Joshua Tree National Park United States

Legendary

View the unique Joshua trees native to the Mojave Desert.

Photo by Henrique Pinto

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In the 1920s, people started driving into this desert and digging up the plants. Collectors hauled away cactus by the truckload to sell as decorations for gardens in Los Angeles.

A woman from Pasadena named Minerva Hoyt decided to stop it. She spent years building traveling exhibits of desert plants and showing them in New York and London to prove the desert was worth saving.

Her campaign reached President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1936, he set aside 825,000 acres as Joshua Tree National Monument.

Hoyt almost didn't get that much. Officials first suggested protecting only 138,000 acres, so she complained directly to the Secretary of the Interior until they agreed to a far bigger area.

People lived here long before any of that. The Pinto Culture came first, followed by the Serrano, the Chemehuevi, and the Cahuilla.

They left behind cave paintings, pottery, and stone tools. The park now has 501 known archaeological sites.

In 1950, Congress cut about 290,000 acres out of the monument so companies could mine and graze cattle there. That land stayed unprotected for decades.

The California Desert Protection Act changed that in 1994. It gave the land back and turned the monument into a full national park.

The park sits where two deserts meet. The higher, cooler Mojave Desert covers the west, and the lower, hotter Colorado Desert covers the east.

Joshua trees only grow in the Mojave side. They aren't really trees at all, but a type of yucca plant, and they can live for 150 years or more.

Scramble across the giant rock piles at Hidden Valley, some of the best climbing boulders in the country. Drive out to Keys View at sunset for a view stretching to the Salton Sea. Stay after dark, since the park is a designated Dark Sky Park and the Milky Way is easy to spot.