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Joshua Tree National Park
California
Used to be, southern California's deserts were largely ignored by Angelenos with outdoor play on the brain. Joshua Tree was a little-visited national monument — it had plenty of desert scenery but lacked the kind of dramatic natural wonders that put Yosemite, Death Valley, and Yellowstone on the map. Then, slowly but surely, word began to trickle out that the best winter rock climbing anywhere in the United States was here. Instead of stowing their ropes and rock shoes when snows ended the season in Yosemite and other Sierra Nevada hot spots, climbers began to make pilgrimages to the warm monzogranite faces of Joshua Tree.
 Joshua Tree National Park
Soon, campers and hikers and other desert nature lovers followed. When President Clinton signed the California Desert Protection Act and turned Joshua Tree into a national park in 1994, its rise to prominence was complete. As next-door neighbor to the Los Angeles megalopolis Joshua Tree has naturally become a very popular getaway, but the park remains a wonderfully low-key place, 75 percent of its land designated wilderness.
Joshua Tree National Park encompasses one of the most interesting and diverse patches of desert in the United States. Its namesake species, the spiky, dramatically crooked Joshua tree, is also considered by many to be the defining characteristic of the Mojave Desert. But this huge desert park actually lies at the meeting point of the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts: The park's eastern and southern precincts, with sub 3,000-foot elevation and plants such as creosote bush,"jumping" cholla cactus, and spidery ocotillo, is Sonoran in character; its western precincts are higher, cooler, wetter, and quite densely forested with the park's namesake tree.
You'll find the tumbled granite boulders to which the park owes its recent fame in the high central range. And don't miss the towering fan-palm oases, where an entire realm of wildlife revolves around their precious water.
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