Desert Snow

Very few people are lucky enough to see Joshua Tree in the snow, and when they do, it’s often a light dusting. Whenever I’ve visited, the temperatures have soared in a typically dry desert landscape, occasionally topping 100 degrees. This week, we had the rare opportunity to see it, not just with a dusting of snow but with deep, driven snow.

Joshua Tree is the meeting of two different desert ecosystems, the Colorado and Mojave deserts. They mainly exist at different elevations, and I’ve never seen the difference so distinctly marked. As soon as we climbed from the Colorado to the Mojave desert, the snow began to pile up.

The drive there should have been 7 or 8 hours, but the storms closed many roads, and in the end, it took 13 hours. It was worth it to see an iconic landscape transformed so dramatically; it was something special indeed.