The desert doesn’t forgive.

I learned that years ago, standing on a ridge in Joshua Tree as the sun bled out behind the Wonderland of Rocks. The temperature dropped thirty degrees in forty-five minutes. One second I was sweating. The next, my breath was fogging in front of my face.

That’s the thing about this place. It tricks you.

Eight hundred twenty-five thousand acres of high desert, low desert, and mountains that don’t care if you live or die. The Mojave side sits higher, cooler, dotted with those twisted Joshua trees that look like something from a dream you can’t wake up from. The Colorado side bakes lower, hotter, full of creosote and ocotillo and rattlesnakes that don’t warn you before they strike.

Humans have lived here for five thousand years. The Chemehuevi people called it sacred. The Spanish came through looking for gold. Miners blasted tunnels into the rock. Cattle ranchers tried to tame it. None of them succeeded.

The desert doesn’t get tamed.

It just waits.

 

Here’s what the National Park Service won’t put in the brochures.

Joshua Tree has over seven hundred archaeological sites. Eighty-eight historic structures. Nineteen cultural landscapes. A museum collection of 23,300 items. And a body count that keeps climbing.

In 1976, Congress declared 420,000 acres of the park as wilderness. That means no roads. No cell towers. No help coming unless you bring it yourself.

The park maintains 199 miles of roads—93 paved, 106 unpaved. There are 32 trailheads, 191 miles of hiking trails, 9 campgrounds with 523 sites. On paper, it’s manageable.

On paper, people don’t disappear.

The NPS warns you about the heat. Drink a gallon of water a day. Wear loose, light-colored clothing. A wide-brimmed hat. Sunscreen. Don’t rely on your cell phone—coverage is a myth out here. If you get in trouble, you can dial 911 from certain spots, or call 909-383-5651 from the emergency phones at Indian Cove Ranger Station, Intersection Rock, or Cottonwood Visitor Center.

But here’s what they don’t tell you.

Bees will chase you for your sweat. Rattlesnakes coil in shadows you can’t see. Flash floods turn dry washes into rivers in minutes. And the rocks—those beautiful, impossible piles of granite that climbers come from all over the world to touch—they shift. They hide things. Pits and caves where a body can lie for a decade before anyone finds it.

And sometimes, the desert takes people who should have known better.

 

Let me tell you about Bill Ewasko.

June 2010. Sixty-six years old. Vietnam veteran. Avid hiker and jogger from Georgia. He’d visited Joshua Tree several times before. This trip, he planned to spend a week in the park and catch a flight home by July 1.

Before he left, he gave his girlfriend Mary Winston a detailed itinerary. Every trail. Every destination.

On Thursday, June 24, Bill packed lunch, water, and snacks. He drove to Keys Ranch—a historic homestead deep in the park. His plan was to hike a loop starting and ending at that remote site.

Mary tried to talk him out of it. The area was too remote, she said. Too easy to get turned around.

“I’ll be out by 5:00 PM,” Bill promised.

She never heard from him again.

Mary started calling his cell phone that night. Straight to voicemail. She tried reaching Park Service officials after dark, but couldn’t get through. At 8:00 AM Friday, she tried again. Reported Bill missing.

Here’s the first strange thing.

Temperatures that day had reached nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Park rangers immediately set out for the Keys Ranch trailhead.

Bill’s white 2007 Chrysler Sebring rental wasn’t there.

No one had visited that trailhead in at least a week. The rangers checked the logs. Checked the entrance stations. Bill’s national park pass had never been scanned. There was no record of him ever entering the park.

So where was he?

Dave Pellman had been doing search and rescue in Joshua Tree for nineteen years. He knew every hidden canyon, every deceptive ridge line, every place where the rocks folded in on themselves and made the compass spin.

“It looks benign to a person who drives through it,” Pellman told the New York Times. “But there are so many areas where you can get lost and not even realize it until you’re lost. You look back and figure out, where did I come from?”

On June 26, a California Highway Patrol helicopter spotted Bill’s rental car.

Not at Keys Ranch.

At the Juniper Flats trailhead.

