Transcript
Jessica Porter (0:11)
Hi, I'm Jessica Porter, and welcome back to Sleep Magic, a podcast where I help you find the magic of your own mind, helping you to sleep better and live better. Hi, everyone. It's so nice to be here. I'm going to keep it short tonight because we have a lot to cover. I want to say thank you to any and all new subscribers, old subscribers, people who are not in a position to subscribe, who spread the word and just spread the vibe. So basically all of you. And I want to say that recently there were a couple people who reached out to us saying that although they had subscribed, it was hard to activate the subscription. And I just want to say a, it seemed to have worked out for everybody. Sometimes you got to reboot your phone or reboot the app, but more than that, thank you for your patience and thank you for your support. We really appreciate you. Okay, tonight, get sleepy in Joshua Tree National Park. I recently went to Joshua Tree national park with a friend of mine, and I think national parks are amazing. I mean, it wasn't until relatively recently that people got the idea that some land should be preserved simply for the sake of keeping it pristine, which, of course, indigenous tribes had been doing all along. But that is a whole other conversation and a much appreciated quality that we are emulating, hopefully in some places. In the late 1800s, early American citizens, artists and leaders began to consider the concept of protecting certain lands simply for the conservation of the wildlife and the enjoyment of visitors. After centuries of speculation and gold rushes and staking claims in American soil, the idea that certain lands shouldn't be divided up or exploited or even privately owned began to take root. The first area to be officially protected was the amazing and enormous Yellowstone national park in Wyoming in 1872. And in 1916, the National Park Service was created by Congress. Now there are a total of 63American national parks, including places like Joshua Tree, Yosemite, and, oh yeah, that other one, the Grand Canyon. So I'm really grateful for that. Joshua Tree is almost 800,000 acres in size, and it sits in a transition zone between the higher, cooler Mojave Desert and the warmer lower Colorado desert. It's about 160 miles due east of Los Angeles, and it's hard to describe because its qualities are somewhat odd. These weird trees, which aren't really trees, but you yucca plants between 15 and 40ft tall, and they look like hands stretching out with gnarled fingers. They appear prickly, but they're not quite cacti and they're dotted in and among these really big rock formations, not mountains, but rocks that are granite pushed up from the earth that's been exposed over time through erosion. And that's it really. And yet as we went through.
Sleep Guide/Co-host (4:13)
Was.
Jessica Porter (4:14)
