There are places far hotter than this. April promised pleasant daytime temperatures of 70 to 80 degrees. But, what no one tells you about is the sun. It blares and it blares. It blares from above and up from the ground. It blares sideways and always, until you’re ready to drop to your knees from all that blaring. There are hardly any clouds in the Joshua Tree National Park, this parched place where the Mojave and the Colorado deserts meet. It receives so little rainfall that the clouds can’t be bothered to come.
But, the desert is a place of extremes, and metaphor, and allegory. A hike through the near-800-acre park is a hallucinatory experience. The landscape is brutal and beautiful. The gnarled, twisting, beseeching arms of a thousand Joshua trees, which can live for 100 years, are grotesque and gorgeous. No wonder, according to local legend, the Mormons thought they were the biblical Joshua, arms extended in prayer, beckoning them westward. Centuries before that, the Native Americans used the tough leaves to make baskets and tools, and ate the flowering buds. Today, these spiky yucca trees are a vital part of the ecosystem offering shelter to the desert’s smaller residents like lizards, rattle snakes, birds, and insects.
At some point, the flat earth segues into enormous jumbles of boulders that form colossal shapes of skulls, teeth, and spines. Only an hour from glitzy Palm Springs, it is a land of otherworldly emptiness, seemingly dead but very much alive. Fair warning: Such surroundings can spur on small epiphanies about your place in the great wheel of nature and time.
A stop at the Key’s View lookout point offers an extraordinary break from the sun-baked surroundings. Standing at the crest of the Little San Bernardino Mountains offers a panorama of the relatively-verdant Coachella Valley far below and — oh joy! — clouds above.
Virginia Edwards
More kookiness outside the park. The Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum is a Mad Max-like setting filled with art made from found objects. For quirky antique and thrift stores, and a break from the sun, head into Yucca Valley and Algoberto’s Taco Shop — a must. Then, stay the night at the hip Pioneertown Motel, about 20 minutes away, and drift off to the words of Dr. Seuss: “But those trees! Those trees! Those Truffula Trees! All my life I’d been searching for trees such as these.”