That’s a ninety-minute drive from where Bill had said he was going. A completely different part of the park. Juniper Flats sits at the base of Quail Mountain, the highest peak in Joshua Tree at 5,814 feet. The terrain is brutal. The temperatures at night drop to near freezing, even in June.

Pellman shifted the search immediately. Teams fanned out from Bill’s car to the summit of Quail Mountain, south to Keys View, deep into the Juniper Flats backcountry. Volunteers from across Southern California showed up on Saturday afternoon. They set up an incident command post near Cap Rock, spread a six-by-nine-foot map across a table, and started marking GPS tracks.

One team found a red bandana at the foot of Quail Mountain.

Another claimed to have seen lights on a ridge at night—flashes that could have been a signal, or could have been heat lightning, or could have been nothing at all.

A bloodhound was brought in. The dog got excited near a wash, then lost the scent entirely.

Helicopters flew grid patterns. Ground teams covered miles of terrain that should have been impossible to hide in.

Nothing.

On July 5, 2010—eleven days after Bill was reported missing—the official search was called off. Regional resources were exhausted. The assumption was that no one could survive that long without food and water in extreme temperatures.

“After a while,” Pete Carlson of the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit told the Times, “where else do you look?”

For nearly twelve years, Bill Ewasko’s fate remained a mystery.

Then, in February 2022, hikers Mary Nguyen and her son Zach were exploring the northwestern corner of the park, adjacent to the Panorama Loop Trail. They found human remains.

A wallet was with the body.

The name inside was Bill Ewasko.

Here’s what made the discovery strange—and I need you to hear this part. The location was nowhere near where any search team had looked. It wasn’t near his car at Juniper Flats. It wasn’t near Keys Ranch. It was in an area that made no sense given his itinerary, his experience level, or the physical reality of how far a sixty-six-year-old man could walk in hundred-degree heat.

Tom Mahood had volunteered with the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit. He’d searched for Bill himself, years ago. When he heard where the remains were found, he told the Desert Sun: “It’s a really odd area for him to have been in. I can’t fathom what he was thinking.”

He paused. Then added: “I always said he’ll eventually be found in some place no one ever thought he would be.”

We know where Bill ended up now. But we don’t know how he got there. We don’t know why he drove ninety minutes away from his planned route. We don’t know what happened in those final days—whether he fell, whether the heat took him, whether something else entirely led him off the trail and into that lonely corner of the park.

Unless Bill left behind notes that haven’t been released, we may never know.

 

The desert doesn’t just take the unprepared.

It takes the experienced, too.

Paul Miller was fifty-one years old from Guelph, Ontario, Canada. An experienced hiker and outdoorsman. On July 13, 2018, he was vacationing with his wife Stephanie. They were supposed to start the drive home that morning.

Paul told Stephanie he wanted one more hike before they left. The 49 Palms Oasis Trail. He’d be back by 11:00 AM to check out of the hotel.

He left his cell phone behind. Stephanie said that was typical for him.

11:00 AM came. No Paul.

Stephanie waited an extra hour. At noon, she called park officials. Search teams were dispatched by 12:30 PM.

Paul’s rental car was located in a nearby parking lot within minutes.

What happened next is almost unbelievable.

More than 600 volunteers. Six thousand hours of searching. Twenty canine units. Helicopters. Ground teams. Grid searches. Everything the search and rescue community could throw at the problem.

No sign of Paul Miller.

For sixteen months, his family waited. Stephanie drove back to Joshua Tree multiple times, walked the trails herself, posted flyers, begged for information.

In November 2019, someone flew a drone over a remote section of the park. The photographs showed what looked like human remains. Park rangers recovered them on December 20. The medical examiner confirmed the remains were Paul’s.

“It’s been a tough journey,” Stephanie told the Desert Sun in a phone interview. “Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Then when you hear he’s been found, it doesn’t make it any easier.”

Officials said there were no initial signs of foul play. They speculated Paul might have experienced a heart attack or heat stroke.

“I hated to think that he was suffering and we couldn’t find him,” Stephanie said.

 

Tramell Evans was twenty-five years old.

