Joshua Tree National Park - Where Deserts Meet

Friday, November 22, 2019
Joshua Tree National Park, California, United States
Joshua Tree National Park covers a huge expanse of land in the California desert almost directly east of the Los Angeles area and close to Palm Springs.  I still think of it as Joshua Tree National Monument, but it was raised to full national park status by President Clinton in the 1990s along with Death Valley plus the creation of new monuments and preserves in the region like East Mohave.  Its proximity to the southern California megalopolis means it gets high visitation of over two million in recent years, despite not having any especially famous sights or superlative landscapes like Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Grand Canyon.  I hear the wildflowers in the Mohave cam be spectacular in the spring, especially after a high precipitation winter like that of 2018-19, making spring the busiest season, but autumn is very popular too I discovered, as campgrounds were all full and parking lots at most trailheads nearly so at the time of my visit.
Joshua Tree has been high on “my list” of places to go in North America for a while for being such a large and prominent national park with good hiking, although it is probably best known for its rock-climbing opportunities, a sport my large heavy body does not participate in.   I did drive through Joshua Tree on the main road through the park on my May 2009 trip to southern California, but did little else there because it was both very hot weather and was starting to get sick with a cold that felt especially miserable in the hot dry air.  Thus, the park is mostly new to me on this trip.
Joshua Tree National Park is considered to be where deserts meet, with differing desert eco-systems between the low-altitude Colorado Desert (the western part of the Sonoran Desert), and the higher, somewhat cooler Mohave Desert. The Colorado is where the Ocotillos and the abundance of Cacti exist, while the Mohave is home to the spring flower blooms, Yucca, and the unique Joshua Trees which give the park its name.
I gave myself only a day for the park on a day trip from Palm Springs, which is definitely not enough to cover it all, even if without doing any long hikes. I could well have spent several days there.  I entered the park on the south side near I-10 at an elevation of about 2,000 feet, the entrance off the highway being east of the long climb on the highway out of the Coachella Valley. The signs on the Interstate still say “Turn Off Air Conditioner to Avoid Overheating”. Do cars still overheat?  I remember sometimes going to the Jersey Shore in summer when I was a kid and cars “overheating” in stop-and-go traffic on the Garden State Parkway, but that doesn’t seem to be much of an issue anymore, even when it’s very hot.
In Joshua Tree I behaved like a typical national park tourist, driving the park’s scenic roads, stopping at viewpoints for pictures, and doing numerous short hikes to scenic spots, quite different from the long hikes I like to do when I have a chance or more time in national parks.  It’s not that weather wasn’t perfect for something more exerting or that there aren’t plenty options for good hikes to scenic spots in Joshua Tree, though, but I was looking for a variety of scenery on short hikes.
One of those short roadside nature trails is in what’s called the Cholla Cactus Garden in the lower altitude side of the park east of where the road climbs through Wilson Canyon to the Mohave Desert ecosystem.   These cactuses are known as “Jumping Cholla” because segments of the plants break off easily if brushed against, lodging a piece of cactus with sharp spines into anything that might threaten it. The signs warn against touching them, and the trail is marked off well with stones, but one still managed to ambush me in the parking lot as I was taking a picture near my car. I ended up with a chunk of cactus lodged into my left arm just below the elbow by what felt like several dozen very sharp needles.  It’s something that’s absolutely impossible to get out on your own without the rights tools. Fortunately, the park provides a first-aid kit at the trailhead with scissors, pliers, tweezers, comb, and disinfectant wipes. It’s a popular trail, so there were people around eager to help the sucker out with some makeshift first aid. As well as being sharp, the spines apparently contain a mild venom which causes some swelling.  I was quite surprised it didn’t become infected in the days that followed.
My wounds weren’t so serious, though, that I couldn’t continue on my merry way and do some short hikes in the one to two-mile range each at Jumbo Rocks and Skull Rocks, Barker Dam, and Hidden Valley through the rest of the afternoon until very early sundown.   The higher western part of the park is where the weirdly shaped Joshua Trees live.  It’s also geologically interesting with prominent monoliths and big piles of jumbled rocks that look like something out of The Filntstones, a sort of prehistoric looking landscape the unusual plant life contributes to.
One of the scenic highlights is Keys View, a scenic viewpoint on a ridge in the southern part of the park at 5,183 feet that overlooks the Coachella Valley and San Andreas Fault. The views are spectacular over the whole area from Palm Springs to Indio and the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains behind.  Or at least they would be under ideal conditions. It was somewhat cloudy when I got there, and there was also plenty of smog being funneled through Banning Pass from the Los Angeles Basin area to the desert obscuring the view.
An acquaintance of mine (Ray) from about a decade ago in Denver who now lives in Yucca Valley just northwest of the park noticed from my Facebook posts that I was in the Palm Springs area and suggested we meet up after not seeing each other for at least 6 or 7 years.   We went to the Joshua Tree Saloon, a western-themed place in the town of Joshua Tree near where the road to the national park turns off.  It was fun place specializing in burgers and beers and very busy on Friday night, more of an old-school California western crowd as well without all the pretentiousness you find around Palm Springs or coastal regions of the state nowadays.
On Saturday morning I got an unusually early start for me just before dawn on my way back to Bozeman. I drove about 820 miles that day on possibly not the most direct route through the Mohave but then on I-15 all the way from Las Vegas to Tremonton, the northernmost town in Utah with a motel to stay in for the night.  Then it was just a short 360 miles on Sunday to get home.
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Comments

Deb
2019-12-09

That is one more park I still hope to see !

modernnomad67
2019-12-09

There's a lot there. Lots of different landscapes.

2025-02-10

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