The Arizona desert is all sharp edges and oven heat and bad intentions. But a few basic guidelines can make it feel like home. Photo by Rob Zabrowski/Shutterstock.

The Nazis escaped right about where the coyote is watching my dog. My dog, a failure in most basic dog departments, hasn’t noticed the coyote yet, because she’s busy trying to figure out exactly what this rabbit-like smell is. In a minute, the rabbit will break out of the brush, unnoticed, and I’ll offer the dog a drink of water that she won’t take. She’s lived here all her life, but she’s never learned the desert rules.

1. Nothing matters more than water.

I know the rules backwards and forwards, because I grew up in the Arizona desert, this part of the Sonoran that looks like the set of every Western movie you’ve ever seen. Along with all the other kids in my Boy Scout troop, I was strangely smug that I could survive, no matter what. We knew how to dig into the cool sand to rest when the temperature hit 120 degrees. We could build distress signals visible clear to the horizon. We knew what to do about rattlesnake bites (cut parallel, not in an X shape). We knew that cholla spines are barbed, and you can’t pull them out, so you have to push them further in. We figured the stories about the spines working their way to your heart and killing you were probably a lie, but we did know for sure how to get water from barrel cactus pulp, how to build deadfall traps for kangaroo rats and lizards.

Okay, to be honest, we would have died quickly should we ever have needed to actually try these things. My friend Corrine and her Girl Scout troop, no doubt as self-assured as we were, got lost in the desert for three days, with no food but a five-pound bag of watermelon Jolly Rancher candies. “Another day, it would have been Lord of the Flies,” she said, “and a day after that, the desert would have been eating our bones.”

2. Even if you know the rules, the desert is bigger and stronger than you will ever be.

Back then, of course, there was more desert; when I was a kid, friends lived on the edge of town, where their only neighbor was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was already refusing to face the lights of the growing city. Today the town goes on for an hour past where we used to float in the pool and watch the bats, in bunches thick enough to be mistaken for rain clouds, come out at twilight.

Still, even though it’s shrinking fast, every year the desert takes its toll. Helicopters fly in for rescues; hikers dehydrate, fall from ledges, think their cell phones are going to get them out of trouble. It pays to remember …

3. Absolutely everything in the desert would like to kill you.

It’s all sharp edges and oven heat and bad intentions. True story: A guy got drunk and started shooting saguaros. These are the quintessential desert cactus, tall and thin, their arms reaching for the sky like they’re being held up by bandits. Saguaros can grow over 25 feet tall, have roots miles long; and if it has rained recently, their hollow bodies can hold two tons of water.

Guy shoots saguaro. Saguaro falls over and crushes guy. Everybody in the city applauds.

The saguaros here in the park are dying from car exhaust pollution; even so, this is an oasis, several hundred acres of desert in the middle of Phoenix. The zoo and the botanical garden are across the road. People jog here, do orienteering, take nude pictures of each other against the red rocks. Hawks swoop after ground squirrels—one once passed my car, grabbed a squirrel, and headed back into the air ahead of me in less time than it took me to realize I was driving more than 70 miles an hour.

7 Rules of the Arizona Desert The Saturday Evening Post

Around Phoenix

Stay near Camelback Mountain: in Scottsdale, that means the beautifully restored Valley Ho, hotelvalleyho.com, which is sort of like walking into the backdrop of a Frank Sinatra movie.

Right in Old Town Scottsdale is the best place to look for desert art: Navajo rugs and Hopi kachinas (ask before you buy, there are a lot of knockoffs) and turquoise jewelry.

A bit more expensive, but right at the foot of Camelback and one of the oldest hotels in Phoenix, the Royal Palms, royalpalmshotel.com, is pure old-style luxury, with incredible views of the mountain.

Either hotel puts you close to Papago Park, Phoenix’s central oasis. On the west side, it’s just park—wander and see what untouched desert is like. On the east side, it’s the zoo and the Desert Botanical Garden, dbg.org, a great place to see how lush the desert really can be.

