Southern California Close-Ups: Joshua Tree National Park and Desert Hot Springs

It's a dry heat – a boulder-studded, wind-raked Mojave heat, in which rock stars lie low, artists think big, marines train, weird plants jut toward the sun like beseeching biblical figures, and climbers cling to granite walls like insects stuck to flypaper, except the climbers are way happier.

By Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 25, 2012