Skip to content

USA · 2022

Day 4 - California - Joshua Tree National Park

5 May 2022

Eroded brown ridges roll across a dry desert valley beneath a broad blue sky.
A steep dark rocky ridge is flanked by golden slopes and desert scrub under blue sky. A sandy hiking path winds along a dry hillside past dried shrubs and cacti. A weathered wooden shack sits atop a rocky, scrub-covered desert ridge. Large Joshua trees stand beside a sandy path through a rolling desert landscape. Dry golden hills shelter crumbling stone ruins among scattered desert shrubs. A lone dirt road snakes through dry hills toward hazy distant ridges. A sandy trail climbs a scrub-dotted ridge to a fenced ruin on the crest. A panoramic desert valley stretches out beneath a rocky, brushy viewpoint. A sweeping desert basin spreads out beneath a ridge of scrub and cacti. Tall desert plants rise on a ridge above a wide dry valley basin. A spiky desert yucca pushes a reddish flower bud from its crown. A crumbling stone chimney and old metal frame mark a forsaken desert camp. A pair of spiky Joshua trees rise from sandy scrub, a rocky hillside sloping off to the right under a clear blue sky. A single Joshua tree stands beside a sandy footpath that snakes away toward a low hillside in the distance. A large, multi-branched Joshua tree stands out in front of a rocky hillside piled with boulders and desert shrubs. A steep desert hillside is speckled with Joshua trees, yuccas, and scattered boulders beneath a wedge of blue sky. Sparse Joshua trees and yuccas scatter across a rocky desert hillside, with only a sliver of blue sky above the ridge. Two twisted Joshua trees grow from a sandy plain, backed by low hills strewn with more desert vegetation. A cluster of Joshua trees lines a sandy trail that curves away toward low hills on the horizon. A sandy path threads between massively rounded granite boulders, with yuccas and desert shrubs along the edges. Rounded granite boulders gather in a sandy desert wash. Weathered slabs and twisted branches crowd a rocky crevice. Two small figures stand atop the distant granite boulders. A circular arrangement of rocks sits in a sandy desert wash. A gnarled skeletal plant curves into a full loop in the sand. Joshua trees and yuccas line a sandy path toward rocky hills. Sunlight flares through the spiky branches of a Joshua tree. A desert yucca sends up a tall cream flower spike. A tan rock overhang shelters dark carved markings beside a green shrub. A huge cracked boulder looms over a tiny figure in a desert field. A sunlit rounded boulder is split cleanly down the middle by a dark fissure. A dense field of fuzzy cholla cacti stretches toward desert mountains, bordered by a fence. Thousands of cholla cacti dot a stony plain beneath a dark hill and distant mountains. A close-up of a cholla cactus shows yellow flowers tipping its fuzzy spines. An empty asphalt highway cuts through desert scrub toward hazy mountains, seen from the road. A school bus painted in tan camouflage sports a shark face on its hood and rooftop details. A weathered wooden bench sits on sandy ground among desert plants with mountains behind. Weathered wooden frontier building with a faded pink door, barrel and desert plants. Rustic wooden storefront bearing a boot repair sign behind barrel and cactus. A woman carrying an orange backpack walks past a wooden gift shop building. Weathered wooden facade with dentistry and boot repair signs, American flag and cacti. Weathered wooden boardwalk and storefront with a pink door, windows and a barber pole. A sprawling Joshua tree stands tall in a desert landscape before rocky mountains. Joshua trees and a massive boulder rise above dry desert scrub and mountains. A wide desert landscape dotted with Joshua trees beneath wispy clouds. Upward view of a Joshua tree's spiky branches crowning green seed pods. A tall Joshua tree stands before a rounded rock formation. Joshua trees cluster in a desert plain near a roadside sign. A sprawling Joshua tree with many arms grows near a roadside. Several Joshua trees spaced along a roadside through desert scrub. A Joshua tree grows among large rounded granite boulders. A towering rock formation rises above desert picnic tables. A lone Joshua tree stands among pale boulders under a deep blue sky. A weathered picnic bench rests on sand beside a Joshua tree and a large granite rock. A black barbecue grill sits on sand among boulders, Joshua trees, and green yucca blades. A Joshua tree's branched crown is framed against a cloudless blue sky. Cars fill a parking lot beneath a Joshua tree and a pile of boulders. A Joshua tree spreads its branches in front of a pale rock outcrop on a clear day. Yellow wildflowers line a sandy path through a meadow of boulders and Joshua trees. A Joshua tree grows beside a massive granite rock face in the desert. A sunlit desert of boulders and Joshua trees seen through a building's concrete window. A massive pile of tan boulders rises behind Joshua trees and a small shed. Two Joshua trees stand tall over a sandy desert floor scattered with rocks. An open desert flat dotted with tan boulders, Joshua trees, and a fallen trunk. Joshua trees frame a view across scrubby flats toward a central boulder formation. A broad desert plain with scattered Joshua trees and a central boulder outcrop. A hillside of stacked rounded boulders dotted with Joshua trees under a blue sky. A large flat boulder is balanced over a gap forming a shallow rock shelter. Rounded tan boulders stack high beside a spiky Joshua tree under a cloudless blue sky. A hand dips toward tiny yellow blooms scattered across coarse desert gravel. A sandy trail winds among Joshua trees toward tan rocks and distant desert mountains. A massive pile of rounded granite boulders towers over a sparse desert floor with a single Joshua tree. A spiky Joshua tree grows against a huge granite slab topped by a balanced boulder. A towering granite monolith looms over a desert floor dotted with Joshua trees. A fuzzy cholla cactus clusters its bristly arms low over sandy desert ground. Cholla cacti dot the flat desert floor under a rugged mountain ridge. A vast dry valley scattered with fuzzy cholla cacti beneath a bright desert sky. A hollow, web-like dried cholla skeleton stands in the desert sun. One cholla cactus stands tall against a deep blue desert sky. A dense cholla cactus bristles with pale spines and green flower buds. A wide desert plain under mountains is covered with cholla cacti in yellow flower. A textured field of cholla cacti extends toward a line of desert mountains. Green-yellow cholla flowers open among rows of pale cactus spines. One green cholla flower is sharply focused among soft white spines. A tall Joshua tree is backlit by a blinding sun.
Journal Notes

