L.A. Adventures: Joshua Tree at Sunset

*Photo by: Leslie Peterson*

The stillness alarms you. You're so far removed from the city, you don't hear a thing. No cars screeching, no children screaming. No desert creatures marking their territories. Not even nature makes a sound.

This is Joshua Tree at sunset. An hour's drive from Palm Springs, you'd be crazy to visit this national park in the middle of an August day. So why did my friends and I come here? Blame the Perseid Meteors.

We tried to catch this event two days after the meteor shower hit its peak. And since you can't see much of anything in the sky while you're in Los Angeles, we needed to drive far away into the Cochella Valley. We passed the visitor's center an hour before the sun came down. The rock formations looked as if they were placed there by giants. But the quiet shook us to our core.


*Photo by: Lori Higa*

To see the Perseid Meteors, we drove to Keys View, which overlooks the Cochella Valley. There's a perpetual haze over the valley, so you don't have a great view of Palm Springs. You do get purple skies with a hint of orange. You do get rolling hills peeking out of the haze. You get one of the most stunning sunsets Southern California has to offer.

We had Keys View to ourselves, except for a pot-loving astronomer named Chuck and two Aussies playing the didjeridu. We laid out blankets and stared at the night sky. We saw few meteors. Most of my friends saw six or seven. I saw two. But they were BIG ones.

We saw Jupiter and the Big Dipper. We saw cosmic dust. We saw satellites and planes, thinking they were shooting stars. We saw the universe. And after three hours, our necks started to hurt and we left Joshua Tree and its stillness.

And as we drove back, I thought, "Who would have thought we could see the universe two hours away from L.A.?"