Genteel Feud Simmers in Desert

Spend a day in the spare, sere moonscape of this desert wilderness and you can see how a feud might fester. An argument over an oasis. Maybe a property line dispute.

But along the northern border of the national park, where three towns offer entry, the clash is more grandiose. Each town claims to be the one true gateway to the park’s 794,000 acres. Each aims to prove it.

“It’s our own little rivalry,” said Lois Carrol, a real estate agent who has lived in Twentynine Palms since 1942 and was one of four students in her high school graduating class.

“Oh, it’s very polite, very genteel,” she said. “But still, everyone wants to have the monument.”

Joshua Tree National Park, which was elevated from monument status in 1994 by the California Desert Protection Act, includes six mountain ranges, two desert systems--the Mojave and the Sonoran--and thousands of its namesake trees. The park draws 1.5 million visitors each year. That’s a gold mine of gas, food and lodging for remote communities such as Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms.

Like the eagles, ravens and roadrunners that tourists come to see, the towns maneuver for territory. Each has a road that leads to the park; each insists theirs is the gateway.

If you believe the Web site for Yucca Valley, that city of 35,000 on the park’s northwest edge is “The Gateway to Joshua Tree National Monument.”

But wait--a Web site for the community of Joshua Tree, a village of about 13,000, proclaims itself “Home of the National Park.”

If that’s true, what about Twentynine Palms (population 15,348), site of the National Park Service’s official visitors center?

“Well, we do have park headquarters here in Twentynine Palms, so unless they change it, I guess that makes Twentynine Palms the real entry,” Carrol said, and laughed. “See how it goes?”

The feuding began in the 1970s, when gas rationing made the vast desert distances suddenly prohibitive for travelers. Until then, the aquifer on which it sits had made Twentynine Palms the biggest town along the national monument’s northern edge, as well as the official entrance into the park.

But the oil crisis coincided with a building boom fueled by affordable imported water. Yucca Valley’s population exploded. The city also laid claim to the Gateway to the Monument title.

At the same time, artists, musicians and writers in search of solitude discovered the rural delights of the hamlet of Joshua Tree, whose higher elevation gives it temperatures 5 to 10 degrees cooler than in lower areas. Locals reasoned that their entrance, which runs past fantastic rock formations made famous in scores of published photographs, must be The One.

“There’s a real rivalry out here,” said Troy Williams, an owner of the Mojave Rock Ranch Inn, a rustic resort on 65 acres midway between Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms. Guests are welcome to bring their dogs--as well as their horses and llamas. Williams’ loyalties lie with the Joshua Tree entrance.

“That’s where you’ll find the boulders and the trees you saw in the photographs that brought you out here in the first place,” he said.

But although Williams thinks the tug-of-war for gateway status is funny in a backwoods, “Green Acres” kind of way, he also finds it self-defeating.

“Each town has its own visitors guide, but to know about all the inns, all the restaurants, all the shops in our area, you have to have all three guides,” he said. “They’re all trying to be the main entrance; they’re all competing for tourists. If we just worked together, we’d all do more business.”

At the Park Center, a facility in Joshua Tree that includes a visitors center, cafe, art gallery and gift shop, owner Deborah LaMonica agrees. She says park visitors who obtain their travel information from a Palm Springs visitors bureau will get directed to the park via the southern route, which will take them through--of course--Palm Springs.

Ditto for the three northern towns.

“I think you do tourists the most good if they can see more of the area,” LaMonica said. “So I try to encourage people to enter through us here in Joshua Tree, and to drive through the park and exit through Twentynine Palms.”

But which is the best entrance?

“Joshua Tree,” she said.

And so it goes.

If you can’t stop the dispute, you may as well understand it. Val Prehoda, a range land management specialist who lives in Twentynine Palms, chalks it up to the free spirits and individualists the desert invariably attracts.

“We all see each other in terms of our towns,” she said. “We Palmeranians think of the Joshua Tree people as more artsy, while Yucca Valley is more a suburb of Palm Springs.”

And the people of Twentynine Palms?

“I think we’re here because of the beauty, for the incredible stillness and for the solitude.” she said. “Hey, I go out in the morning and feed my horses in the nude--you can’t really do that anywhere else.”

As for the gateway question, Prehoda is torn.

“OK, we do have the official visitors center, but that just means there are more maps and guides and a gift shop,” she said. “What’s really important, to my mind, is that you come see the place. It’s amazing. There’s no place like it.”