Sequoia's Wuksachi Lodge, Joshua Tree and Palm Springs: December 2022

 

I had plenty of "Trailing Spouse" trips (I stopped counting at fifteen!) but I've only had one previous "Trailing Daughter" trip: this is my second, Janet's first.  Karen, living in Chicago at the time and working at UChicago, had a conference in Palm Springs, so we decided to meet her and Adam there, but first going to Sequoia National Park's Wuksachi Lodge then making our way down to Palm Springs.  Sequoia is kinda-sorta on the way to Palm Springs...Karen was staying in a nice resort, but she had scored an AirBnB in Joshua Tree for the bulk of our visit.

The Wuksachi, pictured above behind Janet, is not one of the old Magnificent National Park Lodges a'la the Ahwahnee or the Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone, instead built in 1999 after the original lodges were deemed "harmful to the Sequoia Groves" and moved quite a ways up the mountain away from the main giant redwood groves.  There was the main lodge building with a restaurant and ubiquitous gift shop, then motel-like room blocks of two stories across a parking lot.

We did our normal lunch stop at Harris Ranch and made our way due east on CA198 to the lower ranger station.  We had our trusty 4Runner so it didn't concern us heading up into the southern Sierra in December.  Janet spent a lot of time with one of the rangers trying to get more information on the "Henderson Grove" that was donated to the National Park by the family that her mom and dad worked for when they first came in to the country.  Their donation was part of the successful Sierra Club effort to stop the Disney Corporation effort to turn Mineral King, just south of the park, in to a large resort.  We've yet to see the grove as the dirt road out there is only open during the summer, but she got the ranger excited to dig up more information on the specific location of the grove.  As I remember, she passed her e-mail address to him; to date, no info on the "Henderson Grove of Redwoods at Mineral King."

The view from Sierra Drive/CA198 above the entrance visitors' center

there was a good amount of fresh snow up higher

We wandered around the Giant Forest Museum at the old location of the lodge, then headed up to the Wuksachi.  Restaurants were still in the throes of being Pandemic Careful, so one ordered at the bar then the meals were delivered to the table.  The first night there I had a decent steak and had a General Sherman IPA on tap and Janet had chicken piccata.

The General's Highway that runs north up to Kings Canyon was closed for the winter beyond the Wuksachi turnoff, so we were confined to hiking around the magnificent groves in Sequoia, which was perfect for our short winter foray.  The next day we spent hiking through the various groves on the crusty snow trails, but the Giant Sequoias never fail to astound.

After getting our fill of the redwoods, on day 3 we headed toward Palm Springs, routing a bit out of the way once we hit I-5, heading east on CA58 then south on US395.  Out there in the high desert we were surprised to come up on a couple of "boneyards" of commercial and military aircraft, hundreds of them, just off CA58 and US395.  I've never seen these high desert areas east of LA, but they are being built up with homes, warehouses and distribution centers (welcome Amazon and Temu!) that produced a constant flow of semis on the two lane roads until we got to I-15.  It seems all the web shopping products get flown in to the high desert then distributed to the LA Basin from there...obviously, as  Adelanto has the Southern California Logistics Airport, surrounded by mile-after-mile of new homes and apartment being advertised.

Routing on I-15, I-215, to I-10, we finally made our way to Palm Springs, meeting up with Karen and dining on the "Rodeo Drive of Palm Springs" at the Thai Smile Restaurant.  The next day, Karen finished up her conference that morning, so we scooped her up and then picked up Adam from the airport and had lunch at Norma's Restaurant at the Parker Hotel...VERY Palm Springs...

From lunch we headed out to our AirBnB in Joshua Tree, getting settled in later in the afternoon, getting provisions at Stater Brothers, which I'd never been to...and after we settled in we sat down to a game of "full contact Scrabble" where we beat down Adam's attempt at playing "vitro" (nope. not a valid Scrabble word) and laughed at Janet's play of "taint."  Adam complained that his family allows "bending the rules" in Scrabble; we don't!  

The next day (day 5) Karen was feeling under the weather so the two of them stayed in the AirBnB and Janet and I explored Joshua Tree National Park, taking a couple of hikes covering about 7 miles, taking the trails to Arch Rock, Barker Dam, Cholla Cactus Garden, and Skull Rock.

Skull Rock

Day 6: Karen and Adam were feeling perkier so they joined us in revisiting Joshua Tree and while we were there, we got a little rain that made for rather beautiful rainbows over the park.

Petroglyphs on the Barker Dam Trail

After leaving Joshua Tree the next day and taking Karen and Adam to the airport, Janet and I decided to take the long way home and go back through Santa Maria and Paso Robles on US101--or as LA-types say, "The 101"--and again stumbled on an amazing sight.  Of course, Santa Maria Tri-Tip is very famous, but we gave up trying to find a "real" place to have it. After routing along the north side of the LA Basin on I-10/210, we picked up US101 and stayed at a Marriott property in Santa Maria.  The next day we decided to explore a bit more in Pismo Beach and we stumbled upon the Monarch Butterfly Preserve at Pismo Beach State Park.  The eucalyptus grove in the park was covered with Monarchs at rest as part of their annual migration...another one of those Bucket List Sights!

Those are Monarchs packed in on the branches!

From Pismo we went up CA1 to Cambria, having some Linn's olallieberry pie as a snack, then kicked around in Paso Robles before heading back up US101 and home, concluding the roundabout route to and from Palm Springs, putting on 1,677.8 miles on the 4Runner on the elongated loop.