A Hushed Oasis Of Art in the Desert

We decided to spend a few days there based on a friend's praise of the 29 Palms Inn, a complex of circa-1928 wood and adobe cabins favored by artists and rock climbers. (Because the inn could accommodate us for only one night, we also spent an evening at the nearby Roughley Manor.)

Despite a shaky start -- the inn overbooked our room and we ended up in a smaller, darker space -- the 29 Palms Inn lived up to its reputation as a Zenlike escape. Rooms and cabins are sprawled across several landscaped acres on the edge of town, and many have fireplaces and private patios perfect for stargazing. Its restaurant also provided the hands-down best dining experience in town. We later learned that Dean Martin had spent quality time in the restaurant's small but well-stocked bar while filming the Billy Wilder film "Kiss Me, Stupid."

We, however, had to settle for the jazz duo of Bill & Beverly, who packed the house.

* * *

The area has a long history of luring artists, musicians and Hollywood types. Allie Wrubel, the Oscar-winning composer of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" and the "Gone With the Wind" score, lived in the stone-covered Colonial-style home that is now the bed-and-breakfast Roughley Manor. James Cagney owned a ranch here, and in the 1980s, members of U2 holed up at the Harmony Motel on the town's outskirts while shooting video footage for their best-selling "Joshua Tree" album.

Most famously, Gram Parsons overdosed in 1973 (reportedly on morphine and tequila) in Room No. 8 of the Joshua Tree Hotel. Today, the sun-dappled room is decorated with posters from the musician's days with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and No. 8 can be booked for $15 a night more than the hotel's other rooms.

A young front-desk clerk wearing a Social Distortion T-shirt let us view the small but attractive room and an outdoor shrine of flowers and candles dedicated to Parsons. Allowing non-guests inside the room is up to the management's discretion, she said, because "too many people want to leave stuff like empty tequila bottles."

But Twentynine Palms isn't just for music groupies. Take Souder, the retired aerospace engineer. An amateur astronomer, he says he can see the Milky Way clearly from his back porch most nights, though he worries that development and careless lighting are starting to obstruct the perfect night skies.

"When you have a black, black sky, it looks like a strip of clouds across the sky, but those are actually billions of stars you're looking at," he says. "You'll never see that in L.A."

For daytime stars, the town boasts three galleries that display paintings and sculptures by local artists.

The artwork that left the biggest impression on me hung in the lobby of the 29 Palms Inn. "Mrs. Camp's Thanksgiving Day Party," a brilliant acrylic of a large group of couples, children and dogs shivering in the desert one windy November morning, was created by Dean MacKenzie. The New York-based artist was visiting a local commune when he snapped a photo of the scene in 1969; then he went back east and turned it into a painting. He later returned, broke, and offered to swap his finished canvas for a few nights' stay at the inn, explained Gretchen Grunt, who sells prints of the work in her nearby gallery and whose mother, Jane Smith, owns the inn.

Many of the artists who created the murals don't hail from the area. In 1994, a local civic group enlisted them in an attempt to promote Twentynine Palms' history and leave an impression on visitors who may have otherwise overlooked the town.

Guess the murals worked, because we stopped -- and looked.

Laura Randall last wrote for Travel about the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.