Where Two Deserts Meet

One of the reasons this park feels like two different worlds is that it literally is. Joshua Tree straddles the boundary between two great deserts. In the west and north sits the Mojave Desert, higher, cooler, and just wet enough for the Joshua trees to grow, generally above three thousand feet.

Drop down toward the east and south and you cross into the Colorado Desert, the low, hot, dry western arm of the great Sonoran Desert. Down there the Joshua trees disappear and the land fills with creosote bush, spidery ocotillo, spindly palo verde, and cactus. The most spectacular meeting point is the Cholla Cactus Garden, a short flat loop through a dense stand of teddy bear cholla, sited right where the upper Mojave gives way to the lower Colorado Desert.

The plants look soft and fuzzy in the low sun, which is exactly why people get too close. The spiny segments break off at the lightest touch and hitch a ride on skin, fur, and shoelaces, which is how the plant spreads. The park protects almost eight hundred thousand acres of this collision zone.

It was first set aside as a national monument in nineteen thirty-six and upgraded to a full national park in nineteen ninety-four under the California Desert Protection Act.