Three Desert Secrets

There’s a community out in the desert, just a couple hours from LA, that used to enjoy relative obscurity. Many won’t even recognize it by its local name: The Morongo Basin, but you’ve probably heard of Joshua Tree.

Joshua Tree is the sprawling national park, which sits in-between the ( still more famous ) Coachella valley and the vast Mojave Desert. In recent years, the communities bordering the park, to the north, are enjoying and/or suffering an ever growing notoriety.

The park, itself, now sees over three million visitors a year, three times the volume it was engineered for. Anecdotally, as a local, I can tell you that there has been a proportionate growth in traffic around the three intersections that define the tourist town of Downtown Joshua Tree. Air BnB’s are the big growth industry in the area, throwing the local real estate market into an uncomfortable bubble. Covid-19 only exacerbated the problem, as demand for a private getaway in the desert has exploded.

Tourists come for the quirky shops and art galleries, music, walks in the desert, and the still comparatively affordable accommodations. But this desert hides secrets. Many visitors may find themselves, unknowingly, just a few miles away from some truly weird and unique places.

One of the famous places that is bringing in the carloads from the city is Pappy and Harriet's. It’s a steakhouse and music venue with an old-timey western saloon style. Pappy and Harriet's is in Pioneer Town, just 15 minutes outside of Yucca Valley, the largest of three towns you drive through on the way to Joshua Tree. Pioneer Town has a life-size 1870's Main Street set where scores of westerns were filmed through the 1940’s and 50’s. The restaurant, itself, was once a biker bar, but now plays host to some surprisingly famous acts.

But there are a lot weirder and more interesting places out here than Pioneer Town. That's just scratching the surface. I probably shouldn't tell you, but I'll give you just a taste.

If you are driving to Pappy and Harriet's, you’ll probably drive through Morongo Valley. You’ll pass a closed restaurant with “for sale” on the reader board, and a big plastic Clydesdale still guarding the parking lot. For now, it’s still called Willie Boy’s, and you’d never guess that it’s haunted. If I bought the place, that’s exactly how I’d market it: “The most haunted bar in California.”

It’s a grim enough name, as it is, named after a Paiute “Indian” who was hunted down by a posse and killed in 1909. There’s a movie about him, if you’re interested. Inside the bar are artifacts brought together from ruins across the west, including several pieces brought in from Deadwood, Montana, The topic comes up in local chat groups from time to time. Everyone who worked there has experienced something weird. It shows up on ghost hunting shows from time to time, but it’s not the most famous. Local rumor holds that the last owner committed suicide one night, taking everyone by surprise.

My daughter, when she was five, got scared every time we drove past the place. Then, for about six months, every time we got in the car, she would say “Dad, tell me more stories about why Willie Boy’s is haunted.” It became a tradition. I would make up some story about some grizzly death that would lead to an unsettled ghost.

One time, I told her the story at IHOP. The place was almost empty, but a woman overheard me from another table. She was apparently touched with nostalgia because her dad used to tell her stories, too. So she paid for our breakfast without saying a word to us.

Another weird and unknown local landmark is Giant Rock. It’s the largest free standing boulder in North America, standing over 7 stories tall. Giant Rock sits in the desert north of the town of Yucca Valley, and only about 30 minutes from the much more famous Pappy and Harriet's. You have to take some confusing dirt roads, and when I first moved into the area, I was a little worried about the drive, but it turned out to be easy. Giant Rock also enjoys a weird history. I haven’t heard about any ghosts, but there ought to be. A man named Frank Critzer lived out by the rock in the early 1940’s, in a hole he dug underground, but he killed himself with what is described as a self-detonated dynamite explosion.

Later, Giant Rock would become a gathering place for UFO enthusiasts. There was apparently even a restaurant there for a while and they would have some wild parties. You would never know, now, visiting the site. There’s the remains of a concrete slab, but you’ll miss it if you don’t look closely.

My favorite part of Giant Rock is the large chunk that just fell off one day in early 2000. I also took a series of photographs at the rock to show the dramatic effect of parallax in photos. But that’s another story!

Speaking of the UFO enthusiasts at Giant Rock, one of them was named George Van Tassel. Van Tassel was a friend of Frank Critzer, and later Van Tassel began holding meditation groups in one of Critzer’s underground rooms. Van Tassel would go on to design a building known as the Integratron. He died just before the structure was finished in 1978.

From the Integratron website:

The Integratron, circa 1954, is located in Landers, California, 20 miles north of Joshua Tree National Park. Its creator, George Van Tassel (1910-1978), claimed that the structure is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. This one-of-a-kind 38-foot high, 55-foot diameter, all wood dome was designed to be an electrostatic generator for the purpose of rejuvenation and time travel.

These are just a few of the weird and wonderful secrets of the desert. I’ve been a local, here, for about seven years. To many, that makes me an outsider, still. I can’t wait to learn more about this magical desert in the future.