A Desert Epiphany in Joshua Tree
The desert wreaks strangeness, epiphany, and apocalypse on many. Witness the tale of rocker Gram Parsons, who loved Joshua Tree's Cap Rock so much that, when he died of a drug overdose in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn in 1973, his friend Phil Kaufman stole the body from authorities and -- purportedly per Parsons' wishes -- attempted to cremate Parsons at Cap Rock. He didn't pull it off -- one can only imagine the difficulties -- but the story serves to adequately illustrate the desert's powerful draw.
Spend time in Joshua Tree and surrounding environs, where the Mojave and Colorado deserts meld, and you will come to understand what bewitched Parsons, and what continues to render present day seekers spellbound. The specifics are impossible to pinpoint -- they are specific to the bewitched -- but the underlying premise is simple. Here is a place to find yourself, and lose yourself.
As Jima Reed, straddling his mountain bike in the moonlight, explains, "There are two reasons people come out here. To find themselves, and to recreate and have a good time."
We are riding in the desert at the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, an area known to locals (and lucky mountain bike riders) as "Sector 6." We are lucky to be here because Jima, who owns Joshua Tree Bicycle Shop, knows Joshua Tree intimately. His Joshua family tree goes back four generations.
Jima pauses. The rest of us are silent. It is well past sunset. The world has already purpled and lost its sharp edges. The moon, swollen and full, is rising. The darkening desert is settling into itself, the surrounding rocks, pronging up like giant thumbs, reflect the moon's first silver brushstrokes.
The wind whispers something through the rocks and Jima grins.
"Yea," he says. "Soul-searching recreationalists," and with that he wheels off down the lovely, looping singletrack with his friends.
Watching them go, I make my decision.
An hour later we regroup, the lot of us sprawling across silver-strewn boulders and staring up at a universe of stars. There are times in your life when you know there is nowhere else you'd rather be.
Exploring Joshua Tree and its surrounding landscape is a pretty big undertaking: Joshua Tree National Park alone covers nearly 800,000 acres. Your options, as you might imagine, are pretty much unlimited. The town of Joshua Tree rests near the park's west entrance. From here, you might explore Hidden Valley and hike the short (1.1 mile) looping trail to Barker Dam. You might poke around the Gunsmoke area, watching boulderers make their seemingly impossible way up, over and upside down on rock that sings out to climbers from around the world. You might even head to nearby Cap Rock, which, along with being an edifice of legend, is one of the best (and most popular: less solitude here than there was in Gram Parson's time) places in the park for beginning climbers, with its wide selection of routes (slabs, cracks, faces), and many stacks of boulders. Ten minutes here tidily underscores Joshua Tree's reputation as a climbing mecca.
No surprise, with its penchant for lightning strikes (or slow crawlings) of strangeness, epiphany, and apocalypse, Joshua Tree is also a haven for artists. Galleries are easy to find along Twenty-nine Palms Highway and the town's few backstreets, but (again, no surprise) some of the most interesting art is found farther afield. The Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Museum of Assemblage Structure is as grand as its name; some 10 acres of wide-to-the-sky desert strewn with all manner of art and oddity (sometimes hard to tell the difference; maybe that's the point). I won't demean Purifoy's intensely imaginative work with description, but I will make one important note. Purifoy understood the desert. He arrived here in 1989. He died here in 2004. In between he purposefully created outdoor art that would be slowly changed by a unique world.
It is a world that must be experienced, at points, alone. Precisely why, when Jima and his friends ride off down the singletrack, I briefly pause ("What if I crash and die out here?") and then ride up the trail into vast, empty space.
It is the finest thing, riding alone beneath the glowing moon with the workings of your lungs and the soaring of your heart.
A small desert epiphany.
In the cool night, the oddly crooked Joshua Trees bend in respectful silence.