We were surrounded by trees that could have been drawn by Dr. Seuss. A desert hare had just crossed the trail in front of us, its ears translucent in the still-rising sun. But it was something else that caught the attention of my 28-year-old son.
“I can’t believe how silent it is out here,” he said.
This was an offhand comment. I agreed, but said nothing. We walked on.
So I think I know the answer to the questions I brought with me to Joshua Tree National Park that Sunday morning. Can a person find isolation, silence and beauty in a visit measured in hours? Is it possible to experience a national park’s wildness in the time usually allotted for a blacktop tour?
Yes to all.
Speaking only for myself, this is useful knowledge to have when vying with work, friends, sleep and entertainment for the attention of a person in his late 20s.
My son, Will, works for a start-up in Los Angeles. When I visited him recently, he’d had the job for less than a year and had recently moved from a house-and-yard neighborhood to a loft in the Fashion District. I’d planned on five days there, but he had only the weekend off – and graciously reserved it all for me.
He and I had done a fair amount of camping when he was younger – backpacking on the Long Trail in Vermont, kayaking on the Chesapeake Bay, that sort of thing. His enthusiasm had waned with age. I was a bit surprised when he said yes to my proposal that we visit Joshua Tree, where I’d never been.
I booked us rooms at a bed-and-breakfast called the Campbell House in Twentynine Palms, a town outside the Oasis Visitor Center on the park’s northern border.
We’d do a short hike Saturday after a 2½-hour drive to the park. On Sunday morning, we’d do one of the “challenging hikes” listed on the park’s website – the 8-mile Boy Scout Trail.
We left Los Angeles at 10:58 a.m., an hour later than planned. Twenty miles west of the park, we began seeing the Joshua trees.
They’re not actually trees, but a species of yucca. One could be forgiven the confusion. Their trunks are shaggy with the desiccated foliage of previous seasons, which eventually falls off to reveal treelike bark. The new growth at the ends of branches looks like exuberant pineapples. They’re a kindergartner’s version of a tree.
We arrived at the visitors center with 15 minutes to spare before the 2 p.m. start of my choice for the afternoon activity. It was a tour of the abandoned Keys Ranch, one of the few successful homesteads in the pre-park desert. Unfortunately, the rangers stopped selling tickets at 12:30 p.m., an annoying fact not mentioned on the website.
We came up with an alternative – hiking the nearby Split Rock loop. Half a dozen cars were parked in an unpaved lot next to a map board and a kiosk with a composting toilet. Will got out of the car. As I changed shoes and stuffed a day pack with water bottles, he ran to the closest ridge of rocks. Soon he was 60 feet up it. “Oh, man, I forgot how cool a place this is,” he called down.
The trip was already worth it.
The Split Rock Loop was 2.5 miles long.
The dominant geological feature is a fine-grained rock – sometimes tan, sometimes gray – called monzogranite. It’s the cooled and weathered remnant of magma that welled up from deep in the Earth more than 100 million years ago. The boulders, ranging in size from baskets to buildings, awake the imagination.
A few minutes after we started, I took a picture of an inclusion running through a rock, and above it a jet contrail of the same shape. We stopped at one formation that looked like bread dough from a kitchen with no pans. Elsewhere, I saw the head of a dinosaur whose chief feature was nostrils. And a whale with a racing stripe.
The rock also invited climbing. About 300,000 of the park’s 2.8 million visitors last year were rock climbers. Will, who has done some climbing, made it to the knife-edge top of a group of boulders next to the trail. He announced he was going to stand up, but not proceed along the edge “because it’s a long way down.”
We had hardly seen anyone by the time we got back to the car at 5:15 p.m. It was a great warm-up, and we had another half-day ahead of us.
Our bed-and-breakfast, the Campbell House, is a “sister property” of the 29 Palms Inn, which was a few miles away and full. An 11-room stone house that was finished in 1929.
Outside, shaggy palms and tamarisks shaded the raked-gravel yard. Chairs and tables sat on islands of fieldstone. Behind the house were cottages and a picket fence. At the edge of the property, a wooden water tank stood next to a headless windmill tower. The place was a cross between a Zen temple garden and an abandoned set for “Oklahoma!”
My son and I had the master suite upstairs; its decor was haute grandmere.
It featured a large bedroom with a fireplace, a smaller one next to it and a bathroom in Eisenhower-era blue tile. My bed had 10 pillows. On the bedside table was a tray with two Old Fashioned glasses and a bowl for ice. A mahogany china cabinet – a refugee from downstairs, I guessed – held pitchers and sugar bowls. On the mantel sat six volumes of Readers Digest Condensed Books.
