Joshua Tree National Park

By Beth Huetter - As happens to all of us from time to time, I wanted to run away. To experience new things. To go on a true adventure. To see a landscape as foreign to me as Mars. But I also had to be able to drive there. So I chose the desert.

A Joshua Tree, by Beth Huetter

Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California is a desert preserve that includes the Mojave and Colorado deserts within its borders. In order to get to the park, however, I first had to drive pretty far through the rest of the Mojave Desert, past the once-desert that is now southern California, built-up with tract houses, irrigated lawns and planted palm trees. Farther out, I passed billboards for Indian reservation casinos and for women who were licking their enormous lips from 50 feet above the freeway, telling me they how couldn’t wait to meet me. And farther out, I drove past the herds of tall, metal power windmills on the dry, yellowed grass hills to either side of me. Still farther, I lost the grass and moved into the rocky soil. I passed the small desert towns of Morongo Valley and Yucca Valley, all the while wondering how people could live out there in the hot, dry, tumbleweed landscape that you only see in old Westerns. Where do they get their water? How did the Indians who lived out here in the past survive?

I was sure I doomed to perish in this dry landscape by the time I reached the north entrance visitor’s center. It was early April, and the winter had been especially wet. However, the landscape, now a dark brown rocky shade, was intimidating with what seemed like lack of plant life. The winds were incredible, blowing 25 to 35 mph, making me pull my sweater over my head and tie my hair back to keep it from flying all over the place. I had planned to camp out there, but with all of the campsites full and with winds that would blow your campfire over to your neighbor’s campsite, it looked like this would be a day trip.

Once I passed the gate into the park, the landscape changed, and the effect of the wet winter was much more evident. There were several varieties of cacti, flat leaf to soft to flat-out mean-looking, all of them budding, while yellow, red, and purple wildflowers bloomed alongside. All the plants seemed to have a little more green, their thirst a little more quenched. Wildlife was evident: lots of sack-shaped spider webs hanging off the sage bushes with caterpillars growing happily inside the webs, ravens and smaller nesting birds, and even a few jack rabbits.

The roads around the park are well traveled by photographers, campers, and nature lovers. Rock climbers have their favorite locations around the park. There are turn-outs every few 100 feet so people can get out and take pictures of the rocky landscape, including landmarks such as a rock formation that had eroded to look like a skull. The rocks were red, yellow, brown, and everywhere in between, but all had that definitive look of years of standing against the extreme desert elements. Every time I saw a boulder bigger than an RV delicately balanced atop a pile of an even larger rock formation, I held my breath and tried not to pause too long under it. These particular rock formations are too small to be mountains, but aren’t loose like boulders. Scientifically they were the original rock below ground that was slowly eroded away to leave monzogranite hillsides all over the park. Groundwater and rainwater cut grooves so deep into these rocks that they look like they’ve been squeezed together instead of being slowly ripped apart.

Then there are the Joshua Trees. They range in size from a few feet tall to almost twenty. All have an individual shape. They look like overgrown bushes, but they have bark just like a normal tree. Driving along the park’s main stretch of road, it looked like there was an endless supply of the gray-greenish trees, stretching out to the horizon.

From Keys View, the highest point of the park you can drive up to, I looked out over the brown, fertile-looking yet sterile Coachella Valley, 5,185 ft below me. Southern California’s smog had reached even this far east, for what was once a clear view of Mt. Jacinto now appeared as a far-off mysterious mountain, shrouded in blue mist. The smog seemed out of place over 150 miles from the ocean.

While most of the tourist resources are on the northern Mojave Desert side of the park, it is worth it to drive south on Pinto Basin Road to the southern, Colorado Desert side of the park. If you look carefully at the evolving landscape and plant life, you can tell when the Mojave Desert shifts into the Colorado Desert. The Joshua Trees disappear and are replaced by tall empty bushes with red flowers on them, and tall rounded cacti. The mountains become more whitewashed and almost smoother.

I’d driven to the desert to lose myself, and I did, as I sat in its stillness. Who needs Mars when there’s the desert?