Joshua Tree & the Southern Deserts
Two deserts meet at Joshua Tree — Mojave high, Colorado low — with Pioneertown's film-set main street, the accidental Salton Sea, Salvation Mountain, and the badlands and dark skies of Anza-Borrego.
Joshua Tree National Park sits on the homelands of the Maara'yam, the Serrano, and the Kawiya, the Cahuilla, with the Nüwü, the Chemehuevi, and the 'Aha Makhav using and crossing this country long before it had a boundary — fifteen federally recognized tribal nations are associated with the park today. What the boundary encloses is a meeting of two deserts: the high Mojave, where the Joshua trees grow among heaped monzogranite domes, and the low Colorado, dropping east through the Cholla Cactus Garden into creosote and ocotillo, with Keys View looking clear across the Coachella Valley to the Salton Sea. Climb into the Wonderland of Rocks at golden hour and the place explains its own fame.
The country around the park runs from the sublime to the gloriously strange. Pioneertown, up the hill from Yucca Valley, was built by Hollywood in the 1940s as a permanently standing Western set — people live on Mane Street now, and the honky-tonk at Pappy and Harriet's draws acts far bigger than the room. South and east lies the Salton Sea, California's accidental inland sea, made when the Colorado River burst its irrigation works early in the twentieth century and poured into the basin for two years. It boomed as a resort, then shrank and soured; what remains — the ruins and art of Bombay Beach, the painted folk-art hill of Salvation Mountain at the edge of Slab City — makes one of the strangest drives in the West.
Farther south, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park spreads across badlands, slot canyons, and palm oases, with wildflower springs that can carpet the desert floor and night skies dark enough to navigate by. Winter and spring are this region's season; summer is for the brave and the air-conditioned.
What to See in Joshua Tree & the Southern Deserts
9 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Natural Areas
Towns & Gateways
Roadside Stops
Stories from Joshua Tree & the Southern Deserts
Joshua Tree & the Southern Deserts rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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