They called it their Valley of the Moon when they courted here in the 1920's, this beautiful, fantastic, adventurous, delicate wonderland where one could never exhaust routes to travel, rocks to scramble, precious flora and fauna and exquisite scenery to cherish and protect, and where one could enjoy the myriad stars on black moonless nights or stroll and cautiously scramble on bright moonlit nights.

ABSTRACT

This website makes available to the dedicated enthusiast of Joshua Tree National Park large displays of 1-meter resolution and 2-meter resolution aerial photographs and topographic maps. The data for these displays were acquired through the MicroSoft TerraServer (MSTS) facility from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). MSTS and USGS have collaborated to provide a huge data bank of picture elements called "tiles", whose boundaries coincide with grid lines of the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) Global Positioning System (GPS). GPS units (receivers) and GPS-compatible maps are very useful for situations where accurate knowledge of location is required, including driving, hiking, and climbing. UTM, MGRS, and UGPS, three standard GPS grid reference methods which employ latitude measurements incommensurably with metric measurements, are briefly discussed. Proposals are presented for purely metric normalizations of UTM (NUTM) and of MGRS, and for a spectrum of new purely Metric Global Positioning Grids (MGPG) including specifically the Metric Grid Reference Window (MGRW) facility which is superior to MGRS in providing unicity of truncated addresses over large areas when used with large scale customized MGPG maps. One third of the NUTMAP (Normalized UTM Map) is displayed over a background showing the Cylindrical Mercator Projection of the world in order to provide a graphic visualization of the NUTMAP and the incommensurability of latitude measurements with metric measurements. Attention is called to certain GPS units, GPS-compatible maps, and digital cameras.   Dale dePriest  provides an excellent description of  How Your GPS Works. The website contains many links as well as a copious supply of GOOGLE search engine windows for general inquiries.