Day 18, Wednesday March 18th: Hot Hiking in Joshua Tree National Park

It was 65F when we got up and we said we would get out early to hike, but somehow it was 09:00 when we left our campsite and getting warm. We picked out Panorama Loop as a hike of about 5 miles and set out on the scooter.  It turns out that that loop requires going out of the west entrance of the park and coming back in. We were informed of this by a Ranger, who also gave us bad directions to another hike. Ultimately,  we settled on the 'Panorama Trail and Bigfoot Trail Loop' hike. I guessed it to be about 7-8 miles. The trail head was about 25 miles from our site, it was a nice cool scooter ride. 

Rag Head

Another mistake I made was forgetting my hat! By the time we hit the trail about 10:15 it was already smoking hot, I had to put a rag on my bald head 😕.

We saw only 3 groups of hikers on the entire trip, so I don't think you will see any pictures of me on social media.

One group was about 6 young adults backpacking for 5 days, they were huddled into a pile of rocks trying to stay cool in the shade. They were chipper and seemed to be having fun.

Snow in the Mountains

It was very hot but we could see snow on the mountains in the distance, pretty cool, pun, pun.

Hot Hikers

When we could find rocks big enough we would take a break in the shade.

🔥Do we look hot?

Joshua Tree Forest

We went through areas that I would call Joshua Tree Forests.

Panorama Trail

They call it Panorama Trail because the views are truly spectacular. 

Lizard

We saw some critters along the way, this guy posed for us. I think he thought his Camouflage was working.

The first half of the hike took us gradually down into a big valley, we knew that we were going to have to climb out eventually, but did not realize it was going to be some pretty steep climbs. 

We completed the hike of about 8 miles, but to be honest, it was a  grunt!  Hiking in these temperatures is challenging, it was probably approaching 100F and we should have brought more water.  Shade was hard to find, when we did find shade we would sit for 5 or 10 mins just to cool down.  I was tracking our progress using the Trail Forks App.

18Mar2026 Hike

This is our hike, it was really too much to do in such hot conditions. The park says it is a 4-5 hour hike, we did it in 3 1/2 hours; if it was cool, it would have been significantly less. 

We Scootered the 25 miles back to camp, it was refreshing to have the wind on the scooter. 

We got back to camp and each downed a Gatorade, it was still really really hot! I fired up the genny and put the AC on in the Serenity.  The AC felt great. We showered and chilled for the rest of the day watching You Tube videos in the Serenity.   

After it cooled down outside, I loaded up the Scooter and got things ready for an early departure tomorrow.  The Scooter is just about out of gas, we put over 100 miles on it inside the park, just running to trail heads and riding around.  It would have been a pain to have to take the RV every time we wanted to do a hike. 

I did go out and take in the night sky, it is pretty spectacular and pictures just don't do it justice. 

We enjoyed our stay at JT NP, it is a huge park of about 800K acres, about the same size as Big Bend NP. I was surprised that they are both barely in the Top 15 ranked by size. We left many trails unhiked and many dirt roads unbiked, if we get back to California we would visit again. 

I mentioned in a previous post that we were having a difficult time booking a campsite in San Clemente, where we want to spend the weekend.  In the past I have used a service called 'Campnab' to get into National Parks and even Graceland. It is a paid service ($30/month) that notifies you of park cancelations, then you race to book it before someone else does. I turned it on and it notified me of a cancelation at San Clemente which I booked for Fri/Sat, so we are not going to be homeless this weekend 😊.

Tomorrow we will make our way to the Pacific coast and visit family.