Joshua Tree National Park
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Rocks, Trees & Fault Lines: Back Into California

July 18, 2022 /

When you imagine temperatures of over 110F (43C), you picture blistering sunshine and the need to find shade, yet for a good part of our drive across the desert from the Grand Canyon to Joshua Tree, the temperature gauge is up there above that number yet the skies are consistently overcast. It even rains a couple of times. When we step out of the car for a break, we are hit by a wall of heat incompatible with the cloudy skies above.

On a dark desert highway…….

Leaving the Interstate 140, we drive south west through some extraordinarily barren country, miles of dead straight road through open land. Once past the salt flats at Amboy and out into the desert, we pass only occasionally through anything resembling a village, eventually reaching a remote community where the surprisingly small houses are spaced an awful long way apart. It’s as if the residents seek further isolation even within their isolated village.

Wonder Valley

Signage tells us that this is Wonder Valley, which, according to the internet, is “a community of artists, musicians and other desert dwellers”, but it’s certainly a strange looking place. Just at the point where we’re thinking how weird this all is, these letters appear roadside…..

The End Of The World

Yep, we’re just starting to think that that’s precisely where we are.

After the unusual drive, surely today isn’t going to get any more strange…but it does. Our next base, a “ranch house” dwelling in Joshua Tree village, is deserted when we arrive. There’s no reception, just a scrawled note advising that the “hotel” has no staff and we are to let ourselves in to any one of the rooms which has a key in the door. We try all three such rooms, each one has an unmade bed with dirty sheets, one has a table full of cleaning fluids, each of them has an unpleasant smell. None are fit for occupation. There’s another couple in the car park who are in the act of leaving after just a cursory glance into their “room”. Hastily, we do the same, and head off in search of another place to stay: there is clearly something very wrong. God knows what’s happened here but this place is not going to do any business tonight! We settle instead in the nearby village of Yucca Valley.

Joshua Tree Saloon
Joshua Tree Saloon
The Tiny Pony Yucca Valley
The Tiny Pony Bar Yucca Valley
The Station Joshua Tree
Joshua Tree
Joshua Tree

Friday morning, July 15th. No cloud now, just open, unforgiving sun. The rough, sandy rocks around us are hot to touch as the temperature starts to move from bearable to brutal as noon approaches. From where we sit among these strange rocks, the sweeping view is monumental, the very point where two deserts meet. Behind us is the Mojave Desert, ahead of us the Colorado Desert, at a much lower elevation and consequently more dry and more barren than its cactus and yucca filled neighbour.

Joshua Tree National Partk
Coachella Valley, Joshua Tree
Where two deserts meet
Where two deserts meet
Conchella Valley Joshua Tree
Coachella Valley

We are looking across the Coachella Valley, and somewhere down there in that valley, running straight through what lays before us, is the San Andreas Fault, poised for what one day will be its big move. Haze fills the valley and blurs the mountains: city pollution swirls into this place on the prevailing wind and sits as living proof of human damage. A thought occurs: this is a place where the natural world could one day destroy some of humanity; yet it’s a place where we can also see direct evidence of humanity destroying the natural world.

San Andreas Fault, Coachella Valley

This is Joshua Tree national park, full of crazy landscapes and strange sights, and not just those odd trees which give the park its name. The rock formations here don’t have the appearance of hills, cliffs or mountains – they look more like giant piles of rubble. Magma formed these rocks something like 15 miles underground, and somewhere around 85 million years ago: earthquakes and the uplifting of mountains pushed the rocks closer to the surface, water seeping in and cracking the rocks on the way.

Hills like piles of rubble

Once above the Earth’s surface, cracks became divisions, weathering and erosion changed the shapes, until eventually we were left with what we see today: boulders of weird shapes and different sizes, some sculpted into natural statues, others precariously poised to fall from the pile. It’s an intriguing, moonlike landscape.

Joshua Tree National Park
Joshua Tree National Park
Joshua Tree National Park

Filling the open spaces between the piles of rocks are the joshua trees themselves, looking coppiced by nature, their twisted arms bearing leaves which appear feathery yet sport vicious spines. The Spanish name for this tree is “izote de desierto” – the “dagger of the desert”. Highly appropriate. This tree – not actually a true tree and more accurately named yucca brevifolia – is only found in desert conditions at altitudes between 400m and 1800m; its distribution coinciding mostly with the spread of the Mojave Desert, through the south western states and down into northern Mexico.

Joshua Tree National Park
Joshua Trees
Joshua Tree
Joshua Tree
Joshua Tree

Whatever, the trees and the odd rockpiles, coupled with stout cacti and the comical kangaroo rat bounding between harsh shrubs, combine to form most unusual landscapes and vistas. Pointing out likenesses in the natural sculptures in the boulders becomes an amusing aside as we walk – there is a whale, next a tortoise, then a tower block, and a cowboy hat, even a clenched fist. But pride of place in this display of nature’s statuary goes to the appropriately named Skull Rock.

Skull Rock Joshua Tree
Skull Rock
Rock formations
Hidden Valley Joshua Tree
Joshua Tree National Park

The heat gets brutal early. Thankfully, the Park features a large number of short trails designed no doubt to enable summer hikers avoid too much exposure to the unforgiving sun. Of course, we manage several of these trails during our stay here, but even hikes of less than 2 miles have an exhausting effect and restriction to those short trails, with respite between each, is the order of the day. You can’t afford to run short of water when it’s 109F.

Hidden Valley Joshua Tree
Hidden Valley
Hidden valley Joshua Tree
Hidden Valley

Amongst the trails we follow is the Hidden Valley Trail, an atypically green area where in bygone times cattle rustlers would hide, and graze, their ill gotten herds. A second trail wanders us through the Cholla Cactus “garden”, where these unusual cacti with vicious needles grow in remarkable quantities. It’s another very unique landscape.

Cholla Cactus Garden Joshua Tree
Among the Cholla Cacti
Cholla Cactus Garden Joshua Tree
Cholla Cactus Garden
Cholla cactus
Cholla cactus

The trails, despite their shortness, have plenty of informative boards, many detailing the ingenious ways in which the desert flora and fauna have evolved to cope with their harsh, extreme environment. Every board is a fascinating read, from the shrub which now has no leaves at all, as a way of retaining water, to the bird which finishes off its prey by impaling it on the spines of the joshua tree.

Each of the four National Parks visited – Sequoia, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Joshua Tree – has been markedly different from the other three. And that’s just the Parks: the rest of our California trip has provided immense variety, and has been one of the most exhilarating and exciting trips of our travels so far. We’re not done yet though – after a couple of days back with my daughter in Acton, it’s off to Mexico, and on to the next stop….Guadalajara.

Mexico here we come!

(Trivia note: Yucca Valley is the first town/city/village we’ve stayed in on our travels which begins in Y, meaning we’ve now stayed in at least one place beginning with each of the 26 letters of the alphabet!).

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