April 30, 2023. He was dropped off at the Black Rock Campground in the northwest corner of Joshua Tree. His plan: hike from Black Rock to Geology Tour Road, then back to Black Rock via the California Riding and Hiking Trail.

A friend was supposed to pick him up on May 5 at 11:00 AM.

Tramell wasn’t there.

The search team included highly trained trackers, searchers, climbers familiar with the area, and aerial support. They found nothing.

His mother, Amy Evans, received unconfirmed tips that her son had been spotted alive in Slab City and Wonder Valley—two remote, off-grid communities known for squatters and transients. Private investigators looked into the sightings.

No confirmation.

As of now, Tramell Evans is still missing.

He’s six-foot-three, 190 pounds, reddish-brown hair, brown eyes, facial hair. Last seen wearing a silver-white-and-gray sun hoodie, a black Patagonia puffy vest, blue shorts, blue shoes, a black REI backpack, an egg-crate style sleeping pad, a dark green beanie, and a Patagonia fanny pack.

If you’ve seen him, the National Park Service wants to hear from you. 888-653-0009. Or 909-383-5652.

 

But not everyone who goes missing in Joshua Tree stays missing.

Some of them come back with stories that don’t make sense.

Paul Hanks was fifty-four years old. An attorney. An avid hiker. On March 11, 2018, he decided to celebrate his birthday with a hike in Joshua Tree. He wore shorts and a T-shirt. Took a few energy packs and a few hours worth of water.

He’d been to Joshua Tree several times before. This time would be different.

While bouldering—rock hopping, really—he fell approximately twenty feet. Shattered his left heel. Broke his pelvis.

“It happened. I slipped. And it was just—having not slipped in forty-five years, it was instant and total shock,” he told CBS News.

He called out for help. The vast desert echoed his cries back to him.

As the sun set and the temperature plummeted, Paul found refuge beneath a Joshua tree. He hoped the dry soil around it would provide some cushioning. He tried to use the loose dirt to warm himself.

By the first night, he was out of water.

“By the very first night, I was drinking my own urine,” he said. “I drank all the water in my bottle and was refilling my bottle with my own urine.”

Then he fell again. Fifteen feet. Hit his head.

He ate cactus for food. He was in and out of consciousness. But he refused to give up.

“To quit out there is basically a death sentence,” he said.

On day five, he thought he was dreaming when he heard voices.

They belonged to the search and rescue crew that found him.

“These three angels appeared out of nowhere, and I was shocked,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I don’t want to say I’d given up, but multiple times I’d written myself off—that I was never going to see another human being again.”

Paul was taken to a Palm Springs hospital. Multiple surgeries. But he made a full recovery.

“You’re out there and you’re on your last breath of life,” he said. “I would think you would be fantasizing about much greater things. But for some reason, I was just fantasizing about chugging down a Gatorade.”

 

Claire Nelson was thirty-five years old. A hiker from New Zealand.

On Tuesday, May 22, 2018, she set out on the Lost Palms Oasis Trail around 9:15 AM. She told her friend she’d be back the following day.

Around 11:00 AM, she lost her footing while scrambling over a high boulder. Fell about twenty-six feet into a small clearing. Shattered her pelvis. Dislocated her left ankle.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d gone a mile off the trail,” she said.

She ran out of water. Drank her own urine. Fashioned a curtain from a stick and a plastic bag to minimize sun exposure.

“I felt more vulnerable than I could ever have imagined in my life,” she said.

She wasn’t reported missing until Friday. Search efforts started that same day. Around 3:00 PM, a search helicopter spotted her. She was airlifted to Desert Regional Medical Center.

Here’s what Claire said afterward—and this is important.

She thinks it was her hiking experience, not inexperience, that very nearly got her killed.

She didn’t worry about sharing her itinerary with anyone. Didn’t leave notes telling people where to find her. She’d done this a hundred times before. She knew what she was doing.

That’s exactly what almost made her another statistic.

 

David Suh was seventy-six years old. Legally blind.

