Hang on to your blog reading glasses, it will be a mega one tonight…
Started off this morning with a visit into the Town of Desert Hot Springs to the Cabot Museum. This is a little museum that is owned by a local Foundation, and is simply dripping in history. I love researching history of the local area where we are staying, and today was like winning the lotto! Well, you know what I mean…
Judy is approaching the welcome centre…
The museum is a large structure, called a Pueblo… or large house. Cabot Yerxa lived here. He came to the Desert from Alaska after not being able to find gold up there, in 1913. He obtained 160 acres of land at what is to be Desert Hot Springs, and started working on the Pueblo in 1939 and was still working on it when he died in 1965!
It is quite a site…
In 1913 he was getting tired of travelling with his mule a total of 13 miles daily to get water! He thought there must be some locally. With help from a local Indian, he started digging a well by hand! He eventually it a rock and the deeper he got the hotter it got! Finally after breaking through the final piece of rock, he hit water…HOT WATER. This changed everything for this area. They soon figured out there was different minerals in the water…
It kind of looks to me like he changed his mind a lot during construction…
There is a large cactus garden…
Yes, a weather rock, you know, if it is wet, it is raining, if it is white, it is snowing…
A large Indian carving, this would have taken a bit of work…
There was a room called the water room and it was full of great info. Cabot found both hot and cold water in this area. Eventually, the Town of Desert Hot Springs placed controls over the water to conserve and preserve it for future use. They also had a big map of the area and info on the San Andreas Fault. It goes right up the San Gorgonio pass! I did not know this. If the BIG ones comes when we are here, we will automatically be on the east side of the quake, and will stay in North America. Palm Springs, on the other hand, will fall into the Ocean and may end up as part of Japan, as that Tectonic plate is the biggest one in the world. Now are you now glad you read the blog tonight!
After lunch we changed gears, and headed over to 1,000 Palms, which is a State Park. Time to go for a hike!
Judy headed into the info booth for some info on where to go and why???
I have posted pictures of this place before, but it never fails to amaze me. These palm trees do not shed their palm fronds… (spelling) so that is why they look like they do.
They built a walkway out into the desert to continue the hike.
Looking below at the chart will show you how an oasis is formed. Where the two tectonic plates come together, (see split on chart) the under ground water is dammed up, and the water then heads to the surface! It is that simple… hence an Oasis where the odd Palm Tree will grow…
So after all of the above occurs, you end up with what you see below… amazing, in the middle of the Desert!
As you can see, the Palms grow up to over 60 feet!
Nice and cool place on a hot day…
This is a picture of the oasis from up on the ridge that we hiked. Busy day as you can tell… 4.2 mile hike today.
Ended the day with a nice Skype conference call with the Grand Kids in Tennessee!
Tomorrow is Big Bear!
Till tomorrow…
so you are saying that if there is an earthquake..Rick and Paulette are headed to Japan!?..better let them know!!..before they park themselves for a few months!..great informative post today..thanks for the tour!
ReplyDeleteGreat post today and it brought back a lot of memories for us. Thousand Palms is one of my favourite spots and we go there for a hike each year we visit. The Cabot Museum was interesting too, I was there last year as well.
ReplyDeleteI loved this post! It rained so much of the time that we were in Desert Hot Springs at Christmas that we didn't get a chance to visit the museum. I also loved the history that you wrote about. I really wanted to know more about the town that I didn't figure out while we were there and you did that! Thanks!!
ReplyDeleteSo which route did you take to Big Bear? The "back way" up from Lucerne Valley or the 38 past Forest Falls and Angelus Oaks? Isn't it lovely up there? As I told you before, we're in Forest Falls at 6000', and still have lots of snow and ice. Stay warm!
ReplyDeleteThanks for that bit of tectonic information ... now we know which side to stay on :-)))
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