Hiking in the Desert

I was recently speaking with a new friend and mentioned that I love hiking.

“Oh, me too,” they said. “Where do you like to hike?”

Now, I like to hike in all kinds of places. One of the amazing things about living in California is that you don’t even need to leave the state to hike in just about any type of environment you like. But usually, when someone asks me that, they want to know which Los Angeles-area hikes I like. And, unfortunately, I don’t ever have a response to that.

“I usually travel a bit to hike,” I confided. “I do a lot of hiking in the Mojave.”

“Oh, I don’t like hiking in the desert,” she said. “It’s too flat.”

I get it. It took me until about a decade into living in Southern California to even visit Joshua Tree, and once I did, it was anything but love at first sight – and I think that’s part of what excites me so much about the desert.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love hiking at elevation. I love the glacial topography of the Sierras; the chaparral of the Santa Monica Mountains and the San Gabriels. But there’s just something about the desert – and specifically the Mojave – that keeps calling me back.

For years, I have said that it’s because everything there shouldn’t be. It’s a harsh environment. Nothing should be able to survive in it, but that’s not the whole story.

See, I believe the desert does something to your perspective. The mountains take you up high, away from everything. The desert brings you down to it. You’re inside the vastness. You can’t escape your fears in the desert. They’re at eye level; you must walk among them. The exposure is constant – the heat, the distance, the silence – and eventually your inner noise has nowhere left to echo. What remains is not comfort, but clarity. You learn which fears are real, and which ones only needed space to pass.

I am a big believer in the ability of toil to clarify our thoughts. The mountains are incredible for that, but perhaps just as effective is monotony. Recently, I was walking along Juniper Flats Road in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s a tedious walk, and at some point I realized I’d slipped into a kind of meditative trance, mulling over my problems. There was nothing to distract my mind from itself, so it turned inward. In the Sierras, beauty competes for your attention—water, trees, views. The desert is sparse, which leaves more space to notice your breath, the sound of your footsteps, or that looming deadline waiting back at work.

Everything in the desert feels earned, too. Just look around you – the plants that stand are the survivors. To stand among them, you must be a survivor, too. You don’t take comfort for granted in the desert. You don’t assume the land is there to support you. In fact, you know that it is not. It does not care about you. You do not feel like part of its ecosystem, and there’s just something about that that, for me, creates a quiet gratitude. You adapt to it.

On top of that, there is just a feeling of time in a place like the Mojave Desert. That humans have come here and survived here is a testament to their will. I used to see a town like Goffs or Bagdad and think, Why here? On the westward march of civilization, why stop at somewhere so arid, so demanding, so unforgiving? I get it now. Time moves slowly there. What you have is yours, and it is earned. You can feel ancestral humans in every bend of the landscape. You could live and die a thousand times in a single desert sunset.

I’m not sure that someone who finds the desert “too flat for hiking” is ever going to love it the way that I do, and maybe that’s the point. Maybe it takes a certain kind of person, or a certain kind of way of seeing the world, but I am endlessly fascinated by every small bloom I come across. People who love desert hiking are perhaps just more drawn to truth without decoration. It doesn’t entertain you in the way that a glacial valley might. It doesn’t rescue you. It simply exists, and it asks you to do the same.