Joshua Trees Cut Down!?! (My thoughts while looking for a hidden waterfall)

I don't know about this one, guys. This might be one that I should probably bail on. So I got about an hour left until sunset. I'm at the South Fork Campground up near Paradise Springs. In a second, I'm gonna be on the Manzanita Trail. I was not anticipating snow today, so let's see how the trail looks. So I was out in Victorville all day, out in the desert working on a project that I'm hopefully gonna share with you guys next week. Yeah, well, just hit some snow on the trail, so I don't know, I don't know how far I'm gonna go. Definitely wanna play this one, play this one safe. Don't have any gear. I don't even have good shoes on, like good hiking shoes. It's pretty muddy and slippery. Supposedly, where I'm going is only like a mile away. Of course, I've been wanting to hit this one for a while, Mount Lewis Falls. The thing about this one is, it's something I found off of World of Waterfalls, and it's like possibly there could be a waterfall there. We think there should be a waterfall there, so there may not even be a payoff. I love this part of Angeles National Forest, though, this northern backside, close to the high desert, going out into the Mojave. You get to see the Joshua trees transition up into the big pine trees. It's absolutely beautiful. Awesome rock formations and stuff, but driving in, saw a ton of Joshua trees. That was awesome, but it reminded me of all the crap that went down in Joshua Tree National Park recently. I don't know if you guys are familiar, but during the government shutdown, people were just treating it terribly, and it wasn't limited to Joshua Tree. I heard the same thing about Yosemite and other places, but people were cutting down Joshua trees to make room to go off-roading on their 4x4s in the desert where they're not supposed to, but that actually reminded me, when I saw that, of a couple things, actually. Reminded me, when I was a little kid, first of all, I grew up in a house that had been vacant for like 100 years or something like that, so my parents were restoring it as we lived in the house, and our backyard was like this overgrown jungle. I mean, it was a tiny lot, maybe a quarter of an acre, something like that, but the entire backyard was overgrown. I used to love to go back there with my friends, you know, play commando, play hide-and-seek, manhunt, all that kind of thing. One time, I found my dad's old rusty machete, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna help the family out. I'm gonna go in the backyard, start chopping down weeds, and some of these weeds were gigantic. They had grown up into giant tree-like structures, so every day after school for, I don't know, maybe a week or something like that, I would go back there and just have at it with the machete on the big weed trees. Not that kind of weed. I ended up getting in trouble one time because I chopped down this thing I thought was a weed. I thought everything in the backyard was a weed, and it turned out we have a fork. We have a fork. I don't know if this is actually gonna get us where we wanna go, but it's gonna get us somewhere. My rule, take the path less traveled. So, in addition to not being prepared for this hike, I'm also not prepared to film this because I don't have an extra card. I have an extra battery, but guess where it is, guys? Guess where it is. Is it in my pocket? No, it's in the car. I accidentally cut down this tree in my machete-ing of the backyard. I was probably like, I don't know, 11, 12, and I got in trouble because it turned out that one of the things I had chopped down was some kind of Japanese mandarin tree or something like that. Apparently, it was an extremely rare, I don't know if it was rare, but it was expensive if you're gonna go buy that type of tree, and there was one growing in our backyard. Obviously, somebody had planted it. It wasn't growing wild, but I cut that down. I didn't know. I felt real bad about it. Thinking about this whole Joshua tree thing with the people cutting down the Joshua trees, it actually triggered this memory. We know, Team Infamous, most of us probably know, that Joshua trees are protected. I don't remember the exact classification. They might even be endangered, but I know they're definitely a protected species. So even though sometimes when you go out in the high desert, it seems like there's Joshua trees for miles, they're actually pretty rare. Oh, beautiful. Beautiful spot up here. One of the reasons why they're protected and one of the reasons why they're an at-risk species is because, well, let's back up. The way trees and plants in general, but especially fruit-bearing trees, which is what a Joshua tree is, it bears a fruit which contains seeds inside of it. And the way that those plants propagate or spread their seeds is they get eaten by animals, birds. If the fruit's small enough, like if it's a berry or something like that, it gets eaten by an animal. And as the animal migrates or travels long distances across the land, it defecates those seeds out. And so the seeds come in a nice little compact