We slept in the beds but left long before the breakfast. An afternoon temperature of 101 degrees was predicted, and we wanted an early start.
We arrived at the parking area for the Boy Scout Trail at 7:12 a.m. The plan was to get a ride back to the car from the other end. I’d been told that Uber drivers operated inside the park. We’d see if that were true.
There were 18 cars at the trailhead – a surprisingly large number. It seemed unlikely they were all day hikers who had risen earlier than us. Soon, it was clear who they were.
To our right, a woman with pink hair, carrying a sleeping child, made her way through the spiky scrub, followed by a man clutching sleeping bags to his chest. We stepped aside to let five people pass; they were pulling two blue plastic wagons piled with stuff. Soon after, two more men passed us, hugging a tent and sleeping gear.
Car camping out of sight of the car – but not so far that a backpack was a worthy investment – appeared to be popular in Joshua Tree.
After that, we had the trail to ourselves. This has been my experience in national parks: You don’t have to walk far to get away from people.
The trail was flat for a while, then climbed gradually. The Joshua trees became bigger and more evenly spaced the deeper we went into the park. They were also more extravagant, as if finally free to do what they wanted.
For a stretch, the trail was a dry streambed, channeling us between gigantic hills of rock. I suggested we leave it to get a taste of exploration. But I didn’t want to go far.
A couple of weeks earlier, The New York Times Magazine had run a story about a 66-year-old man who went backpacking alone in Joshua Tree in 2010. The headline: “Two hours from Los Angeles, it’s still possible to completely, tragically disappear.” No trace of him has been found, despite many searches.
Our destination was a high spot about half a mile up a slope to our left. The land was a boulder garden, every step an invitation to twist an ankle or fall into a crevice (which, of course, is what makes it fun). I looked back toward the trail several times, taking visual bearings in case we needed to retrace our steps. The landmarks disappeared into the geological jumble as I climbed; it wouldn’t have been easy.
Will scrambled straight up. I walked in switchbacks. He stopped before the final pitch and gave serious thought to his route. When he got to the top he spread his arms out, haloed in the sun. “Take a picture of me like the statue in Rio de Janeiro,” he called back.
I did.
A truth about walks in the wilderness is that they’re invitations not just to silence and contemplation but to conversation and revelation. Two people walking single-file on a trail have a perfect balance of intimacy and distance.
They can speak in ordinary tones. They don’t have eye contact. They can stop a conversation because of real or feigned distraction. They can resume it without asking permission. Say what you want about Freud, he was onto something with his rules for the psychoanalytic encounter.
During our two walks, my son and I talked about many things. He told me what he wanted to change to get ready for his 30s. I told him things I’d never mentioned before about mistakes and bad decisions I’d made. We talked about money. We talked about generosity. We talked about what was around us.
“This looks like it could be Tatooine from ‘Star Wars,’” he said, stopping to face a tawny wall of rock. “Like you could see droids and Sand People coming around the corner.”
On our hike there was no music, nothing to read, nobody to visit, no shortcut, no responsibilities. (True, he did check his phone a few times.) But there was an end.
A long switchback took us down to a plain where the trail was wide and indistinct. We saw a road and estimated how long it would take us to get there. Soon, we had a cellphone signal. We sent for an Uber.
If you go
Where to stay
Campbell House
74744 Joe Davis Dr., Twentynine Palms
(760) 367-3238
campbellhouse29palms.com
This bed-and-breakfast on 25 acres has 12 rooms, with prices ranging from $120 to $220, depending on size and season.
29 Palms Inn
73950 Inn Ave., Twentynine Palms
(760) 367-3505
29palmsinn.com
The inn has 25 rooms in various buildings, including adobe bungalows and wood-frame cabins. Prices range from $110 to $350. The restaurant at the inn is good, with entrees from $19 to $32.
What to do
Joshua Tree National Park
74485 National Park Drive, Twentynine Palms
(760) 367-5500
nps.gov/jotr
About 140 miles east of Los Angeles, the park has two visitor centers on its northern border. One is at the village of Joshua Tree; the other, farther east, is at Oasis of Mara, near the town of Twentynine Palms. A third visitor center is on the southern side of the park at Cottonwood Spring. The park encompasses parts of two deserts: the Mojave on the west and the Colorado on the east.