General

Joshua Tree National Park lies in south eastern California, straddling north central Riverside County and a part of southern San Bernardino County. It is named after the Joshua tree, the yucca that grows in the park and the country around it, and it stands about 130 miles, or 211 kilometres, east of Los Angeles and roughly 78 miles, or 125 kilometres, east of San Bernardino. The cities closest to its gates are Indio, Palm Desert and Palm Springs, and the whole of the park is reached within a day from the coast or from Las Vegas.

The protected area covers 795,156 acres, which is 1,242.4 square miles or 3,217.9 square kilometres, slightly more than the state of Rhode Island, and 429,690 acres of it are designated wilderness. It was declared a national monument in 1936 and redesignated as a national park in 1994, when Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act, and it therefore belongs to the second generation of American desert parks rather than to the first.

The park contains portions of two deserts, each with its own ecosystem determined mainly by elevation. The higher ground belongs to the Mojave Desert, the lower and hotter south eastern part to the Colorado Desert, which is itself a subregion of the Sonoran Desert. The Little San Bernardino Mountains line the south western edge of the park, and the boundary between the two deserts runs through the middle of the protected area, visible in the change of the vegetation rather than in any line on the ground.

Six blocks of mountains stand inside the park, and five of them, the Little San Bernardino, Hexie, Pinto, Cottonwood and Eagle ranges, belong to the Transverse Ranges, which run generally east to west in this part of California. Between them lie wide basins such as the Pinto Basin, dry washes, and plains of gravel and sand. The park’s climate is a hot desert climate, with the extremes of temperature that the classification implies, and the summers are becoming hotter and the rainfall less frequent than they were a century ago.

Visitation is concentrated in a few places. The park is entered from Twentynine Palms in the north, from Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley in the north west, and from the south through the Cottonwood area, and most of the roads inside it are short spurs from one of those entrances. The distances between the entrances are long, the services inside the park are few, and the water that visitors drink has to be carried in with them. There are nine established campgrounds in the whole protected area.

