Desert View Trail

Joshua Tree straddles the boundary between two very different deserts. Above about three thousand feet the land is Mojave, cooler and wetter, and this is where the Joshua trees, actually giant yuccas, raise their shaggy arms in loose forests among the boulders. Drop lower and east and the country becomes Colorado Desert, the western arm of the Sonoran, where creosote flats and gardens of cholla cactus take over.

That transition is why the park feels so varied from one drive to the next, and why an overlook trail here can show you both realms at once. The plants, the light, and even the temperature shift as you move across the boundary.

The park's signature piles of rounded, stacked boulders are monzogranite, molten rock that cooled deep underground long ago, then cracked into blocks along regular joints. Groundwater rounded those blocks below the surface, and as the land eroded away they emerged into the strange, sculptural stacks that climbers and photographers love.

Faults run through this country too, part of the restless geology of Southern California, and hidden fan-palm oases mark spots where water is forced to the surface along fault lines elsewhere in the park. From an overlook, the long straight lines of distant mountain fronts hint at that underlying architecture.

This land is the homeland of Native peoples including the Cahuilla, Serrano, and Chemehuevi, who lived across these deserts for generations, moving between water sources, harvesting pinyon and mesquite and desert plants, and leaving behind village sites, rock art, and the bedrock mortars where they ground seeds.

Later came ranchers, miners, and homesteaders chasing gold and grazing and cheap land, and the ruins of their mines and cabins are scattered through the park. The desert that can look empty from an overlook has in fact been lived in and worked for a very long time.

Desert life here is mostly quiet and nocturnal, but patient visitors spot black-tailed jackrabbits, antelope ground squirrels, lizards basking on the rocks, and, at dusk, coyotes and the occasional bobcat. Golden eagles and red-tailed hawks ride the thermals, and after a wet winter the flats can bloom with wildflowers in spring.

Summer is brutally hot and the wrong time to be out on an exposed trail, so the comfortable seasons run from autumn through spring. When the sun sets, Joshua Tree becomes one of the best places in Southern California to see stars, and an overlook like this one is a natural spot to stay for the dark.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.