By Laura Randall
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 18, 2008

The 60- to 100-foot-long murals in the California desert town of Twentynine Palms sneak up on you like a rattlesnake behind a barrel cactus. Often invisible from the main drag, they cover the sides of auto-parts shops and Christian bookstores, or simply appear as your eyes follow a ball of tumbleweed across a deserted road or handball court.

Dubbed the "Oasis of Murals" by the Twentynine Palms Chamber of Commerce, the vivid outdoor canvases tell the stories of the hardy souls -- miners, Chemeheuvi Indians, bighorn sheep -- who settled on this patch of desert on the northeastern edge of Joshua Tree National Park.

In this sleepy town of 27,000, finding touristy activities requires some creativity, thus our scavenger hunt for the 18 murals. During a weekend visit, my husband and I also enjoyed digging into Jack Daniel's-glazed salmon and baby back ribs slow-cooked on an outdoor grill at the Rib Company and taking a Geology 101 tour of the 7,000-year-old palm oasis that gives the town its name. We also liked the throwback prices: $5 double features at Smith's Ranch Drive-In (now playing: "Street Kings" and "The Ruins") and $2.50 bowling at the Bowladium, a 16-lane alley and cocktail lounge.

In the end, though, it was the silence, interrupted only by the occasional hoot of a great horned owl or the whispered dash of a roadrunner, that captivated us, leaving me calm and unknotted. It made up for the treeless landscape that so closely matches Iraq's desert conditions that the local Marine Corps base requires units to train here before leaving for the Middle East.

The stillness also was inescapable. It enveloped us while reading by the fire in our cottage at Roughley Manor; navigating the rows of kale in the 29 Palms Inn's garden as the sun's rays danced on distant blue-gray hills; and soaking up the views of the Coachella Valley from the top of Ryan Mountain south of town.

"At night out here it's so quiet you can hear the air hissing in your ears," said Bill Souder, a retired aerospace engineer who lives in nearby Yucca Valley and is part of a group preparing to open an observatory at the park's edge.

The facility, which will open later this year, will feature amateur telescope sites, a model solar system and a sun circle modeled after the calendar used by Southwestern Indian tribes.

Twentynine Palms' universe is expanding.

* * *

About 150 miles east of Los Angeles, Twentynine Palms is home to the largest visitors center in the 780,000-acre Joshua Tree National Park, which is known for its squat, spiky-limbed trees, steep rock walls and the Oasis of Mara, a palm-fringed lagoon created thousands of years ago by an active fault line. The town also claims one of the country's largest Marine Corps bases, which sprawls to the north. You can sense the military presence in the large number of barbershops and furniture rental stores scattered throughout the area.

The town's most influential citizen was James Luckie, a physician who advised World War I veterans suffering from tuberculosis and mustard-gas poisoning to relocate here for the dry climate. Luckie is honored in one of the Oasis murals, as are a mining settlement known as the Dirty Sock Camp and the founders of the town's first roller rink

Other towns adjacent to the park along Highway 62, such as Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, offer more shopping and culture than Twentynine Palms. But most people eventually find their way here, if only to grab maps from the visitors center, take an easy half-mile walk around the Oasis of Mara or replenish their liquids. In the spring, daytime temperatures average 80 to 90 degrees, but they often hit triple digits in July and August. Few businesses, though, close for more than a week or two in the scorching summer.

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.