Joshua Tree National Park - 2026 Trip
The Geology Tour Road in Joshua Tree National Park looked like enormous and fascinating fund. I had been wanting to drive it at Joshua Tree since we first visited the park in 2008 and were only able to drive part of it in our Saturn. We had to turn around just where it looked like it was becoming super interesting. We bought Mather the Subaru in 2018 exactly so I could drive to those sorts of geologically marvelous places. But one thing or another kept getting in the way, and we hadn't made it back to Joshua Tree. In 2026, however, Eric and I desperately needed a distraction from our grief over Fortitude's loss in January. So, with a February Monday holiday (for me, although not for Eric) I planned a Presidents Day weekend trip.
The trip was doomed from the start. I had originally hoped to visit cousins in Palm Springs, but that visit had to be postponed. I planned to visit my immediate family in Redondo Beach for the latter part of the trip, and the logistics of that also kept changing. The plan I ultimately arrived at was to get up and leave home early Saturday morning, grab Subway sandwiches for dinner along the way, arrive at the park in time for a sunset shoot, munch on the sandwiches until it got dark, and do some night photography. We'd spend the night near the park in Twentynine Palms, have a leisurely morning and breakfast on Sunday, finally drive the Geology Tour Road, and arrive in Redondo Beach in time for one of our sister-in-law's fabulous dinners. Then we'd see my father Monday morning and I'd drive home while Eric worked.
The first part of the plan went reasonably well. We actually arrived at the park sooner than I'd expected. What we did not anticipate was a long line to get in at 4:00 pm. When we finally arrived at the ranger station, we needed a new annual park pass, and we had to buy an exceptionally ugly one. Hopefully they will keep the senior lifetime place program in place long enough for me to buy one next year, and that that one will have a picture of a pretty park scene in accordance with the rules and regulations for park passes.
I had hoped to shoot the sunset from Hidden Valley, but we didn't have enough time to get there after our long wait in the entrance line. We stopped at a random pullout along the road.
Cholla Cactus.
Eric photographed a Cholla Cactus framed by Joshua Trees.
I just barely managed to get a sunset photo.
Joshua Tree.
After the sunset, beautiful colors emerged in the sky.
Eric managed to catch a photo of a SpaceX launch.
Trails left by SpaceX launch.
We sat beside Intersection Rock, eating our sandwiches, waiting for darkness to fall and stars to emerge. Headlamps made astrophotography difficult.
As the skies darkened, they began to cloud over, so this was the best photo I was able to take.
We left Intersection Rock relatively early, around 8:00, knowing now that we would need extra time to reenter the park in the morning. We arrived at the motel where Eric had made a reservation, the Starlight Inn & Suites, sister to the next-door Oasis Inn & Suites, in Twentynine Palms, around 8:30. We highly recommend that you never stay in either of these places, and absolutely that you never make a reservation.
We were shocked when I went to check in and was told that, despite a reservation made directly through the motel's own website and guaranteed with a credit card, no rooms were available. They had given away our reservation, leaving us literally stranded in the desert. On a Saturday night. On Valentine's Day.
We scrambled with our phones for 45 minutes, trying to find an alternative reservation. The best we could do was reserve a $340 room more than an hour away in Indio.
Eric was so discombobulated that he scraped the bumper of the car next to us backing out of the parking spot. He left the driver a note. Fortunately the driver apparently felt that the scrape was not worthy of any particular concern.
It was around this time that I realized that my primary credit card had gone missing after I used it to pay for the annual park pass.
Staying so far away from the park in Indio would add not only more than an extra hour of travel that night, but another two extra hours of driving on Sunday. So much for our plans for a relaxing and restful morning. We were both bitterly angry.
Driving through Yucca Valley, close to the park, we saw a motel with a vacancy sign. Staying there would add even more money (the reservation we'd made in Indio was not cancellable), but it would rescue our weekend and save a considerable amount of time. We decided to stay there.
The Desert Sands Motel was ugly but serviceable. We spent the night.
In the morning, we visited Luna Sourdough Bakery. We decided to eat sandwiches for breakfast, because fish would not keep in the car all day, and get pastries for lunch. The food was quite tasty, although Eric complained about the coffee. We decided to sit and eat our sandwiches. This was more time-consuming than we'd intended, because the sandwiches sat heavily in our stomachs and caused further delays.
We got into the park around 12:30. They did not have my credit card. I was frustrated by the need to cancel it, because it had a particularly easy to remember expiration date and CSV. I blame the horror of the uglification of what should be a happy thing like a park pass.
We set out on the Geology Tour Road around 1:30, almost two hours after I'd hoped to set out. The road is a lollipop. The stick of the lollipop is well graded and mostly rated for any motor vehicle.
We were surrounded by the wonderful gneiss of Joshua Tree, but it wasn't particularly different from the views from the paved road.
Eric photographed Mather with the 4WD sign.
Eric photographed the downhill part of the road ahead, which looked downright steep!
We drove through a deeply rutted part of the road, where we had to drive on the side, at a steep angle. It was scary and thrilling. That was a relatively short stretch, and then road smoothed out a bit, becoming more like dry sand.
Eric photographed the view from the summit, looking out at Queen Valley on the left and Pleasant Valley on the right.
This photo of Eric's shows Malapai Hill, a dark basaltic mass rising between the two valleys. [SOURCE: Joshua Tree National Park Geology, Trent & Hazlett, 2002]
We were surprised to see a couple of people arrive in a FWD Prius. Admittedly, the lower parts of the Prius were fairly dented up. We hurried to get back in Mather, because we didn't to be stuck behind the Prius if it got stuck in the sand on the way down. The downhill turned out not to be as steep as it had looked, and the Prius made it behind us.
We had driven the lollipop loop much more quickly than I had expected, and we were there to take pictures of rocks, so we stopped to see some of the rounded granite boulders.
Eric photographed a Joshua Tree through a window in a rock.
The geology that we see here is created by crustal stretching in the Basin and Range province. As the crust stretches, the granite gets lifted and compressed, and cracks form. Once a crack has formed, it erodes faster than the intact rock. As this preferential erosion continues over time, the intact rock gets more and more rounded. [SOURCE: Joshua Tree National Park Geology, Trent & Hazlett, 2002]
The rocks and trees were beautiful.
We did it! We drove the Geology Tour Road. Other than the expansive view from the summit, it didn't really show us anything we couldn't have seen from the paved road. But we'd achieved it. And it was a lot of fun, just the sort of thing I'd wanted to buy Mather for.
We enjoyed our pastries, which were all most excellent!
Not only was there a line to enter the park, there was a line to exit. You have to show your pass on exit, because some people drive in at night when the ranger booths are not staffed. It seems that for not much more money, rather than having a ranger dedicated to an exit line, they could staff the ranger booths 24 hours and avoid the exit line altogether.
We got out of the park around 4:00, which was later than I'd hoped, but not disastrous. We headed west for Redondo Beach.