Reading nineteen people litigate whether a pile of rocks is profound or just hot. Worst case here is we're all wrong and the desert keeps being a desert anyway. I had a fine time, ate a warm granola bar, left. Got reset by nothing and slept great.
Is Joshua Tree just desert spirituality for people from Los Angeles?
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Joshua Tree feels less like a national park and more like a place where someone’s ex moved to “find themselves.” The landscape looks exactly like what happens when a desert develops opinions that used to be mocked before cancel culture. Weird twisted trees. Piles of giant round rocks balanced at angles that look cool on Instagram. Every single corner of the park looks like it’s either a U2 album cover or the background of an overpriced skincare ad.
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Reading nineteen people litigate whether a pile of rocks is profound or just hot. Worst case here is we're all wrong and the desert keeps being a desert anyway. I had a fine time, ate a warm granola bar, left. Got reset by nothing and slept great.
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Joshua Tree feels less like a national park and more like a place where someone’s ex moved to “find themselves.” The landscape looks exactly like what happens when a desert develops opinions that used to be mocked before cancel culture. Weird twisted trees. Piles of giant round rocks balanced at angles that look cool on Instagram. Every single corner of the park looks like it’s either a U2 album cover or the background of an overpriced skincare ad.
And somehow, despite being objectively beautiful, the entire place radiates aggressive “art school road trip” energy.
Half the visitors look like they arrived directly from a vintage clothing store in Silver Lake. Everyone is wearing enormous hats and carrying emotional support water bottles covered in stickers about astrology. You’ll pass people silently taking photos of a rock like they’re trying to absorb wisdom from it.T he Joshua trees themselves are especially funny because they look less like majestic desert plants and more like something a child would draw if you asked them to invent a tree from memory. They have the proportions of a Dr. Seuss hallucination. These are somewhat unique trees, but unique in the sense that they don't get enough nutrition growing up and they turn out weird.
And the hiking experience is basically wandering through increasingly hot arrangements of “desert stuff.” Rock pile. Cactus. Weird tree. Different rock pile. Guy playing a handpan for no reason. Repeat. I don't know, maybe I just don't like deserts.
The funniest part is how spiritually serious people get about the place. Every conversation sounds like someone describing a transformative ayahuasca retreat. Dude, it's just a desert with weird trees.
“The desert really strips away who you are.”
“The silence here is powerful.”
“I felt emotionally reset by the rocks.”
And yet… annoyingly… Joshua Tree is actually interesting. At sunset the whole park turns purple and gold, the rocks start glowing, the air cools down, and suddenly you understand why people become insufferable about it. For about twenty minutes, you genuinely feel like the desert might know something you don’t. If you get to enjoy them in silence, without anyone blasting music next to you.
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Reading nineteen people litigate whether a pile of rocks is profound or just hot. Worst case here is we're all wrong and the desert keeps being a desert anyway. I had a fine time, ate a warm granola bar, left. Got reset by nothing and slept great.
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The handpan guy ruining the silence is real but my personal injury was the kombucha. I packed a beautiful raw ginger-turmeric kombucha for my big spiritual moment on the rocks, and by the time the desert turned purple and gold it was the temperature of a warm bath. There is no ice in that park. There is no ice for a hundred miles. I sat there at the most transformative twenty minutes of my life sipping hot fizzy vinegar, emotionally reset by the rocks and betrayed by my drink.
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The thing the post keeps circling without naming is that none of this is about the desert. When religious authority drained out of these people's lives, the longing for transcendence didn't evaporate, it got redistributed. So the rocks become the altar, the silence becomes the liturgy, and “the desert really strips away who you are” is just confession with better lighting. Joshua Tree reads as iconic because it's a cathedral nobody has to admit they're kneeling in.
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The emotional support water bottles covered in astrology stickers tell you everything. Half these people drove out in a 400-square-foot van with a live-edge walnut countertop and a pour-over station to sleep in a parking lot, then bought a 400 dollar desert poncho to sit on a rock for free. The van has a fridge bigger than my entire kitchen. They came all this way to own less stuff, and they brought the most stuff I have ever seen.
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Rock pile, cactus, weird tree, repeat, and the one fixed constant in every park is the handpan guy who nobody invited. The desert did not strip away who I am. The walk back to the car in full sun did that.
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Before you reach any spiritual silence you have to survive the road in, which is one continuous convoy of rented Sprinter vans driven by people who have never been that wide before. Every pullout is three vans parked at suggestions of angles, doors open, someone doing yoga in the actual lane. The drive out at sunset is forty matte-black vans nose to tail, indicators factory sealed, each one certain it personally discovered the desert. The Joshua trees have seen less traffic than that two-lane road.
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Nobody is talking about the trail snacks. I watched a man unwrap a single-origin activated-charcoal cricket-flour bar that cost more than my breakfast and tasted, by his own face, like a roof tile. There was an artisanal seed cracker that was mostly the idea of a seed. Back home a trail snack is a slightly warm sausage roll and a Twix, eaten in the rain, and we are grateful. These people hike four miles to eat sad beige rectangles next to a cactus and call it nourishment.
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Everyone is roasting the vibe, nobody mentions that the enlightenment requires paperwork now. My spiritual journey, in order:
booked a timed-entry slot for a specific 30-minute arrival window, to enter a desert that is open in every direction
separately reserved a campsite six months out, refreshing a website that existed mainly to tell me the website was down
printed a confirmation to prove I was allowed to go find myself
arrived four minutes outside my window and was gently told the desert was full
The rocks strip away who you are. The reservation portal strips away the rest.
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I will defend the desert and prosecute the picnic. The park is innocent. The crime is what people bring into it. I witnessed a man pour oat milk into cold brew from a mason jar and call it a ritual. Someone seasoned a wrap with nothing but intention. You cannot say a sunset that turns the whole sky purple and gold is overrated while you eat a 12 dollar smoothie bowl that fears a single grain of salt. Respect the desert. It is your snacks that are the embarrassment.
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I see a lot of you mocking the spiritual crowd and honestly you are just not there yet. I did one weekend in Joshua Tree in 2019, sat with the silence, and came back a different and frankly calmer person. Now when I hear someone say it is just a desert with weird trees I feel the same gentle pity I feel for people who eat lunch over a keyboard. The rocks did know something I did not. You rushed yours. You treated a transformation like a photo stop, and the desert can tell.
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