The California Desert
The hottest, driest, lowest place on the continent — and in the cool months, the most alive: superblooms, singing dunes, and stars you forgot existed.
A quarter of California is desert, and almost none of it is empty. This is where the state keeps its extremes: the lowest ground in North America at Badwater and the hottest air ever measured on Earth at Furnace Creek, dunes that boom like cellos when they slide, stones that sail across a dry lakebed, and — every few winters, when the rain cooperates — wildflower blooms so violent they show up from orbit. Death Valley is the largest national park in the lower 48, Anza-Borrego the largest state park in California, and Joshua Tree the winter capital of American climbing. The desert's secret is its calendar: come October through May and this is the gentlest, starriest, most spacious country in the state.
Two deserts share the region, and Joshua Tree National Park is the seam where they meet: the high Mojave — cooler, wetter, the Joshua tree's home — and the low Colorado, an arm of the Sonoran that runs down through Anza-Borrego to the Mexican border. The terrain works in extremes. Badwater Basin lies 282 feet below the sea while Telescope Peak stands two vertical miles directly above it — you can stand in salt flats and look up at eleven thousand feet of mountain wearing snow. The Racetrack's sailing stones dragged their mystery trails across a dry playa for a century until cameras caught the answer in 2014: thin panes of overnight ice, sailing the rocks on a breeze. Kelso Dunes boom — a deep, resonant hum when sand avalanches down the slip face — and Ubehebe Crater marks a steam blast just a few thousand years old. It is the youngest, rawest landscape in California, doing its geology in plain sight.
4 more chapters, plus when to go and the gateway towns — included with the Atlas subscription. Every destination in this region is listed below, free.
See plans →The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway is the fastest way to change your environment in California: 10 minutes in a rotating gondola r…
Ryan Mountain is the high-payoff summit of Joshua Tree National Park — a short but genuinely steep 3-mile round trip that climb…
The single best introduction to Death Valley's badlands. You wind up a golden-walled canyon past the fin of Manly Beacon, detou…
North America's lowest ground, a blinding sheet of crystallized salt stretching to the Panamints. There is no formal trail — yo…
The most famous view in the park — an overlook onto a sea of wrinkled golden badlands with Manly Beacon rising like a sail. Bey…
The single best short walk in the park — a one-mile loop that threads through a gap in the rocks into a natural boulder-walled …
Jumbo Rocks is the quintessential Joshua Tree campground — sites nestled among the park's surreal piles of giant, rounded monzo…
Hidden Valley is the spiritual home of Joshua Tree rock climbing — a first-come campground tucked among the boulders at the cen…
Furnace Creek is the heart of Death Valley — a below-sea-level campground (at -190 feet) beside the park's main visitor center,…
Joshua Tree's landscape looks like someone assembled it from a child's drawing of a desert — rounded boulders stacked improbabl…
Hidden Valley Campground is the Camp 4 of Southern California - the historic beating heart of Joshua Tree climbing, where gener…
Real Hidden Valley is Joshua Tree's crown jewel of moderate-to-hard trad - a roughly one-mile nature-trail loop just south of t…
Intersection Rock is the postcard of Joshua Tree - the great roadside monolith standing at the crossroads of Park Boulevard and…
There is no off-road experience in California that scales like Glamis. The Imperial Sand Dunes stretch 40 miles in a band avera…
Death Valley contains more vertical change than any national park in the US — from the lowest point in North America (Badwater …
Death Valley National Park, certified as a Gold-Tier International Dark Sky Park in 2013, offers some of the darkest skies in t…
Joshua Tree National Park, an International Dark Sky Park since 2017, is California's most beloved and photogenic stargazing de…
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California's largest state park at some 600,000 acres and an International Dark Sky Park since …
Mount San Jacinto rises over 10,000 feet almost straight up from the desert floor at Palm Springs — one of the most dramatic es…
The park's most accessible dune field, rolling right up to the highway near Stovepipe Wells. There is no trail — you climb the …
The park's flagship oasis hike — a rolling desert traverse through washes and past Cottonwood Spring that ends at a hidden cany…
A compact loop up a rocky canyon to a 60-foot waterfall right at the edge of Palm Springs, on sacred Agua Caliente Cahuilla lan…
The single richest desert-oasis complex in California, on ancestral Cahuilla land: Palm Canyon is an almost unreal ribbon of th…
Borrego Palm Canyon is the developed heart of Anza-Borrego, California's largest state park — a vast desert wilderness where a …
Death Valley National Park offers some of the most extraordinary and extreme road cycling in the world — vast, quiet desert roa…
Death Valley — the hottest, driest, and lowest place in North America — offers some of the most otherworldly and extreme desert…
Indian Cove is Joshua Tree's north-side enclave - a geographically separate section reached off Highway 62, with its own campgr…
Every February, Johnson Valley hosts the King of the Hammers — a race described simply as the world's toughest off-road competi…
Anza-Borrego is the largest state park in California and one of the most extraordinary desert landscapes in North America. Its …
Where Anza-Borrego requires vehicles to stay on established roads, Ocotillo Wells SVRA throws those rules out entirely. The 85,…
The Mojave Road follows a route that Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, and American settlers used to cross the Mojave Des…
Titus Canyon is Death Valley's signature backcountry drive — a spectacular 27-mile, one-way route through the Grapevine Mountai…
The crown of Death Valley — from the summit you can see both the lowest point in North America (Badwater, −282 ft) and the high…
The desert's best adventure hike: a loop that climbs a series of ladders bolted into a genuine slot canyon, then returns down t…
A true rarity — a spring-fed waterfall veiled in maidenhair fern deep in a boulder-choked desert canyon. The route climbs throu…
A gentle climb across the flank of Cima Dome — a near-perfect granite swell — through what was the densest Joshua tree forest o…