The Wonderland of Rocks and Fifty Years of Climbing

The jumble of granite you are looking at covers several square miles and contains more named climbing routes than most entire climbing destinations in the United States. The climbers who named them arrived in the late nineteen-sixties, and they had to invent new techniques to climb what they found.

The problem was the rock. Yosemite granite offers long vertical cracks that climbers can follow with hands, feet, and hardware designed for the purpose. Joshua Tree granite offers something different: smooth, rounded faces, shallow pockets, and friction moves that require a completely different physical vocabulary. The small group of climbers who began exploring these formations in the late nineteen-sixties were largely Yosemite-trained, and they had to adapt or fail. They adapted. The style they developed, more friction-dependent, more balancey, more reliant on reading small irregularities in the rock surface, became known as Joshua Tree style, and it influenced how a generation of climbers thought about movement on rock.

They named the formations themselves: Intersection Rock, Headstone Rock, the formation they called the Blob. They named the routes. Most of those names stuck, and the Joshua Tree climbing guidebook now runs to several hundred pages.

The first ascents were made by people camping in what was then a national monument, under regulations that were not consistently enforced and that some of the climbers were technically violating. The monument eventually became a national park in nineteen ninety-four, and the climbing community became part of the park's identity rather than a complication of it.

The Wonderland of Rocks is the center of that history. It is also, if you walk into it, genuinely disorienting: a labyrinth of house-sized boulders with no clear path and the feeling, which is accurate, that you could get lost in it for hours.