A guide to Joshua Tree National Park, CA Paloma Torres/Staff California is home to Joshua Tree National Park, the namesake of the 1987 U2 album and one of my favorite places in the whole world. To the naive eye, it’s a seemingly boundless desert of large rocks, but to the keen observer, Joshua Tree is an eclectic, artistic and vibrant desert, where the yellows are gold and the reds are magenta. It is here where my dad and I drove together one random August afternoon after I had some sort of breakdown due to reasons that I can’t even remember anymore. We drove two hours to sit in silence, simply to feel the coolness of the rocks against our backs while the harsh sun beat down on my stressed self.