Creosote and Field Station fan rant

Admin user
August 9, 2025
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I missed last week because I drove to California to help my mother host a family reunion, of sorts, in memory of my aunt, who would have been 99 in a couple of weeks. I have a routine for this drive, which I make several times a year: I take I-10 to Desert Center, where I get off the freeway and drive the northern edge of Joshua Tree National Park on 177. If I have time, I go into the Park and wind through the crazy trees and stonepiles. It’s like a fossilized tree rave.

Joshua Tree National Park (photograph by Brad Sutton – https://www.nps.gov/jotr/planyourvisit/first-time-visitors.htm)

I stay at The Field Station at the west end of Yucca Valley – and permit me a moment of fandom. This is a refurbished motel – Motel, capital M. Like the motels my family (very rarely) went to on our summer camping trips in the 1970s. You can pull right up to your room and haul your stuff in. The place is really well done – honoring but updating the mid-century vibe. Rooms are super-clean and simple. No waste. The floors are concrete. Comfortable beds and good sheets. A fridge. Your closet is a plywood pegboard. A great small thing: the doors don’t snap shut automatically – you can leave the door standing open while you unload your stuff. I love to drive, because my car is like a giant purse. I can just throw all kinds of shit in it – hotpot, coffee paraphernalia, a whole IKEA laundry bag of shoes, a bag of books, bluetooth speaker, chargers and laptop and clipboards… you get the idea.

And the Field Station landscape, though recently installed, is superb. It appears to be all Mojave natives, and the landscape design, too, honors the mid-century aesthetic.

Mojave natives in one of many outdoor spaces at The Field Station.

And it’s affordable.

Very nearby is a storied bar/restaurant, The Copper Room, overlooking the Yucca Valley airstrip. Established in the 1950s, it has actually good food and drink, and it somehow embodies the desert-rat aesthetic without actually being a dive.

Looking out at the airstrip, March 2025

[By the way, I should probably say that I make no money for sharing these places and links – just spreading the joy.]

Then I get back on I-10 and grit my teeth and bomb through LA to the coast.

And then do it in reverse a few days later.

Coming back I was admiring the creosote plains flanking 177. I have a thing for creosote, the way they self-space, so the colonies look like a strange crop; their fragrance after rain is a contender for a Best Smell on Earth prize; the way they can fade and go dormant in drought, and turn shiny glossy green fast when they get water. The delicate bright yellow blossoms and silvery puffball seed heads. The limber, twisting, silvery branches. Everything, everything.

Creosote blossoms and seed puffs (https://www.nps.gov/jotr/learn/nature/creosote.htm)

A little over forty miles northwest of Joshua Tree, still in the Mojave, is the King Clone creosote colony – at 11,700 years old one of the oldest creatures on earth. That’s on my next itinerary.

I wondered which comes first, the plant or the place? Do I love deserts because of the plants, or the plants because I love deserts? I guess I think it’s probably place first, and then you start looking at the details, which make the place even better, richer, more complexly textured. Which makes you look closer, which reveals even more, so you can no longer look at the place the same way ever again, because every time you look at the place you ‘see’ everything you now know. God, I guess. The details.