History

The earliest known inhabitants of the land were the people of the Pinto Culture, who lived and hunted here between 8000 and 4000 BCE. Their stone tools and spear points were discovered in the Pinto Basin in the 1930s, and they indicate a life of hunting and of gathering seasonal plants, although little else about them is known. They were followed by the Serrano, the Cahuilla and the Chemehuevi, who lived in small villages near water, above all at the Oasis of Mara in what later became Twentynine Palms, and who used the plants of the desert for food, medicine, bows, arrows and baskets.

A fourth people, the Mojave, came into the region to use its resources without settling it permanently, and the desert as a whole was the country of small and widely scattered groups rather than of dense settlement. The villages were placed at springs and at the few permanent water holes, and the routes between them followed the oases and the passes that later carried the wagons and the roads.

Settlement of the modern kind began with cattle. In 1870 white settlers started grazing stock on the tall grasses that grew in what is now the park, and in 1888 a gang of cattle rustlers led by the brothers James B. and William S. McHaney moved into the country around the Oasis of Mara and hid stolen cattle in a box canyon at Cow Camp. Ranchers dug wells and built rainwater catchments known as tanks, among them the White Tank and the dam that carries the name of Barker, and grazing continued inside the present park until 1945.

Mining followed the cattle. Between the 1860s and the 1940s about three hundred pit mines were worked in the area, most of them small and short lived. The most successful was the Lost Horse Mine, which produced gold and silver worth about five million United States dollars at present values, and which passed through the hands of Johnny Lang and his partners, who installed a two stamp mill at the site, and of J.D. Ryan, who replaced it with a steam powered mill of ten stamps and cut timber in the surrounding hills to fire its boiler. Most of the structures of the mine have since collapsed, and the openings have been closed for safety.

The protection of this country was the work of campaigners as much as of government. On 10 August 1936, after Minerva Hoyt and others persuaded the state and federal authorities, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the power of the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish the Joshua Tree National Monument, protecting about 825,000 acres. In 1950 the monument was reduced by approximately 290,000 acres to open land to mining, and on 31 October 1994 the Desert Protection Act redesignated it as a national park and added 234,000 acres. A further 4,518 acres were added in 2019 under the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act, and private land inside the park has been bought up by the Mojave Desert Land Trust, which has transferred more than 25,000 acres to the National Park Service.

Geology

The oldest rocks of the park are among the oldest in California. The Pinto Gneiss and its neighbours are about 1.7 billion years old, and they appear at the surface in the Cottonwood, Pinto and Eagle Mountains. These are the roots of mountains that were raised and then worn down long before the landscape of today existed, and they form the basement on which everything else was deposited or intruded.

Between 250 and 75 million years ago the movement of tectonic plates forced molten material towards the surface in this region and produced the granites of the park, among them the monzogranite that makes up the Wonderland of Rocks and parts of the Pinto, Eagle and Coxcomb Mountains. The harder rocks, gneiss and granite, were eventually left standing as uplands when the softer material around them eroded away, and the debris filled the canyons and basins between the ranges.

That debris was moved by gravity and by water. Alluvial fans formed at the mouths of the canyons, and where the fans overlapped they built the broad slopes known as bajadas, which cover much of the floor of the park between the mountain blocks. The same process continues after every storm, when the dry washes carry sand, gravel and boulders out of the mountains and spread them across the lower ground.

The shapes of the famous rock formations owe their form to two forces. Groundwater, filtering through the roughly rectangular joints of the monzonite, eroded the corners and edges of the blocks and rounded them from within, while flash floods later washed away the covering soil and left the boulders piled in the open. Outcrops formed in this way are called inselbergs, and the piles of rounded stone that stand above the desert floor in the Wonderland of Rocks and at Skull Rock are the result of the combination of the two.

The mountain blocks of the park are geologically part of the Transverse Ranges, which run east to west rather than north to south as most of the ranges of California do, five of the six blocks of the park belonging to that system. The San Andreas Fault passes close to the southern edge of the park near Keys View, where the fault, the Salton Sea and the Coachella Valley can be seen together from a single point, and the presence of the fault explains both the relief of the region and the frequency of earthquakes in it.

Things to See

Keys View is the classic overlook of the park and the best introduction to its geography. From the south western rim the ground falls away to the Coachella Valley, and on a clear day the Salton Sea, the San Andreas Fault, the Santa Rosa Mountains and the city of Palm Springs lie in view at once. The road to it climbs through the Little San Bernardino Mountains, and the wind at the top is often strong enough to make the visit a short one.