If that doesn’t satisfy your interest in plants, head out to the
Boyce Thompson Arboretum, ag.arizona.edu/bta, on the edge of the Superstition Mountains.

And by the time you’ve headed out that far, a stop at Lost Dutchman State Park, azstateparks.com/parks/lodu, is the perfect place for a desert hike in the rugged, cliff-strewn mountains. Or take it easier by driving the Apache Trail, which is an old stagecoach road through the mountains. It’ll take all day to get back to town, but, especially in spring when the flowers are blooming, there’s no prettier drive in the state.

Away from Phoenix

Tucson has the Saguaro National Park, some of the most pristine, beautiful desert anywhere, chock full of its namesake cactus. Tucson is also home to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, desertmuseum.org, which is sort of a zoo, sort of a botanical garden, and a great place to see the best of the desert up close. For lodging, go for old and full of character at the downtown Hotel Congress, hotelcongress.com, a local institution since 1919. Or move upscale
and to the outskirts of town with the Westward Look Wyndham Grand, westwardlook.com, which has been around just as long. And at the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains, the swank never gets in the way of the view.

Finally, the most famous patch of desert in Arizona is that big hole in the ground: the Grand Canyon. Not so many cacti—it’s high desert, a completely different kind of ecosystem—but most people are too busy watching the sun light the rim of the canyon like a lava lamp to care about the greenery anyway. Spend the night right at the edge, at the El Tovar, grandcanyonlodges.com/el-tovar-409.html, or head over to Cameron and stay at the Historic Trading Post, camerontradingpost.com. For the record, the much less developed North Rim of the canyon is way prettier than the South, but everybody visits the south side because it’s easier to get to. If you do go to the north side, check the weather: The North Rim closes in winter when there’s too much snow.

High desert or low, the desert rewards the patient: The longer you stay, the more you’ll see, and the richer you’ll find the landscape.

Where to Stay, What to See in Arizona The Saturday Evening Post

Yet a lifetime in the Southwest has taught me that the truth of the arid landscape is something much different. The best deserts hide their secrets under cactuses and boulders, and only offer them up to people who know the magic phrase: “Yeah. I have time to stay a while.”

Joshua Tree National Park—first set aside as a monument by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, but not gaining national park status until 1994—encloses 794,000 acres of one of the very best deserts. Two of the best deserts, in fact, because in valleys between six ranges of mountains the park holds both the lowland Colorado Desert and the high desert of the Mojave, which is cooler (peak highs around 105 instead of 115) and a little wetter (up to eight inches of rain a year as opposed to five). The east side of the park slants down toward the Colorado River while the west side leans toward a coast that is only a few hours’ drive away.

And although the two deserts are geologically unalike—completely different in their plants and ecology—in either one, the first glance seems one of utter hostility: mountains shaped like jawbones of filed teeth, plants with needles that can penetrate leather boots, and animals with poison bites.

But the wise traveler stops to look closer. And then the landscape comes alive with more than 900 species of flowering plants: gold poppy, gray ambonia, desert trumpet, aster, the wooly daisy, and wide, blue Canterbury bells. “And we’re still finding more,” says Joe Zarki, the park’s chief of interpretation. Seventy-five species of butterfly flit their shadows over tarantulas, and species of shrimp swim upside down in small pools caught in the crooks of folded mountains. In the lower Colorado Desert, spiders spin morning webs between the barbs of cholla (called “jumping cactus” for good reason); in the Mojave, desert night lizards perfect the art of being invisible under the fallen bark of Joshua trees. Deserts are landscapes for the miniaturist.

In the rugged desert environs, Bill Keys once built a life for his family at Desert Queen Ranch where the stamp mill and ramshackle family home still stand. Photo by Ralph Nordstrom.

