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Rio Ranch Market (Map; 760-367-7216; cnr Twentynine Palms Hwy & Tamarisk Rd; 7am-10pm; ) Shop here for groceries and produce.

Joshua Tree

JT Country Kitchen (Map; 760-366-8988; 61768 Twentynine Palms Hwy; most mains $4-8; breakfast & lunch) This roadside shack serves down home cookin’: eggs, pancakes, biscuits with gravy, sandwiches and…what’s this? Cambodian noodles and salads? Try the crispy chicken or peanut chicken salad.

Beatnik Cafe (Map; 760-366-2090; www.jtbeat.com; 61597 Twentynine Palms Hwy; mains $4-9; 11am-11pm most nights; ) This funky strip-mall coffeehouse with beat-up furniture serves breakfasts, sandwiches and light meals, like the Beatnik pizza with pesto and artichoke hearts. There’s something doing almost every night: films, live music, open mic etc. Young crowd.

Crossroads Café (Map; 760-366-5414; 61715 Twentynine Palms Hwy; dishes $6-10; 7am-8pm Thu-Tue; ) The much-loved Crossroads serves healthy breakfasts, huge sandwiches, big salads and tasty dinner specials. Earth-goddess atmosphere.

Sam’s Pizza (Map; 760-366-9511; 61380 Twentynine Palms Hwy; mains $8-11; lunch & dinner Mon-Sat, dinner Sun; ) Pizza? Yeah, but cognoscenti come here for Indian dishes like chicken tikka masala and aloo gobhi. Atmosphere: nil. Solution: takeout.

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GETTING THERE & AWAY

The only way to reach Joshua Tree is by car. Rent one in Palm Springs or Los Angeles. From LA the trip takes two to three hours via I-10; from Palm Springs it takes about an hour, depending on where you enter the park.

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ANZA-BORREGO DESERT STATE PARK

Encompassing some of SoCal’s most spectacular and accessible desert scenery, the little-developed Anza-Borrego comprises almost a fifth of San Diego County and extends almost all the way to Mexico, making it the largest state park in the USA outside Alaska: 640,000 acres, or 51% of the land in the California state-park system.

Human history here goes back 10,000 years, evidenced by the site’s Native American pictographs. The park is named for Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza, who in 1774 led some 240 soldiers and colonists through the area, and the borregos (Spanish for ‘bighorn sheep’) they no doubt saw. These are viewable even today, along with jackrabbits, roadrunners, kit fox and mule deer. In the 1850s, Borrego Springs became a stop along the Butterfield stagecoach line, which delivered mail between St Louis and San Francisco.

Winter and spring are high season here. In spring, wildflowers bloom in brilliant displays of bright color, a striking contrast to the subtle earth tones you’ll see here all year long. Summers are extremely hot, hotter than in Joshua Tree. The average daily maximum temperature in July is 107°F, but it can reach 125°F.

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DETOUR: INTEGRATRON

In the late 1940s, former aerospace engineer George van Tassel moved to the desert and began meditating near giant rocks on a desolate stretch some 10 miles north-northwest of Joshua Tree. The story is that visitors from Venus arrived in a flying saucer and told him of a process for cell rejuvenation involving a dome based on principles of sacred geometry. He began work on it in 1953. Van Tassel called the dome at once a time machine, a rejuvenation machine and an anti-gravity device. There’s no documentation of its actually achieving any of that, but the Integratron (off Map; 760-364-3126; www.integratron.com; 2477 Belfield Boulevard, Landers; depending on number of people, sound baths $25-50 ; check website) is still worth a visit. The draw today is 30-minute ‘sound baths’, in which docents stroke crystal bowls under the acoustically perfect dome; many visitors report an out-of-body experience, so maybe van Tassel realized his goal after all.

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ORIENTATION

The park’s main town, Borrego Springs (Map, population 2989, elevation 590ft) has a handful of restaurants and lodgings. It’s about 40 miles from Palm Springs as the crow flies,