What’s with the two deserts? Joshua Tree sits on a seam. The town and its national park straddle the line where two great deserts meet: the higher, cooler Mojave to the west — above about 3,000 feet, where the rain is a little more generous and the Joshua trees grow — and the lower, hotter Colorado Desert to the east, all creosote, ocotillo, and cholla cactus. Cross the park from one side to the other and the whole world changes: spiky Joshua-tree forests and piled boulders give way to open cactus flats and palm-shaded oases fed by water forced up along the San Andreas fault. Two deserts, one town at the gateway — which is a lot of strangeness for one stretch of California.
The town’s namesake is Yucca brevifolia, a tree-sized member of the agave family that grows only in the Mojave and crowds the horizon here with its shaggy, upraised arms. The name comes from Mormon pioneers who crossed the desert in the mid-1800s: the tree’s outstretched branches reminded them of the biblical Joshua raising his arms to the sky, and the name stuck. Each one is slow — decades to mature — and depends entirely on a single pollinator, the yucca moth, which carries its pollen from bloom to bloom and lays its eggs in the flowers, so neither the tree nor the moth can live without the other. Strange, spiky, and unmistakable, the Joshua tree is the silhouette the whole town is named for.
Why People Visit Joshua Tree
People come for the strangeness: trees out of a storybook, boulders made for scrambling, and a night sky so dark the Milky Way throws shadows. Pair the park with the town’s desert-arts scene and you have a high-desert getaway unlike anywhere else in California.
