Joshua Tree rocks: take a hike. Climb a boulder. Nourish your soul - Travel & Recreation - Joshua Tree National Park

Sunset, Feb, 2003 by Matthew Jaffe

From a vantage point atop a stack of monzogranite boulders 100 feet above an empty road, Joshua Tree National Park is a coyotecolored landscape of golds and browns. It isn't beautiful in any conventional sense, but Joshua Tree has something else: mystique. This is the coolest national park in the country.

J. T., as its devotees like to call it, is a rock-climbing mecca and a music lover's rock-and-roll shrine: a bold, boulder-strewn desertscape, where its namesake trees (actually tree-size yuccas) raise their twisting arms to the sky. The park encompasses 800,000 acres of prime high-desert terrain, from craggy 5,000-foot mountains to secluded canyons lined by native California fan palms that are hundreds of years old.

Bounded by the Mojave Desert to the north and the Colorado Desert to the south and east, the park is poised on the edge where the ocean's influence breathes its last. In the lower elevation of Pinto Basin, Joshua Tree's creosote flats sprawl eastward and forever toward Arizona. But from 5,185-foot Keys View, the vista faces west over the Coachella Valley to snowcapped 11,000-foot mountains.

It is a landscape that creeps into your consciousness and never fully leaves. On my last visit, I encountered artist and rock climber Gregory Frux, a Brooklyn resident, sketching one of the park's formations. He was on an artist-in-residence gig, an ideal opportunity to indulge his twin passions.

"As an artist, there's no substitute for slithering up and down these rocks and getting a feel for their textures and rhythms," says Frux. "This is a really complex, mazelike landscape with infinite perspectives."

The strange beauty of a fabled tree

Photographer and graphic designer Rudy VanderLans first visited Joshua Tree about 20 years ago. The Netherlands native and his friends had ended up at the park by accident, but early in his visit, he knew this was a place where he would return.

"At first it seemed very, very alien," he says. "But when you start hiking, your perspective changes from a macrovision to a microvision. There's so much beautiful detail, and in spring the bloom can be mind-boggling."

Much of that alien quality comes from the Joshua trees themselves, a plant described by explorer John C. Fremont as "the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom." For all the stillness in the park, the Joshuas add a quality of movement, their branches frozen as if in mid-dance or mid-gesture, no two trees ever quite posed alike. One dead Joshua tree is snapped in two, but from deep in the trunk, I hear the rustling of an unseen nesting bird or rodent that has taken advantage of the tree's demise. Nothing goes to waste in the desert.

That's especially true for the few people who have tried to make a go of it here. For nearly 50 years in the early 1900s, Bill Keys worked his Desert Queen Ranch. Combining a pack rat's stash of items with a Rube Goldberg--style inventiveness, Keys took junk and turned it if not into gold, then at least into some useful things.

Many of Keys's creations can still be seen on guided tours of the ranch. He turned an old car into a chicken coop, where the hens could fly in and out of the windows and remain safe from predatory coyotes. When Keys wanted to check on the eggs, all he needed to do was open up the trunk.

The rusting hulks of the ranch's old Chevy trucks stand in contrast to the shiny SUVs crammed with ropes and pitons that testify to Joshua Tree's emergence as a premier rock-climbing destination. A good 30 percent of Joshua Tree's 1.25 million annual visitors are rock climbers drawn to its 3,000 mapped routes.

It's those monzogranite boulders again. The rock is renowned for its coarse, high-friction surface, as well as cracks that challenge climbers. "These are some of the best-loved pieces of rock anywhere in the world," says Frux.

Mythic echoes in the rocks

The Joshua tree has always sparked imaginations. It gave its name to U2's 1987 album. But the park's true rock-and-roll spirit is embodied in 1960s and '70s icon Gram Parsons. Often compared to Hank Williams, Parsons, a onetime member of the Byrds, wrote songs of longing that melded country, R&B, and rock influences into what he described as "cosmic American music."

Joshua Tree National Park was Parsons's favorite place in the world. He traveled here to commune with nature--and sometimes to scan the skies for UFOs with such friends as Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

"I spend a lot of my time up at Joshua Tree in the desert, just looking at the San Andreas Fault," Parsons once said. "And I say to myself, 'I wish I was a bird drifting up above it.'"

He even wanted his ashes scattered here. After his death in 1973, an impromptu cremation took place near Cap Rock, now a place of pilgrimage for Parsons fans. The musician's embrace of this land is understandable to those who have explored its singular terrain, from its forests of Joshua trees to the sheer faces of its boulders.

"There's a little mythic echo to the name Joshua Tree," says Frux. "Like Kathmandu or Shangri-La."