fooWare!

When U2 released “The Joshua Tree”, it was a pretty cool album. It was 1987, sophomore year at HHS for me…

It was so cool, I thought, I want to go find and see the Joshua Tree. It’s not shown on the album cover (I checked to be sure). Nobody told me there was more than just one…way more…

Fast forward to the late 90’s. I’m a software engineer, and I end up with a consulting job in Los Angeles. I spent 3 weeks out of every month there for about a year and a half. My wife was not thrilled. But, I did get to do a lot of hiking and general wandering about SoCal, up to SF to visit a longtime friend, out to San Bernadino to visit another friend, and made the most of it.

Soon after I started going out there, I felt the absolutely need to drive out to Joshua Tree National Forest. National Forest. That should have been my first clue. There’s tons of Joshua Trees. They’re all over the place. I don’t know where they took the album cover photo, but they must have looked at JTNF and figured, that’s no bloody good, there’s too many Joshua Trees there for an album called “the” Joshua Tree.

JTNF is a really cool place to wander about. Even better than hiking and trekking during the day (Ryan Mountain at 100 degrees F!) is staring at the sky at night and watching satellites fly by.