Joshua Tree

I came to Joshua Tree on a Wednesday in November, coming down from the high desert through Twentynine Palms, and the landscape changed so gradually that I wasn’t sure when it happened — when the creosote flats became boulder fields, when the boulders became architecture, when the Joshua trees started appearing between the rocks in their particular angular crouch, arms out at odd angles like they were directing traffic in different directions simultaneously. I pulled into the park at dusk and by the time I reached Skull Rock the last orange had gone out of the sky and the stars were coming up in a way that coastal California never quite permits. There was no light pollution for thirty miles in any direction. I sat on a boulder and did not move for an hour.

Joshua Tree sits at the collision point of two distinct desert ecosystems. The Mojave, in the park’s northern half, is higher and cooler and where the Joshua trees grow — those strange yucca palms with their upturned branches that are so singular in their weirdness that they became a geographic mascot. The Colorado Desert, in the south, is lower and hotter and sparser, all palo verde and ocotillo and the occasional cholla cactus glowing silver in direct sunlight. The boundary between them is the transition zone, where you can stop the car and point left toward the Mojave’s tree-crowded hillsides and right toward the Colorado’s bare mineral flats and feel the temperature differential on each side of your body.

The town of Joshua Tree, just outside the park’s western entrance, has become something genuinely unusual over the past twenty years — a desert arts community that arrived partly accidentally and partly by design, drawn by cheap property and extraordinary light and a proximity to Los Angeles that counts as escape but not exile. The main drag has galleries in converted garages and a bookshop with poetry shelved next to mycology and a coffee place where the espresso is seriously considered. I had lunch at a taqueria and talked to the woman who made my burrito about how the winter has grown shorter every decade she’s been here.

The climbing is the secret the park’s casual visitors often don’t register. Joshua Tree has over eight thousand documented routes on granite that breaks into those famous rounded domes and slabs — crack climbing, face climbing, trad lines up walls that require a rack and a partner and a comfort with exposure. Even if you don’t climb, watching people work a difficult crack in the late afternoon light is its own kind of entertainment. The granite here is called monzogranite, a specific composition that weathers into surfaces excellent for the sticky rubber on a climbing shoe.

When to go: October through April. The park is essentially inaccessible to pleasure in summer — daytime temperatures reach 110°F and there is no shade except what a boulder provides. Spring (February to April) occasionally brings wildflower blooms that carpet the desert floor after a wet winter. Winter nights are cold enough for frost, which makes the camping austere but the star-gazing incomparable.