We are at Joshua Tree National Park. The Colorado Desert and the Mojave come together here among the mountains. Our first day here was cool since it was a little overcast. I don’t think that we hit 80 and the next few are supposed to be even cooler. There are lots of hummingbirds all around camp. We heard them pretty much all day. I never realized how much noise they make. We saw a weird lizard called the Chuckwalla (same as the mountains we are in so he is a local guy) that was about a foot long. We did some boulder scrambling on our afternoon hike to mastodon peak and met a fair sized rattlesnake. He had been sunning on the rocks and I guess we disturbed him. He was something over 5 feet long with 5 or 6 rattles. He was 30 feet away (at least when we noticed him) and didn’t seem interested in heading our way. It made me pay more attention then ever where I put my fingers when we climbed back down!