Exploring the byways, instead of the highways, always turns up something good. On the way to Joshua Tree National Monument, there is an offshoot from busy route 10 called Dillon Road that took me back into the real desert. Along this road, surrounded by sand and dead-looking bushes, there is a sign from out of an Indiana Jones movie: Canyon of a Thousand Palms.

Nestled into a valley formed by the Indio Hills and San Andreas Fault, there is a huge, jungle-like oasis of fan palms and shallow ponds. It has been a haven from the desert’s severity for thousands of years, constantly being fed water that rises over an underground “dam” formed by fault movement.

It is now a part of the 13,000 acre Coachella Valley Preserve, originally set aside to protect the fringe-toed lizard from the threat of expanding condos and golf courses.  Owned and maintained by the private organization The Nature Conservancy, it has been used by many different people over the centuries, but has fortunately never been cut down and destroyed except by an occasional fire.

The clearings left 5,000 years ago by Malpai Indians can still be seen, and the oasis has been inhabited off and on ever since. Stage lines used the ponds and streams as a water point in their route, and teamsters hauling supplies to gold mines stopped at a station site here in the 1880’s. In this century, its most important inhabitants have been a single family of local ranchers: the Wilhelms.

They bought the area in 1905, but waited until 1924 for their first family campout. This was when Cecil B. DeMille used the canyon as a tropical set for two movies (moviegoers thought they were looking at exotic, faraway islands, not the middle of the California desert) . A one room building, which included a fireplace made of palm logs, was built in 1932 and leased by Paul Wilhelm from his father. Paul turned it into a visitor’s center/retreat for campers and vacationers, and it evolved into the federally protected area that it is now.

The best way to explore the area is along the McCallum Trail. It leaves the original “Palm House” and travels about a mile through things you never thought you’d see in this arid land. Desert pupfish swim in the calm pools, though they are being overrun by Tilapia, a fish native to Africa that was introduced here by the Wilhelms to keep down the algae and mosquitoes. The fish have attracted egrets, herons, and ducks, and the cool, lush canyon has attracted over 150 species of other birds.  Squeamish people should avoid the fronds of the palms; they hide a host of creepy-crawlies, including bats, lizards, snakes, pack rats, and black widow spiders.  Short spurs from the trail bring all this up close.

The dry, thirsty walks between groves made me very aware of how unusual the cool, breezy oases really are.  The bottoms of dried-up wash beds are covered with small bushes that like the churned-up soil, at least until the next flash flood. The descendants of plants once used by Indians are sparsely spread out. Dyeweed flowers were pulverized to make a bright yellow-orange dye, and screw bean mesquite provided beans to feed both animals and people, as well as wood for fires and fence posts. Rattlesnakes and iguanas can be seen during the day. Night sometimes brings out a bobcat, coyote, or gray fox to feed on prey avoiding the daytime heat. And absolutely everything away from the oasis is covered with a fine, tan dust.

At the end of the McCallum Trail, there is a comfortable grove through which I could see sand dunes covered with the squiggly air of desert heat. That squiggly air wasn’t bothering me or the sky blue dragonfly that whizzed by, because we were in the Canyon of a Thousand Palms.