Admiring the Desert at Joshua Tree

…but really it’s Palm Springs, Joshua Tree, and Pioneertown. In any event…

Dear reader, you may recall that in 2016 we took a shoulder season trip to Zion. That trip was in service to our goal of visiting a new National Park each year, and was a grand success. We essentially learned that November is an amazing time to visit desert-forward locations due to the temps, crowd volume, etc. In the Autumn 2019, we took some time off to visit Joshua Tree for similar reasons.

One additional ulterior motive worth mentioning – Elisse found a super cool AirBnB nearby that we wanted to check out. More on that below. I’m breaking this post up into sections. First stop, Palm Springs!

I like when you can get a sense of a place from the airport – e.g. in Palm Springs, they don’t even pretend that it ever rains. Almost the whole airport is outside, apart from security and a couple air conditioned waiting rooms at the gates. It was super pleasant given the temps in November. I could imagine it being a tad warm in the summer.

Palm Springs as a town/location/destination has gone through a variety of phases, including health retreat as well as playground of Hollywood’s rich and famous. I would actually recommend the wikipedia article as a fun browse. Its unique history shows up in the interesting shops, creative food, and in particular the fun / creative / colorful / sometimes very MidMod hotels and resorts scattered around town.

It’s also adjacent to the world’s largest rotating aerial tram, going 2+ miles up the side of San Jacinto Mountain into the San Jacinto Wilderness. It’s quite the experience to leave the desert and a few minutes later be in a totally different climate and landscape – that’s what a couple thousand feet will do for you. (Also I learned there’s a word for this – a sky island – but I digress.) We hiked around at the top of the mountain (felt like a plateau), took in the views, and then headed back to town. Definitely a highlight of the trip, including joining our group riding the tram down in loudly singing ‘Sweet Caroline’ all together.

I also have to mention the Salton Sea. If you look south-ish from the San Jacinto mountains you’ll see this wide open, flat expanse of land between the coastal mountains and the high desert that eventually (some creative imagination here) opens up into the Gulf of California. Apparently the Colorado River historically has sometimes run through this area, creating a freshwater flood plain great for farming in the modern era. But also sea level changes over eons has left the Sea area itself very salty from many cycles of large scale ocean flooding and subsequent evaporation. At the moment, the Salton Sea is actually a very large lake because someone ‘accidentally’ diverted the entire Colorado River into it for a while in 1905, causing the historic seabed to fill with water.

After our brief stay in Palm Springs we spent a couple days exploring Joshua Tree National Park.

We quickly learned that the park is huge, and a lot of it is just flat sandy desert. We spent more time driving than anticipated, but didn’t mind much. The landscape in itself is vast, which typically means there’s at least something interesting on the horizon.

We:

• Saw a ton of rock formations. ‘Formations’ is a bit of an odd word though – we saw many rocks of many shapes and sizes and colors. We started playing a “what does that rock look like” game that was highly entertaining. Check out the photos below and you can play along remotely.
• Visited a Cactus Garden. ‘Garden’ makes it sound more formal that it was – essentially there’s this small micro region that’s perfect for cactus growth, so folks installed a parking lot and a nature trail through the cactus grove. Complete with a small “I got poked by a cactus” treatment kit near the trail entrance.
• Climbed a mountain in the middle of the park. Which was worth it, but if the day got any hotter may not have been. Plus we were there in November at dawn… imagine what it might be like most other times of the year. Eek.
• Visited the Hidden Valley. And while there, talked to a park ranger about joshua trees. Apparently they can live to be 200+ years old.
• Did some hiking outside the official park as well to the 49 Palms Oasis – it’s a convenient low spot at the confluence of two mountain ravines that collects water, creating a little patch of lushness in the middle of very dry hillsides.

Lastly, I have to mention the amazing AirBnB referenced above.

It’s located outside of Pioneertown, which was established in the 1940s literally to be a movie set replicating Western life in the 1880s. So ‘downtown’ looks just what you’d expect in an old Western movie, because it likely is literally what you’re seeing in the movie. But leaving ‘downtown’, you quickly get start seeing a variety of nice ranches/houses formerly or currently owned by wealthy Hollywood industry folks.

The particular house we stayed in was removed from all that, another few miles up the road. It was totally off the grid – water was trucked in and stored in huge tanks just uphill, energy came from solar panels on the roof and nearby on the property. The house itself was a boxy metal frame with walls of glass, many of which were actually sliding doors that you could open to let the breeze through. There’s no air conditioning or heat, no rumbling electric appliances, and no general rumble of people driving, etc. because it was so far out in the desert – so it was incredibly quiet. You could sit on the deck (or hey, even just wake up in bed and open the sliding doors) and hear a cricket chirping probably a mile away. Would definitely go back.