BURSTING WITH INSPIRATION
Harsh. Hostile. And a little bit of heaven. Desert parks, including Joshua Tree, offer plenty of places to escape, explore or just absorb the magic of the quiet. Here’s why we’re drawn to them and how something that seems so unwelcoming can restore us.
BY DAVID KELLY The lure of the desert is as complex as the arid landscape itself. It’s a place of revelation and escape, a parched world offering rare solitude and unexpected beauty. But more than anything, it’s a vast expanse of rock and sky where the elemental powers of heat, light and wind run free. And for those of us in the West, it’s never far away.
North America is home to four major deserts. The sprawling Chihuahuan Desert stretches through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas before turning south into Mexico. The Sonoran Desert, the wettest and most biologically diverse, takes in swaths of Southern California, Arizona and Baja California.
The Mojave, where broad sandy basins meet soaring mountains in California, is the smallest and driest desert. And the Great Basin Desert, spreading through Nevada, Utah, eastern California and Idaho, is the coldest.
Within these harsh and varied landscapes are dozens of desert parks hosting unique plants, animals and geology.
Like botany? Visit Saguaro National Park in Arizona in spring to see the blooming saguaro cactuses. Bizarre geology? Try Devil’s Golf Course in California’s Death Valley National Park. Spectacular pictographs? Hike to the Holy Ghost Panel in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. Desert snow? Go to Great Basin National Park in Nevada.
“In the early years of the National Park Service, there was a national bias toward thinking of parks as landscapes with trees, meadows, lakes and mountains,” said Mike Reynolds, superintendent at Death Valley. “Slowly that attitude has changed.”
We are increasingly drawn to desert destinations. They are among the few places where we can sit, listen and hear something we didn’t expect: nothing. And that’s something.
“A friend took me camping in Joshua Tree National Park years ago, and as soon as I got out of my car I felt this irresistible pull to stillness,” said Darren Main, who leads
meditation trips to the park every year. “It forced my mind into quiet almost instantly. It is a metaphor for what we try to achieve in yoga — becoming empty.”
Perhaps the need to disconnect from an overly connected world is behind the surge in visitors to desert parks.
Joshua Tree National Park had 2 million visitors in 2015, a record, and expects 2.4 million this year. Death Valley had 1.1 million visitors last year, the most in more than a decade. In March, 213,212 people came through its gates — 60% more than in any single month in park history.
Deserts weren’t always as popular. For thousands of years they suffered a major image problem.
Even great faiths born in the desert — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — often saw them more as hostile wilderness or crucibles for prophets and peoples than a nice place for a hike.
Satan didn’t tempt Jesus at the beach; he did it in the desert. When Yahweh punished the Israelites, he didn’t send them for a stroll in an alpine meadow; he marched them around the scorching Sinai for 40 years.
The desert is a powerful, transformative place that has laid the foundations for many of our ideas of law and justice while inspiring some of history’s greatest literature.
In fact, “desert” may be one of the oldest words in the world, according to UC Davis history professor Diana K. Davis. In her book, “The Arid Lands,” she said “desert” may come from the Egyptian hieroglyph pronounced “tesert,” which became the Latin deserere, meaning to abandon and forsake, before becoming the “desert” we know today.
Call it what you will; just don’t call it barren.
“That’s the perception of people from overly green places,” said Frazier Haney, conservation director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust in Joshua Tree, dedicated to acquiring and protecting desert places. “It’s all about looking closely.”
Haney hails from chlorophyllrich Indiana, but he has put his verdant past behind him. Last Thanksgiving he wrapped a turkey in six layers of foil and buried it with hot charcoal in Mojave National Preserve . Five hours later it was done. “Best turkey I ever ate,” he said. As tough as deserts are, they are also fragile. Some scientists estimate that climate change could kill all the Joshua trees in Joshua Tree
National Park in as little as 50 years.
“You now see grass between Joshua trees, and that grass allows fire to spread from tree to tree,” Haney said. “They don’t do well in fire. They can recover somewhat, but after a few times they’re gone.”
The famously twisted member of the yucca family also requires a deep freeze in winter for its seeds to emerge from its pods. That’s hard to do when it’s getting hotter.
And deserts don’t just sit there. Their ecosystems absorb carbon dioxide from the air like a big sponge, helping reduce one of the primary agents of climate change.
Danielle Segura, who heads the land trust, has been smitten with the desert since childhood when she witnessed a tarantula migration outside Amboy, Calif.
As we walked, she spied a desert mariposa lily, a single orange flower emerging from the sand. Fragile yet tough. Soon we were all ogling purple delphiniums, paperbag bushes and cactus blooms. Madena Asbell, who is creating a seed bank of local plants for the trust, swooned over flowers smaller than a match head.
Desert life is nuanced. Not big and bold, but small and tough. Even the soil is alive with layers of algae, lichens, microfungi and bacteria known as cryptobiotic crust.
“This is a unique landscape right up there with rainforests and coral reefs,” Segura said. “The desert is really a model of how we need to live. It uses all of its resources wisely, can sustain itself efficiently and is adaptable.” It’s also generous. When the stress of daily life snuffs out our spiritual pilot light, the desert can reignite it.
Just sit, be still and listen.