We plodded through an obsidian darkness, one deliberate step at a time, our headlamp beams illuminating the way. The steep trail seemed to stretch into eternity. My 8-year-old griped, “We’ve ...

The area that is now Joshua Tree National Park wasn’t always a desert. During the Great Ice Age, also known as the Pleistocene Epoch, there were rivers and lakes as well as Columbian mammoths ...