I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting to see when I entered Joshua Tree National Park, but it was way beyond my expectations! With elevations from 536 to 5,814 feet there are two distinct desert ecosystems contained in its 794,000 acres. The western half of the park is in the higher cooler Mojave Desert, which is the home to the Joshua Trees, and the eastern half is in the lower Colorado Desert, which is home to the creosote and cholla cactus. The park also is filled with intriguing unique rock formations. Entering the park through the west entrance, I…

Forging ahead on my National Park hunt, I made the choice to stop at the Grand Canyon. The National Park Service has created collectable tokens for National Parks, National Monuments, National Historic Sites, etc. I started collecting them last September with my first one being from the Dry Tortugas National Park. I was so close to the Grand Canyon, and having been there before, I thought I could stop at the visitor center and pick one up. I ended up spending the majority of the day hiking along the South Rim. I am so glad I chose to stay and…

When you think of a petrified forest, do you think of a painted badlands? I didn’t, but that is what I found at the Petrified Forest National Park. Unexpected, but beautiful! Those of you who know me well, know how I feel about trees and how they feed my soul. That said, there was no question I would have to visit the petrified forest. Petrified Forest National Park actually has two sections with a 28-mile scenic drive that connects them. The northern section, which is where I started, has a painted desert, with canyons stretching through striped mound of geological…

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is right across the border into New Mexico from Guadalupe Mountains National Park. In fact, and this I did not know, Carlsbad Caverns National Park is in the Guadalupe Mountains range, and there are more than 300 caves within the Captain Reef fossil reef of the park. I had been to Carlsbad years ago, when my children were small, but since it is so close, I had to stop. The discovery of the cave entrance, and the first to enter, is unknown. Native Americans have known about the cave for hundreds, if not thousands of years,…

The last two National Parks I visited in Texas were Big Bend National Park, located in southwest Texas along the Rio Grande River, and Guadalupe Mountains National Park, located in western Texas on the border of New Mexico. I’ll start with the 801,163-acre Big Bend National Park. The name is appropriate because of the big U-turn made by the Rio Grande on the south border of the park, which also is the border between the United States and Mexico. The Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas canyons and the areas around them became the Texas Canyons State Park in the 1930s.…