On Saturday, April 21, 2018, he left the Quail Springs parking lot for an unspecified location in Johnny Lang Canyon. His vehicle was found at 8:00 PM in the same lot.

Inside his Honda Odyssey, rangers found a note.

David had started his hike around 8:45 AM on Saturday. He wrote that he would require assistance if he did not return by Sunday.

The National Park Service started search and rescue operations on Monday at 6:45 AM. Fifty searchers. Two canine units. Fixed and rotary wing air support from the California Highway Patrol.

On Tuesday morning, David was found alive.

Not far from where his car was parked. Collapsed from exhaustion on a secluded hillside.

“It’s a miracle,” Park spokesman George Land told the Los Angeles Times. “He was awake, conscious, and talking to rescuers when they found him.”

He’d been up there for about three days without water. Because of the remote terrain, he had to be airlifted out.

Three days. No water. Legally blind. Seventy-six years old.

The desert let him go.

 

Ed Rosenthal was sixty-four. A real estate broker.

Friday, September 24, 2010. He took a wrong turn on a loop trail near the Black Rock Campground while trying to get back to his car.

Six days without food or water.

He was spotted by a helicopter crew around 10:30 AM on September 30. Alive. But very dehydrated. So weak he couldn’t sit up when they found him.

“He just made a wrong turn somewhere,” said Chief Joe Zari. “He was hiking on a loop trail. Somehow he got off. Unfortunately, the area he got off on was a very steep gorge-like area. He couldn’t get out. He just kept going downhill. He realized he was lost and could not go any further, so he laid low and rode on his hat.”

Ed’s wife, Nicole Kaplan, told the Associated Press that her husband had written notes about what kind of funeral he wanted while he was out there.

“He got a break,” Chief Zari said, “because we had some cloudy weather that kept the temperatures down.”

Ed was transported to High Desert Medical Center in stable condition. Reunited with his family. Talking. Doing reasonably well.

“This is the outcome you hope for,” Chief Zari said.

 

But not everyone gets that outcome.

Tina Fiori was fifty-one years old. A climber from Riverside County. On March 26, 2022, she went climbing with two others in an area known as Turkey Tear. They were celebrating a friend’s birthday.

The trio was top-roping—a method where a rope is strung through a permanent anchor system at the top of the climb. The rope acts as a safety mechanism. A second person assists from the bottom, gathering slack and serving as a counterweight.

Matt Himelstein was part of Tina’s three-person climbing team. He told the Desert Sun that climbing equipment—nylon webbing—is often left attached to permanent anchors at the top of climbs. Left by previous climbers. Exposed to the elements for weeks, months, sometimes years.

“Tina just ended up being the last person of the day to climb up there,” Matt said. “She got to the top and told us she had secured herself. So the person down at the bottom was no longer doing that safety work.”

Tina ran her safety rope through nylon webbing left by someone who had climbed there before.

“The desert is not kind to nylon,” Matt said. “I can’t tell you how old it was. But it doesn’t take a whole lot of time sitting in the sun baking and also getting rained on, being frozen and all that stuff.”

When Tina leaned back to rappel down, the weathered webbing gave way.

She fell at least eighty feet near the Sheep Pass Campground.

Joshua Tree Superintendent David Smith released a statement: “Our hearts go out to Ms. Fiori’s family and friends during this extremely painful time.”

 

Michael Spitz was thirty-five. A Spanish teacher at Santa Fe Christian Schools in Solana Beach, California. His Facebook page described him as a multi-sport adventure athlete, lifelong surfer, avid rock climber, licensed skydiver, backpacker, and lover of books and coffee.

On January 16, 2022, he was free-climbing the 100-foot Illusion Dweller in Joshua Tree.

The next morning, around 9:50 AM, two hikers found him deceased at the base of the central wall near the Hidden Valley Nature Trail.

The medical examiner’s office estimated he sustained an unspecified injury around 5:30 PM the previous evening. Officials estimated he fell at least eighty feet.

Bryan Gillette, Michael’s friend of eight years, told Climbing.com that Illusion Dweller was one of Michael’s favorite climbs in Joshua Tree.

