Why we go back to Joshua Tree every year
This is a family trip we make every year — Joshua Tree National Park, straddling the Mojave and Colorado deserts a couple hours east of LA. It's not a hard park to fall for: the Joshua trees themselves look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, and the granite boulder piles scattered across the landscape look deliberate, like someone stacked them, even though it's all just a few hundred million years of erosion.
Part of the appeal is how much the park changes depending on where you are in it — the Joshua trees are concentrated in the higher-elevation western half, while the lower Colorado Desert side further east and south is where you start seeing more cactus, less tree cover. Same park, two different deserts.
No profound conclusion here — just a place worth returning to, and an excuse to get away from screens (market notes and AI experiments included) for a few days a year.