Joshua Tree Morning, Tahquitz Canyon Afternoon

Full day out of the Cathedral City house, still on the few-days-in-the-desert plan. We drove up to Joshua Tree first, clouds stacked over the ridges and the flats between them solid with Joshua trees in every direction. The girls climbed around on the boulder piles — one of them wedged herself into a gap between rocks the size of trucks and posed there like it was nothing.

Back to the house midday for the pool. Palm trees over the fence, bougainvillea going off along the wall, not much else required of anyone.

Then into Palm Springs for Tahquitz Canyon, which is a Sacred Cultural Natural Reserve run by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, tucked into the San Jacinto foothills right above town. The creek was running hard. There's a USGS gauge station perched on the boulders beside a lower cascade, and one of the girls picked her way out onto a rock in the middle of the pool below it. The main fall at the top of the trail drops sixty feet into a bowl of pale rock, loud enough that we mostly stopped talking.