Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness - Nevada — Abandoned Places, Gold Rush & Route 66 Travel Photography

Followers of Cali49.com and Exploratography.com no doubt know about my fondness for Joshua Tree National Park, and Joshua Trees in particular. I think most people associate the tree with the park, but the spikey trees aren’t confined to the famous national park. They can be found in other places as well. And one such place is the Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness, located in Clark county, Nevada.

If you’ve ever driven Nevada State Route 164 between Searchlight, NV and Nipton, CA, you must have noticed the stretch that is home to a huge Joshua Tree forest on each side of the road. The density of trees is amazing. The wilderness itself is located on the north side of the highway; the New York Mountains are to the south, to the west the South McCullough Range and to the east the Highland Range.

I pulled off at a small turnout that led to the sign above and got out to stretch my legs a bit and see what I could find.

Similar to JTNP, there are a lot of sharp, pointy, sticky things here in this wilderness that have a taste for human blood. I think the plant picture above is a Buckhorn Cholla. After my explor of the area, when I got back to the Rav4, I notice lots of needle things in the soles of my sneakers and in my socks.

The yucca pictured here don’t look like the Mojave Yucca I’m more familiar with, these could be Banana Yucca. They do have sharp pointy leaves like their cousins.

I only spent about fifteen minutes here, as there were a number of other stops I was hoping to make on my drive home. It’s definitely worth a return visit, if only to search for a really large tree. The trees are a bit different from the ones at JTNP, these seem thinner and many of them were rather short but had a tremendous number of branches. Perhaps something to do with the climate.

“The name Wee Thump, or “ancient ones” in the Paiute language, tells the story of these Joshua trees. Growing just half an inch per year on average, the stand is home to some of the oldest and largest Joshua trees on the planet. These ancient ones have grown tall in the silence of the
desert, some rising to more than 30 feet over 900 years.”

— BLM website

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