A Climbers' Mecca Carved from Granite

Those enormous piles of rounded golden boulders you keep passing are the reason Joshua Tree is one of the most famous rock climbing destinations on the planet. The park holds more than eight thousand established climbing routes, some two thousand boulder problems, and hundreds of rock formations, drawing climbers from all over the world. The stone is a coarse granite called monzogranite, and its story is strange.

It began as molten rock that cooled slowly deep underground, cracking into a rough grid of joints as it hardened. Then groundwater seeped along those cracks, chemically rotting the edges into soft clay. As the softened corners crumbled and the ground above eroded away, what was left were these smooth, rounded stacks, like giant scoops of dough piled on the desert floor.

Climbers arrived in force in the nineteen fifties and sixties, and by the nineteen seventies a fearless crew nicknamed the Stonemasters, including legends like John Long and John Bachar, turned the place into a proving ground. Because the summer heat is brutal, the real climbing season runs through the cool months of fall, winter, and spring. Head to Hidden Valley and Intersection Rock and you will see people clinging to walls that, a few thousand years ago, were buried underground.