Hidden Valley is the best known of the short nature walks. It is a ring of rocks that once enclosed a cattle hideout of the kind the rustlers of the 1880s used, and the trail around it takes less than an hour and explains the plants along the way. The longer trails of the park lead to the sites that the twentieth century left behind or to the oases that the first inhabitants lived from, among them Contact Mine, Fortynine Palms Oasis, Lost Horse Mine, Lost Palms Oasis, Ryan Mountain and the Ruby Lee Mill Site.

Barker Dam is the most visited of the historic water works. The original dam was built in 1900 by C. O. Barker, a miner and cattleman, and was later improved by the rancher William Keys, whose name is also given to the viewpoint above the Coachella Valley. Rainwater collected behind the dam attracted wildlife and watered stock, and the reservoir is still a place where bighorn sheep and birds come to drink; the structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

The California Riding and Hiking Trail crosses the western side of the park for 35 miles, or 56 kilometres, and connects several of the campgrounds with the backcountry. Nine campgrounds are established inside the park, most of them simple sites without water, and reservations are required in the cooler months, when the nights are cold and the days are ideal for walking. Camping in the wilderness is allowed outside the designated sites with the usual desert precautions.

Climbing is the other great use of the park. The rocks are quartz monzonite, a rough variety of granite that is not polished by snow or ice as the walls of Yosemite are, and the routes are typically short, since the formations rarely exceed 70 metres in height. The park began as a winter practice ground for climbers while the Sierra Nevada was under snow, and it later became a destination in its own right, with thousands of named routes of every grade and a short and easy approach to most of them. Some routes and boulders are closed permanently, and others temporarily, to protect wildlife.

The night sky over the park is an attraction in itself. The International Dark Sky Association designated Joshua Tree a Dark Sky Park in 2017, and the distance from the light of Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Las Vegas keeps the sky unusually dark for southern California. Amateur astronomers have used the area for decades, and the finest views are on the moonless nights of the winter months, when the air is clear and the temperature low enough to discourage the casual visitor.

The plants and animals of the park follow the two deserts it contains. The Joshua tree itself belongs to the higher Mojave ground, where it grows in open stands, while the Colorado Desert below is the country of the creosote bush and the ocotillo, with fan palms at the permanent oases. Bighorn sheep, coyotes, jackrabbits, kangaroo rats and dozens of species of lizards and snakes live in the park, and the oases act as the meeting points for birds on migration. Vandalism at some archaeological and historic sites has led the National Park Service to close a number of places, including Native American sites, Rattlesnake Canyon and Barker Dam, to the public.

Interpretation is concentrated in a small number of places. The visitor centres at Twentynine Palms in the north and at Cottonwood in the south explain the geology and the ecology of the two deserts, and the ranger programmes of the cooler months include walks to the oases and to the historic mine. The roads inside the park are few and mostly dead ends, so a day of driving covers the main viewpoints, while a day of walking covers one of them properly. Water is available only at the entrances, and the last fuel before the southern sections of the park is in the towns outside it.

References

  1. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Joshua Tree National Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Tree_National_Park
  2. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Joshua tree. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_tree
  3. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Yucca brevifolia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_brevifolia
  4. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Mojave Desert. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert
  5. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Colorado Desert. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Desert
  6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). California Fan Palm. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Fan_Palm
  7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Skull Rock. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Rock
  8. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Barker Dam. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barker_Dam
  9. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Rock climbing. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_climbing
  10. Wikipedia contributors (2026). National Park Service. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Park_Service
  11. Wikipedia contributors (2026). San Andreas Fault. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas_Fault
  12. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Little San Bernardino Mountains. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_San_Bernardino_Mountains
  13. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Transverse Ranges. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_Ranges
  14. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Inselberg. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inselberg
  15. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Serrano people. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_people
  16. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Cahuilla. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahuilla
  17. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Chemehuevi. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemehuevi
  18. Keeler-Wolf T. (2007) Mojave Desert Scrub Vegetation. Terrestrial Vegetation of California, 3rd Edition. 609-656. doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520249554.003.0022
  19. Wilmot N.A., McIntosh C.R. (2014) Forecasting Recreational Visitation at US National Parks. Tourism Analysis. 19. 129-137. doi.org/10.3727/108354214×13963557455487