Joshua Tree National Park
— — the tree that only grows where the cold can find it.
Not only on a wall.
“The high desert east of Los Angeles, where the Mojave drops into the Colorado Desert and the Joshua trees stop. Granite monzogranite piles up in soft round stacks the climbers call jumbled boulders; the trees themselves are yuccas, not trees, branching only after they bloom. Days run hot and dry, nights drop fast. The Milky Way arrives by ten. Cholla Cactus Garden lights up gold for about twenty minutes after sunrise, then goes back to being itself. from the studio
Joshua Tree National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Joshua Tree National Park covers roughly 3,217 square kilometres of southern California desert, straddling the line where the higher, cooler Mojave Desert meets the lower, hotter Colorado Desert. Elevations across the park range from about 165 metres in the eastern Pinto Basin to 1,772 metres at Quail Mountain. The Joshua tree itself, Yucca brevifolia, grows only in the Mojave and only where winter cold triggers its bloom, which is why the species stops near the park's southern boundary. The site became a national monument in 1936 and was upgraded to a national park in 1994.
The signature rock is monzogranite, an intrusive igneous stone roughly 100 million years old, exposed and rounded by groundwater weathering before the overlying rock eroded away. The result is the soft, stacked piles around Hidden Valley, Jumbo Rocks, and Indian Cove. These formations make Joshua Tree one of the great rock-climbing destinations in North America, with more than 8,000 named routes and 400 climbing formations. The boulders take morning light gold and afternoon light deep orange, then settle into a long blue dusk before the stars arrive.
Three entrances serve the park: the West Entrance at Joshua Tree village, the North Entrance at Twentynine Palms, and the South Entrance off Interstate 10 near Cottonwood Spring. The standard entry fee is 30 dollars per vehicle for seven days. Best visited October through May; summer highs run regularly above 38°C and water is not available at most stops. The park is a designated International Dark Sky Park, and Keys View at sunset reads down across the Coachella Valley to the Salton Sea. Carry more water than you think you need.