California is so rich in national parks (we’ve got 8), it’s a little startling when you realize that the closest one is a solid 3-hour drive from San Diego. That’s Joshua Tree, which wasn’t even a national park when I moved here in 1974. It took 20 more years for the preserve to win that designation, and Steve and I hadn’t been back to the park since that happened.
But there’s something magical about the national park system. Ask Ken Burns. Or ask my friends Donna and Mike Guthrie, who’ve been inspired to try and hike in all 58 of them by the end of the next half-dozen years. They’ve even started a website, Donna and Mike Take a Hike (http://www.hikeallthenationalparks.com). As part of their quest, they invited us and 4 other friends to join them on a recent visit to Joshua Tree.
Unlike many of the national parks, Joshua Tree has no historic lodges nor accommodations of any kind, other than campgrounds. But the towns of Joshua Tree, Yu
cca Valley, and Twentynine Palms lie just outside the park boundaries, and Mike and Donna found a great rental house for our two-night stay. That meant we only had one full day in the park, an impossibly short time to take in even the high points of almost 800,000 acres. But what we did squeeze in was great: a three-mile hike to the 49 Palms oasis, a stop at one of the visitor centers, lunch amidst the fantastically shaped gigantic rockpiles in Hidden Valley, and a ranger-led tour of the remote ranch where Bill and Frances Keys used all their ingenuity to make a living for 60-some years. Just driving through the park also offered striking vistas: virtual forests of the bizarrely shaped yuccas for which the park is named. And we had at least one magical encounter with a well-fed resident coyote, who seemed unafraid of and mildly interested in us.
What we missed entirely was Cottonwood Spring (it was more than 60 miles from where we were staying). It sounds like there are multiple interesting hikes from there. But we can always return. After all, it’s only a 3-hour drive.
