Spectacular land where deserts meet

"The Transition Zone."

It runs through the heart of Joshua Trees National Monument and creates an ecological melting pot where two deserts meet and mingle.

To the south and east, the drier, lower Colorado Desert features the creosote bush, the spidery branches of the ocotillo, the jumping chollas (pronounced "cho-ya") cactus and Pinto Basin and sounding mountains.

The northern and western part is Mojave Desert, rockier, wetter, higher, cooler, and home to vast forests of Joshua trees.

Both deserts share the common trait of being sculpted by water and each is home to one or more of the five fantail-palm oases within the monument.

Joshua Trees reaches from near sea level to the 5,461-foot Ryan Mountain, with spectacular views (in the morning before the smog drifts in from Los Angeles 145 miles west) from the 5,185 foot Keys View.

The desert is an arid intense, yet fragile environment teeming with life.

Rain seldom falls, but can quickly become a torrent when it does, creating flash floods and dramatically reshaping areas that hadn't changed in years and had looked dry and dead moments before.

Shrubs and trees, such as the smoke tree, depend on the spare rainfall to survive. They have adapted to a desert environment.

Smoke trees grow in mountain washes, waiting for torrents of rain to pour down the stream bed. The flash flood washes away the old smoke trees and roughs up the seeds of the new. The seeds cannot sprout until its surface sustains abrasions.

Adaptability is key to desert survival.

So many plants are like the ocotillo. Until the slightest rain falls, it seems dry, dead and brittle, but the cactus suddenly sprouts green leaves, and red flowers bloom on the ends of its up to 15-foot-long branches. Ocotillo can bloom a half-dozen times a year.

Visiting the desert in the spring, when the wildflowers bloom, illustrates the vibrancy of the desert.

Wildflowers bloom at slightly different times in the higher and lower elevations, but almost all are active in March and April, which is the best time for the annuals, yuccas and Joshua trees.

The wildflower season begins in February in the low desert and can last to June in the high desert and has spectacular blooms on the average of every 20 years, with the last one being 1988.

1991 is having a late bloom because of the rainfall of the "Miracle March." The desert is not the forbidding environment so many think of.

Joshua Trees has been home to Indians who left behind shards of pottery and rock paintings they made while traveling through. The found much to eat: pinyon nuts, mesquite beans, acorns and cactus fruit.

In the late 1800s, the Indians were joined by cattlemen, miners and other explorers, who mined the land for gold, built dams to catch water, and tried to be homesteaders. Their mines remain and tours can be arranged to see the remainders of the Desert Queen Ranch.

Early Mormon explorers are responsible for naming the Joshua tree. They looked at the uplifted branches, pointing heavenward, and thought of Joshua in prayer to God.

A member of the agave family, the Joshua or tree yucca is found only in North American in California, Arizona, Utah and Nevada, almost exclusively in the open grasslands of the Mojave Desert, between 2,000- and 6,000-foot elevations.

Scientists are unable to determine how old individual Joshua trees are because they don't have normal growth rings like pines and maples do. The Joshua's trunk is built of thousands of small fibers.

Joshuas have shallow root system, which helps absorb the maximum amount of water from the arid desert, and a top-heavy branch system, so it isn't a sturdy tree. But they can grow as tall as 70 feet and live several hundred years.

Indians ate its fruit and flowers, a creamy white blossom which tends to appear between February and April, but doesn't bloom annually because of a wide variety of environmental factors.

The Joshua tree provides housing to the yucca night lizard, antelope ground squirrel, desert woodrat, cactus wren, Scott's oriole, and red-tailed hawk.

It was the destruction of these odd-looking trees in the 1930s that led Pasadena conservationist Minerva H. Hoyt to lobby for federal protection of the unusual environment.

President Franklin Roosevelt created the monument by proclamation in 1936; however, Congress removed one-third of the area in 1950 in order to allow mining but then designated more than 467,000 (700 square miles) of the 558,000 acres of Joshua Tree National Monument as a wilderness in 1976.

National parks are created by acts of Congress. National monuments are set aside by presidential decrees. Wilderness areas receive special protection, such as almost total prohibitions against any development.

Like most state and national parks, Joshua Trees is geared to several types of camping experiences and exploration.

There are car campgrounds, wilderness areas and campsites, hundreds of miles of hiking trails, 109 miles of paved road that allow less physically mobile people to see the landscape and take a few very short hikes, and 200 miles of dirt and four-wheel drive routes.

Rock climbers frequent the Mojave area of the park, where the landscape offers them hundreds of challenging peaks. And mountain biking is also popular throughout the park. Biking is allowed on many tails.

Hikers can easily reach old mines, dams pioneers built, rocks nature has shaped like skulls, rocky canyons hidden from view by fallen boulders and dozens of other points of geologic and historic interest.

Rainfall averages about 3 inches per year in the park. Spring time high temperatures average in the 80s and 90s. While summer tops the 100 mark, the fall and winter peaks descend into the 60s.

Joshua Trees has nine campgrounds developed with tables, fire pits and toilets. Two of the nine also have running water. Water must be carried in for the other seven.

Reservations can be made through Ticketron for the campsites with water. The rest are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

The monument is located 145 miles east of Los Angles by way of Interstate 10 to Highway 62. The main visitors center is located in Twentynine Palms and there are two small centers at the other two park entrances.

For further information, you can write Superintendent, Joshua Trees National Monument, 74485 National Monument Drive, Twentynine Palms, 92277, or call (619) 367-7511.