Joshua Tree National Park

For many visitors, the Joshua trees are not only the essence but the whole of their park experience. Joshua Tree National Park, however, is much more than a tableau of twisted yucca and beckons the explorer with a diversity of desert environments, including sand dunes, native palm oases, cactus gardens and jumbles of jumbo granite.

The Joshua trees’ distribution defines the very boundaries of the Mojave Desert. Here in its namesake national park, it reaches the southernmost limit of its range.

The park area is sometimes known as the "connecting" desert because of its location between the Mojave and the Colorado Desert, and because it shares characteristics of each. The Mojave, a desert of mountains, is (relatively) cooler-wetter-higher and forms the northern and western parts of the park. Southern and eastern sections of the park are part of the hotter-drier-lower Colorado Desert, characterized by a wide variety of desert flora, including ironwood, smoketree and native California fan palms. Cacti, especially cholla and ocotillo, thrive in the more southerly Colorado Desert (a part of the larger Sonoran Desert).

During the 1920s, a worldwide fascination with the desert emerged, and cactus gardens were very much in vogue. Entrepreneurs hauled truckloads of desert plants into Los Angeles for quick sale or export. The Mojave was in danger of being picked clean of cacti, yucca and ocotillo. Wealthy socialite Minerva Hoyt organized the International Desert Conservation League to halt this destructive practice. Almost single-handedly, she successfully lobbied for the establishment of Joshua Tree National Monument in 1936.

In 1994, under provisions of the federal California Desert Protection Act, Joshua Tree was "upgraded" to national park status and expanded by more than a quarter-million acres, primarily by transfer of lands from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. This additional land—mostly mountainous terrain from the Coxcomb, Cottonwood, Eagle and Little San Bernardino ranges—expanded the national park to 792,000 acres. More than eighty percent of the park is designated as wilderness.

Getting There

From metropolitan Los Angeles, the usual route to the Oasis Visitor Center in Joshua Tree National Park is via Interstate 10 to its intersection with California 62 (some 45 miles east of San Bernardino). Highway 62 leads north and east for about 43 miles to the town of Twentynine Palms. From town, follow the park signs a short distance to the visitor center.

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