I should have been clearer. I have been to Joshua Tree several times. The Borega Palm Springs, and the badlands towards the Saltan sea. The coast is ok, but I tend to make getting to Joshua Tree a primary goal. Mt Palomar. I showed up at the little ranger station at Borega at exactly noon. Went in to get a map. They looked at me meaningfully, and said, You can't go up there right now. It was 100 degrees out. I figured that was excellent advice. Later, when I went, I was really impressed with the relentless heat radiating from the ground. My last time in Joshua Tree, from around noonish till six, I went back down to my Twentynine Palms motel room, with a real funky air conditioner, downloaded my card, ate, got more water and headed back up. I loved it.

Visit the desert areas in winter. However it will be cold at night. I spent a night at the Anza-Borrego springs with a "Field Geography" class in Jan. We brought sleeping bags etc. They weren't heavy enough. We all wondered why the professor built a large bon fire size camp fire that was about 3 x 6 feet for us to sit around. And he kept spreading the hot coals evenly in that area. At midnight we all got into our soon to be found inadequate sleeping bags. The prof took a shovel and scooped all the coals into a pile in a hole off to one side. Shoveled sand over the hole and the place the fire had been and spread an army surplus "arctic" grade sleeping bag on top then crawled in. He woke up fine, ground under his sleeping bag was still warm - we sort of creaked and chattered our way up. He stuck wood into the pile of ashes where he had shoveled the coals (the bottom was still red coals) and we soon had a campfire with a "large" coffee pot on it. People who didn't like coffee were drinking it hot and black. Turns out he used to give a lesson on how to sleep warm but many didn't pay attention. He found that doing it this way it only took one night for everyone to learn the lesson about heavy sleeping bags and using the camp fire to warm the ground.


The same prof took us to Death Valley later that month. We went with a ranger into a rock canyon that was gated and locked with boulders on the road most of the year. To keep people out, it got that hot 7-9 months of the year. During those months it took special permits - only given for research - escorted by rangers etc. They even had a list of the shoe types you could wear - generally leather soles or other heat resistant material. The prof had been with one research group there in the summer where a PhD candidate grad student didn't listen and was wearing tennis shoes. By noon he was leaving foot prints on the rock from the melting soles of his shoes. A ranger drove him into the nearest town where the right shoes were twice the price he would have paid at a store in LA before going.

The 49ers had a saying that "California is the only place you can start out dying of heat stroke in the afternoon and end up freezing to death during the night."