Today is a day off from our grueling schedule. A change of pace today will be a root canal. No, seriously. A root canal. And you thought retirement and traveling around was glamorous. Still got the ordinary stuff of life to deal with.

On the more positive side, the Joshua trees are blooming. The advantage of being here at this time of the year is to watch the changes taking place. We were thrilled to encounter Joshua trees and now to see them blooming is wonderful.

There are two common yuccas in this area. You’ve already met the Joshua tree on the right. The more traditional yucca on the left is Mohave yucca. We are starting to see evidence that the Mohave yucca will also soon be blooming.

Other desert plants are also starting to bloom. We don’t see the large areas of desert gold blooming as we see on the news from Death Valley, but a yellow desert marigold here, an orange desert mallow there, with purple phacelia in between does sweeten the desert experience. We are having 100 to 200 folks visit us on Saturdays and Sundays; so, others are also looking for all the beauty the desert can show.

There is only a very small part of the refuge that is visited by the masses. From the VC there are two main roads that continue through the refuge, the Alamo Road and the Mormon Well Road. The Alamo Road eventually comes out close to the town of Alamo about 80 miles north of here. It takes about 6 hours to make the trip. The Mormon Well Road comes out on highway 93 north and east of Las Vegas, and that trip is about 48 miles and takes at least 3 hours. Most people don’t get very far when they get past the VC if they are driving a typical sedan type vehicle. High clearance and sometimes 4 wheel drive are required. However, traveling into the backcountry is a very popular thing to do.

The refuge does have a campground 28 miles up the Mormon Well Road. It has two pit toilets and 6 tent sites with fire pits but no water. The elevation is high enough that there are ponderosa and pinyon pines throughout the campground, and when we were there patches of snow throughout the campground. We did travel to it with a staff person and another volunteer so that we were more familiar with the road conditions when we talk to visitors. Shannon accumulated over 13,000 steps on here Fitbit while riding in the backseat of the truck on the trip to the campground. Traveling the roads is a workout even when riding in a vehicle. Theoretically, one of our jobs is to travel there periodically and check the campground for tp and trash. We look forward to traveling there again, but we may have time to make only one more trip before we leave in mid-April.