Two Choices in the Desert

Palm Springs and Joshua Tree

I’m a little bit Palm Springs, and a little bit Joshua Tree. We visited both these places, and enjoyed both, but one felt like an oasis, and the other a mirage.

The desert around Palm Springs has been inhabited for a couple thousand years by the Cahuilla people, as evidenced by the petroglyphs in Tahquitz and Chino canyons. It is now a mid-century modern shopping mecca and resort town spangled with polished aluminum and pastels, a place that feels unreal as you walk through misters to help you tolerate the heat reflected from the asphalt. There is beauty and kitsch, such as towering statues of movie stars in the center of town, and flourescent dinosaurs outside on the highway. The ostentatiousness suspends your disbelief. When arriving at night, you descend from the mountains of the San Bernadino national forest into a lake of diamonds that dissolve into the darkness and leave you holding only dust.

Palm Springs sign; City from the mountains at night; Aluminum house

The food was great, particularly at Tac/Quila, a Michelin star Tex-Mex joint that will makes a mean shrimp quesadilla, and wasn’t much more expensive than the less fancy joints nearby. Our hotel was a resort of timeshares, so our room was the size of a two-bedroom apartment, a timeshare that some sucker couldn’t unload. We arrived before the season, and it was the best deal on a room we got on our whole trip. But staying in a brand-new apartment increased the sense of unreality, and after visiting Joshua Tree National Park, driving around town felt like we were in a simulation. The architecture seemed a jeweled veil over the beautiful desert.

The entrances to Joshua Tree National Park is about an hour from Palm Springs, and the eponymous town has a wild west feel to it, store fronts and saloons along the highway. I thought that arriving by 9:00AM woud beat the heat, but the rangers told us this wasn’t considered early when visiting the desert. Air conditioning and multiple hydration flasks, plus an emergency 6 liter Camelbak bladder, kept us alive.

Don't Die sign, Skull Rock, Cabazon dinosaurs

Joshua Tree is a driving park, but we took an hour to hike out to the Arch and back. I don’t handle exertion in high heat well, but water kept me alive. I handle elevation better than heat, but I was able to climb up the rocks and view the sprawl of the landscape.

We didn’t eschew kitsch entirely while in the park. We listened to U2’s album The Joshua Tree while driving among Joshua Trees in Joshua Tree. The album cover photo was taken in Death Valley, and the tree is long gone, replaced by a marker. I had no desire to find it. I was more enamored of the adorable and prickly cholla cacti, and looking upon the San Andreas Fault down in Coachella Valley, from Key’s View:

Cholla, Key's View, Cholla

We spent hours drinking in the desert beauty, and eventually needed to drink something other than water. The Joshua Tree saloon serves good beer and excellent tacos, and we needed a beer after exploring the park on a 113℉ day. The town of Joshua Tree has the touch of weirdness, and nearby Palm Springs is not immune. When President Eisenhower visited to play golf, he disappeared one evening, ostensibly to have a chipped crown repaired, but conspiracies arose that he was declining an offer from extraterrestrials to gift humanity with alien knowledge if he would dispose of all nuclear weapons. It’s something to ponder, when sipping a date milkshake. I’m not sure that the man who warned us of the military-industrial complex in his famous “Chance for Peace” speech, after the death of Stalin:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Here are a Ladder-backed Woodpecker and a Rock Wren that I saw in Palm Springs. In Joshua Tree we saw neither raven, nor tortoise, chuckwalla, rattlesnake, or roadrunner. But it was beautiful and I’m glad I visited.