If you’re heading east on Highway 62 to the Mojave Desert, after passing through Yucca Valley you arrive in the hamlet of Joshua Tree, which has 1) a cool name, 2) a cultural mystique and 3) the most-visited entrance to the National Park.
Many of the park’s 4 million annual visitors don’t travel farther than Joshua Tree. That means they may never see the town to the east.
Twentynine Palms is known, if at all, as home to a Marine Corps base that at 932 square miles is larger than some New England states. The military-adjacent town has traditionally been a bit rough. But as with the rest of the desert, the vibe is changing.
Suddenly Twentynine Palms has, you might say, a lot of fans. I’m one.
In late October, attracted by the novelty of the inaugural Twentynine Palms Book Festival, a one-day conclave of writers and readers, I drove up and booked two nights at a motor court motel. My car stayed in my parking spot all weekend as I walked back and forth to the festival or to meals.
The city has a new National Park visitors center and a new, adjacent Community Center, where the book festival took place. I’m told there’s rarely a wait to drive into the park from Twentynine Palms, unlike in Joshua Tree.
The small downtown has shops, galleries and restaurants, including a vowel-challenged gastropub, Grnd Sqrl, and a doughnut shop, Jelly Donut, that besides maple bars and old-fashioneds also sells pho, the Vietnamese soup, all from a converted gas station with a canopy.
Among their neighbors are a vinyl record shop, White Label Vinyl, and an artisan bakery, Campbell Hill, whose owners have experience in New York City and San Francisco.
A former local market, long vacant, is now branded as Corner 62 and contains a cluster of boutique retailers, including a general store, a yoga studio and an art and design store co-owned by a guitarist from The Psychedelic Furs.
Suffice it to say that this is not your prospector grandpappy’s Twentynine Palms.
I sat in on panels at the book festival and had side conversations with some participants to learn more about the community of 27,000 and how it’s changing.
“People in Yucca and Joshua Tree are envious of what’s going on in Twentynine Palms,” said Stephen Casimiro, a magazine publisher who lives part-time in nearby Pioneertown.
Ruth Nolan, a desert writer who lives in Joshua Tree, called Twentynine Palms’ current status “a wonderful renaissance.” As recently as five years ago, she said, downtown was virtually empty. Now Twentynine Palms, long in the cultural shadow of Joshua Tree, seems to be becoming a draw on its own.
But first, people have to find it.
“Where the Hell is Twentynine Palms?” was the gently self-mocking title of the festival’s first panel. A local in-joke, the slogan once appeared on bumper stickers issued by the Chamber of Commerce.
It’s called Twentynine Palms, by the way, because of palm trees at the Oasis of Mara that are said to have been planted in the 19th century by the Serrano tribe.
After World War I, the community became home to veterans with tuberculosis who believed they would benefit from the dry desert air. Some bought government tracts of land and built adobe brick homes known as “jackrabbit homesteads,” said Kim Stringfellow, a writer and photographer who has documented them.
L.A. resident Pat Rimmington bought one in 1977 because the house on 22 acres was affordable. But she fell in love with the small city and became active as a historian and writer.
“I still think Twentynine Palms is a great place to live,” Rimmington said. “I have every intention of finishing up in Twentynine Palms.”
When I suggested to Nolan that the city seemed now to be almost an extension of Joshua Tree’s ethos, she agreed.
“There’s a sense of the Morongo Basin being one continuous community,” Nolan said. “Twentynine Palms is no longer so remote. It’s becoming gentrified.”
Twentynine Palms’ surge — the population is now 27,000 — may have something to do with the increased attention on Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley and rising housing prices there. Claire Vaye Watkins, author of the acclaimed 2021 novel “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” bought a house outside of town in 2020.
“Our theory is that the tide you’re noticing, that reach got a little longer during the pandemic,” Watkins observed. Of Twentynine Palms, she told me wryly, “It’s hotter than Joshua Tree, so it’s cheaper.”
Mike Vail is a writer who divides his time between San Clemente and Twentynine Palms, which probably puts him in his own demographic cohort. I asked him to describe the two desert communities that bookend Joshua Tree.
Yucca Valley had the first traffic signal, the first curbs and gutters, and it’s home to many chain restaurants and stores, Vail said.
“Twentynine Palms, by contrast, has stuck more to what its historic personality has been like. It’s still rural and remote,” Vail said. “It just feels a little more raw than Yucca Valley.”
Writer Deanne Stillman lived in the community for most of the 1990s while researching 2001’s “Twentynine Palms,” her true-crime account of the murder of two young women by a troubled Marine. Sometimes compared to “In Cold Blood,” Stillman’s book brought scrutiny from the outside world, not all of it welcome.
As Stillman was at the festival too, I asked what struck her about the town on this return visit.
“Wow, there’s a lot of gentrification that’s happened,” she replied. “More so in Joshua Tree. I know a lot of locals are worried about Twentynine Palms losing its essential character due to the influx of people from L.A.”
Stillman didn’t seem worried herself. That’s because the surroundings are so vast, so extreme.
“In the end,” she told me, “the desert always has the last word.”
David Allen writes a lot of words Friday, Sunday and Wednesday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