ball of fertilizer, ready-made, and then a new tree springs up. Now, the reason why Joshua trees are protected, endangered, at-risk is the species, the only animal big enough to eat that Joshua tree fruit was the giant ground sloth. And that thing has been extinct for thousands of years. What that means is there's no mammal out there, there's no animal out there in that ecosystem big enough to eat the Joshua tree fruit to digest those seeds and spread them as they travel across the land. So what that means is the Joshua trees are contained to a limited area. They can't spread like they once could with the consumption by the giant ground sloth. So that means that when you cut down a Joshua tree, there may never be another Joshua tree to grow in that area again. And so the reason why I'm bringing this up is because when I cut down that Japanese mandarin tree when I was a little kid, I didn't know. I didn't know what it was. I thought I was doing something good, right? And I don't wanna make excuses for the people that did this, but I do wanna offer a little bit of perspective because I think that a lot of times, stuff like this just gets labeled bad or stupid or it just gets judged. And then the people who did the action probably immediately feel defensive and there's no learning process that occurs, right? There's no reason for this person to say, oh, that's why I shouldn't do that because nobody takes the time to teach them, explain to them why that's wrong. And so it falls on all of us. It falls on me, you, parents, schools, society in general. We need to do a better job educating each other about the natural world. And so I figured whether I make it to this waterfall or not since seeing those Joshua trees brought up, that recent news in Joshua Tree Park and also brought up this memory from my childhood that I would share that because maybe some of you didn't know that about Joshua trees. Maybe you didn't know why they're protected because maybe you live out in the high desert and you see Joshua trees everywhere. We need to know about our world so that we can protect it. We need to go out and experience what the natural world is about so that when people talk about deforestation, when they talk about opening up national forest or national parkland to drilling, natural gas fracking, we need to be armed with the facts about what our natural world is because if you never go out in the land or you've never seen the byproducts of all this kind of stuff, you're just kind of operating on people's opinions. Oh, we think it's a good thing. We think it's a bad thing. We think it's good for the economy. So I always advocate education and firsthand experience. Educate yourself by doing, by getting out there, going to areas where you've seen possibly if they allow you access to where there has been strip mining, where there has been deforestation, clear cutting. You know, anything that as nature lovers upsets us when we see it in nature, it's our part to not only just condemn that behavior and say, that's bad, that's stupid, but use it as a teachable moment. You know, explain to that young man or woman maybe who's spray painting a tree or a rock, hey, you know, this is why it's bad. So I just, if I could meet these people that did this thing where they're cutting down Joshua trees to go four-wheeling in the desert, I would say it's kind of like your body, right? So like you can't live with just one part of your body, right, like if I just chop my head off, my head can't stand on its own, right? It needs the heart, it needs the lungs, it needs the heart to pump blood through my body to my lungs to oxygenate that blood to feed my brain with oxygen. So in a lot of ways, like killing that ground sloth, killing the Joshua tree, killing the honeybees, it's like cutting off a part of our body. And I think it's tough for people to visualize that if they don't have a deep connection to the earth and the outdoors. But I think the more you learn about it, the interconnectedness of nature and the science behind it all, the more it makes sense. I hope it makes sense to you. If it doesn't make sense to you, drop me a comment down below, a question. If I can, I will answer it. So I'm about a third of the way there, according to Googly. Third of the way there, sunsets in 15 minutes. I'm gonna be responsible, guys, okay? Because I don't know if you guys know this, but I am a responsible adult. Look at that face. Yeah, I'm gonna bail on this waterfall. It was cool to get up here, though. Yeah, but I'm definitely bailing. We got two thirds of a mile that way. We got 15 minutes of daylight left. No supplies, no gloves. Wearing skateboarding shoes, and I haven't skateboarded in like 25 years, so. So that tells you a lot, guys. No, the shoes are not 25 years old. What's funny is I always say subscribe to my channel on the videos that get the least amount of views, and because this is mainly me just talking and not doing stuff. Believe me, I prefer to be doing stuff. But anyway, subscribe if you haven't already. I'll see you next time. Get out there, find your adventure, and be infamous. Infamous.