Deep in the heart of the Mojave, I get out of my truck on the park’s Geology Tour Road, a dirt track that skirts the Hexie Mountains. The cooling engine is the only sound, until I start to hear the bumblebees gathering nectar from late blooms and the slow hiss of wind through the reaching branches of the Joshua trees themselves. The air smells like warm rocks. Maybe three hours east of Los Angeles, not another person in sight, I turn a full circle, arms outstretched to the sun.

Stepping around the long, silver spines of a devil’s cactus, I climb some rocks that look like petrified stale bread. Joshua Tree is a paradise for rock climbers who have set hundreds of routes on these odd, beige formations. I once came to watch my wife climb; she was 60 feet up a sheer cliff when a woman stopped and got out of her car to gawk. “Do you think she’s okay?” she asked. “Oh, if you could see her face,” I replied, “you’d see the dopiest smile right now.”

I’m not as ambitious as my wife. I only scramble up 20 feet or so. In a crevice of sand, lizard tracks scratch a pattern I can’t read. A patch of rock goldenbush seems to grow without roots, offering pinhead yellow flowers to the bees that wander by. A hummingbird, breast iridescent in the creosote air, buzzes me and moves on. When I look out at the view to the horizon, at the Joshua trees in full bloom, at the red-tipped ocotillo, the world suddenly becomes too big in a glance. Turkey vultures casting shadows over quartz veins laced through the giant boulders seem to have no trouble taking it all in, though.

The first time my wife and I came to this park a dozen or so years ago we didn’t know what a Joshua tree looked like. We thought we were just looking at big yuccas until we thought to check the cover of U2’s album The Joshua Tree. (“We still get a lot of people coming because of that,” says a park official.) And in a way, that’s what the park’s signature plant is—a big yucca. Named by early pioneers who saw the tree’s branches as the arms of Joshua pointing the way—thirst and hope are powerful persuaders—the Joshua tree is also an ecosystem all its own. Yucca brevifolia shelters orioles and owls; kestrels rest in the branches from hunting trips; and Loggerhead Shrikes stab lizards on the spines, letting the meat ripen. On spring nights, Yucca moths pollinate the trees’ flowers, which look like popcorn bouquets.

Cholla Cactus Garden showcases the lush-looking plant with bristles that “jump” onto unwary passersby. Photo by Ralph Nordstrom.

The animals knew from the beginning what it took people a while to learn. “Anybody who lived out here had to meet the landscape on its own terms,” says Zarki. “You have to reckon with the fact that the desert only offers so much.”

And for those who learned the lesson, the desert could be a surprisingly gentle place. In a tiny bowl canyon in the northwest edge of the park, the Keys family ranched, farmed, and mined the area for more than 50 years. Digging 25 feet or more to hit water, using equipment abandoned by those who could not find a way to water the desert into Eden and so fled for cooler climes, the Keys raised their kids here, accepting any guest who walked by. The family patriarch, Bill, even appeared in a couple Disney movies. The ranch, now open for tours, shows the way to survive in the desert—waste nothing and pay attention to the details.

On a small basis, the park simply absorbs human impact; when the people leave, the mines cave in and dirt blows over their trails. But now, with more than a half-million visitors a year, that impact lingers. Air quality is an increasing issue as the cities and agriculture draw closer. Coyotes prowl campgrounds, and increased trash has created a boom in the raven population, which has, in turn, brought a crisis to the tortoise population (because ravens enjoy nothing more than some tortoise for dessert).

But I tend to think this is all temporary. Time works differently in the desert, and with all the time in the world I watch a trail of ants working a low hill and see the curved track a snake took towards shade. Early in the morning the white petals of a ghost flower glisten with dew, and at night the sky is deeper by hundreds of light years to what I’m used to seeing.

“When I first came, this all looked dead to me,” says Jenn Schramm, a ranger in the park. “And now I see all kinds of stuff.” The very best deserts, I think, teach you how to look. It just takes a little time.

Glorious Desert The Saturday Evening Post