Joshua Tree National Park
Joshua Tree is a national park in the United States, founded in 1994 on an area of 3196 km2. The main purpose of creating the park was to preserve the poor but extremely interesting flora of the desert, which can hardly bear all the hardships of dry and salty land. For example, in the Imperial Valley, the air temperature sometimes reaches 50 degrees Celsius, but tourists still visit parts of it because of the cave paintings of old gold mines.
The territory of Joshua Tree Park is located in two deserts at once: Colorado and Mojave. Amazing forests of short-leaved yucca grow here, which the first settlers called the Joshua tree because of the characteristic shape of the branches. A tree is compared to a man with his hands raised up in prayer.
Judging by the archaeological finds, the first people inhabited these places about 8000 years ago - it was the Pinto Indian tribe. Back then, there was lush vegetation, and melting glaciers formed a lot of rivers and lakes, herds of camels, mastodons, horses, mammoths and bison walked across the plains. But about 4,000 years ago, all the drinking sources dried up, and the area turned into a scorched desert. The first settlers in Joshua Tree appeared around the 19th century, who were looking for gold here.
The vegetation in Joshua Tree is dominated by Cholla cacti, juniper, spike cactus, and, of course, huge yucca trees called Joshua. The park is best visited in spring, when vegetation blooms here. The information center will mark the places where flower glades cluster on the map. The Yucca tree grows to a height of 6 meters, it has a curved trunk with branches ending in a tuft with corners slightly similar to leaves. The flowers of the Joshua tree have creamy shades and are shaped like bluebells. The Indians who lived here used the wood of the tree to warm and weave baskets and shoes, and they ate flowers.
The flora of the park is not diverse. You can easily meet Canadian snow sheep here, and there are also a lot of rattlesnakes.