“He loved the route. He was working on a climb nearby—Leave it to Beaver—and would warm up on Illusion Dweller. He was very comfortable with it.”

 

Anna Nuno was fifty-eight. An avid adventurer and hiker from Lakewood, California.

January 2023. She fell and hit her head in Rattlesnake Canyon—an area inside the Indian Cove District of Joshua Tree National Park.

Authorities said how Anna fell was unclear. There was no suspicion of foul play. Park rangers and search and rescue volunteers responded after receiving a cell phone notification of an injured hiker.

She succumbed to her head trauma.

The Los Angeles Times noted that Rattlesnake Canyon features a 2.6-mile trail near Twentynine Palms that takes just over an hour to complete. The Sheriff’s Office reported that the canyon and the Wonderland of Rocks area are challenging to navigate due to their remoteness, difficult terrain, and lack of cell phone service.

Kiki Nuno, Anna’s daughter, said: “Our mother was a kind, caring, and giving person who always put the needs of her family before her own. She was a strong woman who faced every challenge in her life with courage and dignity. Our mother was a source of inspiration to us all and will be deeply missed by everyone whose life she touched.”

 

The desert doesn’t just take people.

It also keeps them.

The Yucca Man, they call him. A desert-adapted Sasquatch said to inhabit Southern California, Nevada, and Arizona. Sightings in the Antelope Valley area date back to the 1970s. The Mojave Bigfoot. The Sierra Highway Devil. Marvin of the Mojave.

Different names. Same creature. Or so the stories go.

The Barker Dam Trail is a brief hike leading to an old water source used by Native Americans in the past. According to local legends, the trail is haunted by the spirits of the Chemehuevi people who were displaced by European settlers. The Chemehuevi held the area as sacred. Their ancestors’ spirits are rumored to reside there still.

Hikers have reported feeling a sense of peace or reverence—as if in the presence of something sacred. Others claim to have seen ghostly apparitions or heard chanting in the distance.

The Wall Street Mill Trail takes you through a fascinating gold mining area. The mill was abandoned in the 1940s. Some believe the spirits of the former workers still haunt the area. Hikers have reported shadowy figures, unusual lights, feelings of being watched. Whispers. Footsteps coming from the empty mill.

The Lost Horse Mine Trail leads to the remains of an old gold mine. Legend says the ghost of a miner who died in a tragic accident still roams the area, searching for lost gold. Hikers have felt cold breezes even amid summer heat. Heard pickaxes striking rock when no one else was nearby.

And then there’s Gram Parsons.

The country rock musician passed away just outside Joshua Tree at the Joshua Tree Inn. But that’s not where he stayed.

His last request: to have his body stolen and burned at Cap Rock, one of his favorite places in the park.

His friends obliged. They stole his body off the tarmac at LAX. Drove it out to Joshua Tree. Doused it in gasoline and lit the match under the overhang at Cap Rock.

If you visit today, you might see the scorch marks on the rock. You might meet fans leaving cigarettes, bottles of whiskey, handwritten notes. You might feel something strange in the air—like the desert is holding onto a piece of him, too.

I wrote about Gram Parsons in my book, National Park Mysteries and Disappearances Volume 2: California. He’s not the only one who fell in love with this place and never really left.

 

Here’s what I want you to understand.

Joshua Tree National Park is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. The way the light hits those rocks at sunrise. The way the stars come out at night—so bright you can see the Milky Way like a river across the sky. The way the Joshua trees themselves seem to reach for something just beyond your vision.

But beauty and danger live in the same house out here.

The National Park Service does everything it can. They maintain the roads. They mark the trails. They post warnings about heat and dehydration and flash floods and bees. They train search and rescue teams to respond within minutes. They coordinate with the California Highway Patrol, the Sheriff’s Office, volunteer organizations, anyone who can help.

But the desert is bigger than all of us.

Eight hundred twenty-five thousand acres. Hundreds of miles of trails. Thousands of rock formations with hidden pits and caves and ledges. Weather that changes from 100 degrees to freezing in the span of a single night.

And something else. Something the rangers don’t talk about in their safety briefings.

