Carey's Castle

Joshua Tree National Park is one of my favorite places in the world. Although it can get very cold at night, winter is definitely the time to go. I wish I went every year.
Took Friday off of work and hit the road with Troop 3116 to the Indian Cove campground. Spent Friday afternoon and evening scrambling around in the rocks around the camp, looking at the brilliant blue sky, and then, later, watching the stars and the satellites making their slow way across the sky.
On our first trip to Joshua Tree, we heard about a "secret" place in the park known as Carey's Castle. There is little known about this location. What we heard was that a man named Carey staked a mining claim in a very remote area of the park (an oxymoron), and that he built a home in the rocks. There were mentions of this in several guidebooks, but none gave information on how to get there. We spoke with a park ranger, who told us that she had heard of it, knew it was in the southern portion of the park, but did not know how to get there. She suggested we try to find someone who had been there.
Since then, every time we went to Joshua Tree, I checked to see if there was information about the trial to Carey's. There were more trip reports, but they always said the same thing--this is a secret location and we aim to keep it secret. Apparently, people even knock down the "ducks" others have left to mark the trail.
This time was different. Somebody finally posted the GPS coordinates online. Lisa downloaded them into her GPS and we were ready!
The trailhead is at the end of a road which has signs everywhere that indicate that it is private property and you are entering at your own risk. Since we have had experience with this, we were a little concerned. Until we discovered that the owner was the Metropolitan Water District. Not as scary as a private owner. We were happy to see four other cars at the trailhead--mostly because it meant we were in the right place.
And here is our journey, in photos.

At the trailhead. Need to journey off across this desert into the mountains.

Some of the beautiful plants we saw along the way.

And a beautiful little lizard.

Heading into the wash.

Shade!

It was getting a little hot. The rocks were cool.

Beautiful trees in the wash. And a lot of water.

Got excited and thought we were there. But just rocks to climb over.

Gotta climb up those rocks behind the girls.

Not a problem for the girls.

The rocks out beyond India looks promising. I was pretty sure we were there.

And we were!

Going in. I didn't take any pictures inside. It was full of rat poop. Pretty gross.

Nice place to eat lunch though.

Adventure Girl was excited. So excited she left her feet in my backpack.

Carey's Mine.

Now we have to climb DOWN all the rocks.

I thought this rock looked like something you would see in a home furnishing store.

It was a beautiful hike. I am glad that we finally found Carey's Castle. It was worth it. And I hope that it doesn't get a ton of publicity. I saw in the log book that people are saying that the traffic has increased ten-fold since the coordinates were published. We came across 3 other groups of hikers--which is a pretty small number when you consider we were there on a popular holiday weekend.