very knowledgeable and obviously passionate geologist give a talk about how the entire area was formed via volcanic action and plate tectonics over geological time. The area we were in was formed by a lava eruption quite a few millenia ago. The lava contained superheated water/steam under immense pressure and when the lava pool exploded from its containment underground the water flashed away and left a very porous pumice like rock that literally splattered everywhere you see. As it eroded it exposed more and more of the holes that the steam left when it escaped. So, they named the monolithic rock area Hole in the Wall. There is a trail around the monolith called the rings trail. Now on this day it was cold. It was threatening snow and was cloudy and windy, so we did a lot less photographing and a lot more just moving and shaking. The Park Service has installed metal rings in some of the taller rock chutes and walls to facilitate climbing, hence the name the Rings trail. That evening we started our packing up since the wind was kicking up (a lot, we actually considered moving the trailer to face the wind better to ameliorate the buffeting and rocking the wind was giving) and we were to pull up our stakes and head to the North side of Joshua Tree National Park the next day. The day as we departed this magical place of dunes and desert we drove into a snowstorm! Go figure, of course it is high mountain desert, but still, it was quite the experience. Unfortunately by the time we could pull over and retrieve the camera from the trailer we had passed the worst of it, but there was still residual snow on the cactus (notice the cactus flowers alongside the snow on the cactus). The wind was still going fairly strong (tail wind fortunately)and it was blowing ground level clouds across the landscape. The rocky foothills shown in the picture would be occluded completely one minute and exposed the next over the course of the fifteen minutes we were there watching. All in all a magical finish to this mesmerizing location (to date our favorite place). From here were moving south to the North part of the Joshua Tree National Park.
