The drive back down Keys View Road runs through the park's third ecosystem, where California juniper, oak and pinyon pine grow alongside Joshua trees above 4,000 feet. This stop looks at what toppled trees shelter, the local bighorn, how city air feeds the grass that carries fire, and a quiet worry about young pinyons.
Watch the trees on the way down, because up here you've climbed out of both deserts. Everyone comes for the two deserts, but above four thousand feet in the Little San Bernardino Mountains there's a third community, California juniper, Muller's oak and pinyon pine. A sparse woodland of juniper, pinyon and Joshua tree runs along this road. The ones lying down still count. A two thousand three survey of this road found toppled Joshua trees the most abundant of its key wildlife habitats, full of small mammals, reptiles and insects. Dead trunks left standing still work as perches and nest sites, and the desert night lizard hunts under the fallen logs. These mountains keep a band of bighorn of their own. Joshua Tree's bighorn fall into three groups, a hundred to two hundred sheep in all. If you see one, stay at least seventy-five feet away. If it moves because of you, you're too close. That haze you saw from the top comes down to the ground here. Polluted air, much of it from the Los Angeles basin, drops nitrates on this soil, and desert plants built for poor ground lose out to non-native grasses that thrive on the extra fertilizer. Those grasses carry fire from plant to plant. Fires in this woodland once came about two hundred fifty years apart. Now, with those grasses, big fires hit the Mojave every five to thirty years. About halfway down, a side road leads to the Lost Horse Mine trailhead, with a vault toilet. It's four miles round trip with five hundred fifty feet of gain, not for the heat, to a mine that ran from eighteen ninety-three to nineteen thirty-six and produced over nine thousand ounces of gold. Its lot is closed to RVs longer than twenty-five feet. One more thing to watch for. A survey for the two thousand five road project found young Joshua trees and junipers near this road, and no young pinyon pines at all, with many junipers and pinyons stressed or dying, drought among the causes. So look at what's growing back as you go. Find a young pinyon on your way down, and you've seen what that survey couldn't.
Photo: NPS / Hannah Schwalbe · Public domain (NPS staff photo)