When I was a kid, I thought an oasis was something a person hallucinated in a desert when that person was dying of thirst. I’m pretty sure it was Warner Bros. cartoons that gave me this impression, ...

I have a very clear memory from childhood of hiking with my family through a sandy desert wash in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the sun beating down as we trudged through the thick terrain. It was ...

JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — It’s a dry heat — a boulder-studded, wind-raked Mojave heat in which rock stars lie low, artists think big, Marines train, weird plants jut toward the ...