[gallery type="slideshow" ids="182,183,184,178,185,202,186,187,201,188,189,190,191,180,181,195,177,179,196,197,199,200,198,192,194,193"] Saveria and I had been planning New Year's starting six months ago when Saveria booked our favorite camp site at Joshua Tree National Park, in Indian Cove Campground. I'm leaving out the camp site numbers, because we don't want to give away everything. We invited our friends and the trip was set. We talked about it about once a week till the date finally arrived.
Saveria, her brother Sebastian and I went up early to set up and our great friend Bob joined us. The next morning we were joined by more of our friends and some new friends too. We woke to a beautiful day with a brilliant blue sky and set up some fun climbing routes. After doing a few climbs, we are in the desert just to remind everyone, it started to SNOW, only for a little but real flakes and the rock got pretty slippery not to mention we were freezing. We returned to our camp, built a giant fire and our friend Ian cooked us some spectacular chili.
The next day we set up some great routes near our site and everyone had a great time and did really well. The best part was that we had people of all experience levels and everyone was able to successfully climb a route or two proving that anyone can be AdventurUs!
After a long day of climbing I was tired and was deciding to celebrate east coast New Year's, but this was not allowed and I reluctantly stayed up till midnight. It was very cool because despite the strict noise code we could hear all the camp sites around the desert celebrate when the clock struck midnight. We even had neighbors come and serenade us with a ukulele and a song. One of the coolest things about Joshua tree is night-time with a full or mostly full moon. The way the light hits the rocks making them glow brightly and the sound the sand makes crunching under your feet all under the moonlight makes you feel like you are in a snowy winter wonderland.
This was Sebastian's first time at Joshua Tree NP, so we took the scenic route home and traveled through the main part of the park. We bought an annual National Park Pass good at all parks. I like to think of it as a challenge to visit enough National Parks this year to make it worth it!
It was great to be out in the desert, under the stars, with our friends having fun and laughing, I could not imagine a better end or start to the any year.
Oh...and Norman was with us too. Another great family adventure for The AdventurUs!