California Mountains a puzzle

On our travels in California we went East from San Diego a bit and traveled through some spectacular terrain.  I’m not that great as a passenger driving through the mountains, so on the way there I was focused on keeping us from plummeting to our deaths by using my imaginary brake on the passenger floorboard.  Do you ever do that?  I’m pretty sure I left some marks in the floorboard!

Anyway on the way back I had my camera out and from past experience know that using my camera as a distraction I might be able to make the trip easier for my sweet husband.

I could not get over the mountains…  I grew up near mountains, but it was nothing like this.  It seemed to me like got took all these boulders in His hands and shook them like marbles and just cast them down to earth.  The way they landed is sometimes really perplexing.  I also took a geology course {that makes me sound so smart, right} in college and know a little bit about the forces of the earth that had to be mind boggling to create such formations.

It starts out looking like this from a distance.

As we got closer to the mountains, we got an up close view of these wind farms.

Someone got a big kick out of this!

As we got higher up in the mountains you could really tell that the mountains are made up out of individual boulders.

Yes, I am a nerd, but I found it fascinating to look at.

See they look like typical mountains…

Then you get a closer look and see that they are in fact just REALLY big piles of rocks!

For some reason the boys were happy to see different types of cacti growing there.

as I was writing this for posterity, I realized that I didn’t know what these mountains are called, so I Googled it. 

Amazingly I still don’t know.  It just calls the area the Cleveland National Forest.  They have to be named, but for the life of me, I just don’t know what the name is!

Laguna Mountain?  No that is farther north?

It goes from sea level to over 4,000 feet in elevation, so they are real proper mountains…  I found different this indicating it was called Devil’s Canyon and Mountain Springs as well as

Anyone know what they’re called?  Bueller?  Bueller?

Whatever it is that they are called I found them stunning.  Not like I’d like to move there kind of stunning {are you reading this Allen?}, but really amazing to see.

So thankful that we had the opportunity to see this and share it with the boys!