So, we hit the trail once more. One of the frequent things you see in the desert are large, rounded rock formations...
As a boy growing up back in the Northeast I learned how glaciation had shaped our hills and valleys, and scoured the field stones round in the process. Traveling through the West, I assumed that the similar, though larger, shapes of the rocks out here were due to older, more gargantuan glaciers. This assumption turned out to be incorrect.
On the way to Los Angeles on the morning of day three we made our first unscheduled stop...
...where we learned that these rounded rock formations are volcanic in nature. Imagine a gargantuan
lava lamp containing granite and gneiss instead of wax and water. The molten granite bubbled up out of the gneiss eons ago, and then the softer gneiss was eroded away, leaving the harder granite blobs dotting our present day landscape...
In the above photo, you can see where the granite flowed out of the upper right and down toward the lower left. The hillside to the right is mostly gneiss, with the exception of the blobs of granite.
Here is a photo of the park's namesake...
