Joshua Tree National Park in southern California is a "sleeper" wilderness that reveals itself only gradually, and then knocks the unsuspecting visitor over like a rock slide. We were so taken by it that we visited the park twice in one year's time: first, camping in our  van, Morgan, and the second time around "glamping" (i.e., fake camping) with our sons, Ryan and Evan.

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On our first visit we entered from the south off Interstate 10, where the gray, barren low Colorado Desert (part of the 

Sonoran Desert) conjures up images of desperate early pioneers plodding through the harsh landscape en route to the goldfields. Up into the foothills we drove, and soon octopus-like ocotillo plants and the seemingly fuzzy but ever-so-prickly cholla cacti dotted the stark expanses. Soon we spied the first sand-colored boulder outcroppings and the eccentric namesake plants for which the park is named: we had reached the high Mohave Desert, home to the Joshua Tree. Actually a form of yucca plant, Joshuas stand like well-spaced soldiers on the desert floor, their many branches twisting this way and that. Though we didn't scramble up the enormous boulders that dot the landscape ("bouldering" is not our sport!), we felt like Fred and Wilma Flintstone camping amongst those land forms.

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When we returned to Joshua Tree a year later with our sons, we traveled in our Toyota and "glamped" at an RV resort near the northern entrance to the park. It was fun--and a bit odd!--staying in a campground where everyone is housed in identical, stationary stainless-steel paneled Airstreams arranged around a clubhouse. 

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Joshua Tree NP taught us a lesson about the desert that we keep with us: whereas a woodland forest is easy to admire at first glance, appreciating the desert takes a little conditioning, and then something "clicks" and the eyes see things that were not there before.

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"The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love." John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901

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