The feeling that you’re not alone.

I’ve felt it myself. Hiking through the Wonderland of Rocks, where the boulders pile up like a giant’s broken toys. The trail disappears and reappears. The shadows shift. You turn a corner and the rock formation you were using as a landmark is gone, replaced by another one that looks almost the same but isn’t.

You start to second-guess yourself.

Did I pass that cairn already? Was that wash supposed to be on my left or my right? How long has it been since I saw another person?

That’s when it happens. The disorientation. The creeping certainty that you’ve made a wrong turn somewhere, but you can’t remember where.

Experienced hikers feel it. The ones who’ve done this a hundred times. The ones who didn’t bother to leave a detailed itinerary because they knew exactly what they were doing.

That’s what Claire Nelson meant. That’s what almost killed Paul Hanks. That’s what might have happened to Bill Ewasko, wandering miles off his planned route into a corner of the park no one thought to search.

 

The desert has a way of making you believe things.

That the next ridge is the last one. That the sun isn’t really that hot. That you can make it just a little farther without water. That the voice you heard behind that rock was just the wind.

Sometimes it’s just the wind.

Sometimes it’s not.

The Chemehuevi believed this place was sacred. They didn’t build permanent structures here. They didn’t try to conquer the land or tame it. They passed through respectfully, took what they needed, and moved on.

Maybe they knew something we’ve forgotten.

That the desert isn’t hostile. It’s indifferent. It doesn’t care if you live or die. It doesn’t care if you’re experienced or inexperienced, prepared or foolish, young or old.

It just is.

And if you forget that—if you let your guard down for one second, if you trust the nylon webbing left by a stranger, if you take your eyes off the trail, if you don’t leave a note telling someone where you’re going—the desert will remind you.

Sometimes it lets you go.

Sometimes it keeps you.

 

Bill Ewasko’s remains were found twelve years after he vanished. His family finally had closure. But not answers.

Paul Miller’s body was found sixteen months later. His wife Stephanie still doesn’t know exactly what happened.

Tramell Evans is still missing. His mother is still waiting for a phone call that might never come.

Anna Nuno, Michael Spitz, Tina Fiori—they went to Joshua Tree to do what they loved. They never came home.

And the Yucca Man still walks the ridges at dusk. The spirits still chant near Barker Dam. The miner still picks away at the Lost Horse Mine, searching for gold that isn’t there.

Gram Parsons’ ashes soaked into the rock at Cap Rock. Visitors still leave offerings. The scorch marks are still visible if you know where to look.

The desert doesn’t forget.

Neither should we.

 

If you’re planning to visit Joshua Tree, here’s what I’m asking you to do.

Tell someone where you’re going. Not just “I’m going to Joshua Tree.” The trailhead. The route. The time you expect to be back.

Take more water than you think you need. A gallon a day per person. And then take an extra gallon.

Don’t rely on your cell phone. Download the NPS app before you enter the park. Offline maps can save your life.

Check the weather before you go. Check it again. Flash floods can happen in canyons that aren’t even getting rain—a storm fifty miles away can send a wall of water through a dry wash in minutes.

Don’t climb on webbing left by strangers. Bring your own gear. Check it every time.

And if you feel that disorientation coming on—that sudden certainty that the trail has moved, that the rocks have shifted, that you don’t know where you are—stop.

Sit down. Drink water. Wait.

The desert isn’t going anywhere.

Neither are you, as long as you don’t panic.

 

The National Park Service does incredible work with limited resources. They’ve brought in over 600 volunteers for a single search. They’ve logged 6,000 hours looking for one person. They’ve used helicopters, drones, bloodhounds, ground-penetrating radar.

But they can’t be everywhere. And the desert is vast.

So it falls to us. The hikers. The climbers. The campers. The people who love this place enough to walk into it, knowing the risks.

We have to watch out for each other. We have to leave notes. We have to carry more water than we need. We have to swallow our pride and admit when we’re lost, even if it means calling for help.

Because the desert doesn’t care about your pride.

It only cares about what you carry with you. And what you leave behind.