Dr. Seuss Trees and Poisonous Yellow Smog

Joshua Tree National Park – January 10, 2007

The Joshua trees could have come from a Dr. Seuss book featuring Horton the Elephant or Yertle the Turtle. You look at them and have to wonder what universe you are in.

We drive from the Salton Sea to the Cottonwood Spring at the south entrance in eastern California. Cottonwood Spring produces about 30 gallons of water an hour. It is the only source of water for many miles and helped support gold-mining operations in the area in the Nineteenth Century.


The southern half of the 825,000 acre Park is in the Sonora Desert. After about thirty miles of exploring vistas and exhibits the landscape transitions to the Mojave Desert and the Joshua trees.


The Cholla Cactus forest is right where the Sonora desert intersects the Mojave. If you touch one of them slightly you end up with a fingerful of painful prickers. They are said to jump out at you for this reason. They are also known as "teddy-bear" cactus. They grow where there is a seasonally plentiful supply of rainwater, in this case on the edge of a mountain slope, where, I suspect, rain is periodically produced by the adiabatic process. The Joshua trees are in the Mojave section of the Park.


On the way out of the Park, after driving 60 miles, we pass though the small town of Joshua Tree, where a disturbed 66 year old man gunned down an attorney, his wife and a bystander two days ago.


The city of Palm Springs has an incredible uncountable forest of windmills set up to catch the effect of the Ventura winds from LA. The air here at ground level is a thick, poisonous, impenetrable yellow smog from the big city 125 miles away.

Here are a bunch of pictures of dead Kangaroo Rats, Cholla cactus forests, Joshua trees, windmill farms and strange rock formations that resemble skulls.

Salton Sea Oddities

Mecca, California – January 9, 2007

They made a bad movie here in 1957 about a giant radioactive sea cucumber that menaced the world. There was a strange man-sized piece of gelatinous protoplasm floating offshore last night. The little piles of dead fish on the shore appear to have been sucked completely dry through identical sets of mysterious puncture wounds. The front of the RV is covered with thick, whitish slime, apparently some type of marine secretion.


There are ice crystals in the stratosphere this morning, and one of those huge, bright rings around the moon caused by the reflection of moonbeams at a 22 degree angle through the crystals.

East of San Diego, the Salton Sea sits several hundred feet below sea level in a desert valley surrounded by mountains. The “sea” is about 30% saltier than the ocean. It is the largest lake in California.


This was once part of the Sea of Cortez. About 500 years ago it dried up as the weather became more arid and silt from rivers filled in the ocean basin.

In 1905, the Colorado River broke its banks in Yuma, Arizona and filled in the basin forming a 350 square mile lake. After that a series of hydro-electric dams were built to tame the river. The lake evaporates about six feet a year, but rivers flowing in from Mexico and agricultural run-off keep the lake depth fairly stable.

The lake gets saltier every year, but it has only 10% of the salt of the Great Salt Lake, so it still supports a large fish population and millions of aquatic birds.


The surrounding area is part desert, but much of it is used for agricultural purposes. We see huge fields of lettuce, grapes, date palms and orange trees.

The California Parks Department vehemently denies that the Salton Sea in unhealthy in any way, except for too much salt. Untreated industrial waste and raw sewage flow into the lake from Mexico.

The Parks Department denies that Selenium levels are excessive, although the fish tissue concentration of selenium "has resulted in a health advisory warning to the public". They also deny that the untreated sewage flowing over the international border is harmful, "since most of the E Coli is no longer viable by the time it empties into the Salton Sea"


Notwithstanding, I have pictures of thousands of small, rotted, dead fish on the beach. It does look like the Red Tide on Florida beaches. The beach is made up of thick deposits of what looks like salt water barnacles.

We decide to camp here a few days an explore some of the nearby National and State Parks.



Here are a few pictures of the desert and lake creatures.