My first visit to Joshua Tree National Park must have been in the late '60s, (that's 1960s, not 1860s). Friends of my parents took me camping and we stayed at Jumbo Rocks campground. I think what fascinated me about the Monument then and which still does in the Park today, is the same thing which drew in over 1.6 million visitors to the park last year. The Rocks. Put simply, the rocks rock.

J Tree encompasses nearly 800,000 acres. The average rock count per acre is 7.45 million to one. Ok, that may be a wild guess on my part, but there are a LOT of rocks in the park. Big ones. Small ones. In between ones. There are rocks on top of rocks, rocks squeezed in between rocks, rocks embedded in other rocks, rocks with holes in them, rocks with gold in them, rocks where no rocks should be, rocks that look like animals, rocks that make noise, rocks that draw blood, balancing rocks, hidden rocks, geometrical rocks, sublime and mystical rocks and of course, rock climber's rocks.

If you've driven through J Tree, you've probably noticed parking areas throughout the park with odd names -- Hemingway, Hall of Horrors, Oyster Bar -- and perhaps wondered why they are so-called. The names refer to well-known climbing rocks located nearby. Rock climbers have bestowed names on thousands and thousands of rocks in the park. Some of the names make sense, but most seem strangely random to me. It may be a climber thing. But the names are interesting, funny and ofttimes mystifying. And once you start to learn some of the names, locations and shapes of major formations in the park, they become excellent landmarks and reference points useful while hiking and exploring off the beaten path.

I spent the better part of two days wandering through several rock climbing areas with the intrepid 3D photographer and quartz monzonite expert Murbachi as my rockguide. I took a lot of pictures and got to know many of the rocks on a first-name basis. Most were quite friendly. A couple days prior to our visit, the park had received several inches of snow and there was still quite a bit of the frosty white stuff scattered about to add some pizzazz to the photos.

There are over thirty named "areas" of rock climbing locations in J Tree listed on mountainproject.com and over the next few years I'm going to try to visit most of them and post some pictures of a few of the rocks in each area that grab my attention. By no means will this be a comprehensive study of every named rock and climbing route in a given area, but rather just a general glimpse of what I saw while hiking through the area.