A California man who got stranded in Joshua Tree National Park for 40 hours is already looking forward to his next hike.

Robert Ringo was hiking near Quail Mountain when he fell and broke his leg. Crying out for help, Ringo started recording his near-death experience.

“I started trying to at least turnover so I could get onto my back,” he told the affiliate. “And when I did, it was just unbelievable pain.”

Ringo, who had shared his location with his son before he left, knew there wouldn’t be service in the mountains. “That’s just something that I always do,” he said.

He brought two liters of water with him, but that was no match for the desert heat. Temperatures at the nearest weather station had highs in the 90’s.

In the video, Ringo calls for help and says, “It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever experienced no saliva.”

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Nobody looks at the mural. Tourists keep their heads down as they walk past. They scan maps, reach for keys, tell their children to use the bathroom. Considering possible destinations, they say, “Did you want to do Hidden Valley and Keys Ranch?” Or, “We can start at Skull Rock.”

They don’t notice the image of a gray-haired woman in a wide-brimmed hat staring out at them. Serene. Determined.

To her right loom stark rock formations and groves of surreal Joshua trees. Flowers bloom at her feet in bright purples and oranges. Look closely and you’ll see a pair of pencil-legged Gambel’s quail and a roadrunner enjoying the desert Eden she nearly single-handedly preserved.

The mural at a federal visitors center is a tribute to the South Pasadena matron who devoted much of her life to saving nearly 1 million acres of desert that would one day become Joshua Tree National Park.

In California lore, the story of how John Muir persuaded Teddy Roosevelt to help preserve Yosemite is legendary. In 1903, Muir and Roosevelt camped in the wilderness for three days as Muir showed him Yosemite’s stunning vistas and valleys. Decades later, Minerva Hoyt would convince another president named Roosevelt that Joshua Tree held its own otherworldly beauty. Her story isn’t as well known as Muir’s. But it should be.

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We were surrounded by trees that could have been drawn by Dr. Seuss. A desert hare had just crossed the trail in front of us, its ears translucent in the still-rising sun. But it was something else that caught my 28-year-old son’s attention.

“I can’t believe how silent it is out here,” he said. This was an offhand comment. I agreed, but said nothing. We walked on.

So I think I know the answer to the questions I brought with me to Joshua Tree National Park that morning. Can a person find isolation, silence and beauty in a visit measured in hours? Is it possible to experience a national park’s wildness in the time usually allotted for a blacktop tour?

We left Los Angeles at 10:58 a.m., an hour later than planned. Twenty miles west of the park, we began seeing the Joshua trees.

They’re not actually trees, but a species of yucca. One could be forgiven the confusion. Their trunks are shaggy with the desiccated foliage of previous seasons, which eventually falls off to reveal treelike bark. The new growth at the ends of branches looks like exuberant pineapples. They’re a kindergartner’s version of a tree.

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In June 2010, Bill Ewasko traveled alone from his home in suburban Atlanta to Joshua Tree National Park, where he planned to hike for several days. Ewasko, 66, was an avid jogger, a Vietnam vet and a longtime fan of the desert West. A family photo of Ewasko standing at the summit of Mount San Jacinto, another popular hiking destination in Southern California, shows a cheerful man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, looking fit, prepared and perfectly comfortable in the outdoors.

Ewasko left a rough itinerary behind with his girlfriend, Mary Winston, featuring multiple destinations, both inside and outside the park. His first hike, on Thursday, June 24, was meant to be a loop out and back from a remote historic site known as Carey’s Castle, an old miner’s hut built into the rocks. Carey’s Castle is so archaeologically fragile that, to discourage visitors, the National Park Service does not include it on official maps.

Winston, a retired mortgage broker, was worried about that particular hike. From what she had read, the site sounded too remote, too isolated. She so thoroughly pestered Ewasko about his safety that, when he arrived in California, he bought a can of pepper spray as a kind of reassuring joke. Don’t worry, Ewasko told her. He would be all right.

The plan was that after he finished the hike, probably no later than 5 p.m., he would call Winston to check in, then grab dinner in nearby Pioneertown. But 5 p.m. rolled around, and Ewasko hadn’t called. Winston tried his cellphone several times, and it went directly to voice mail.

She knew he might still be in a region of the park with limited cellular access, but the thought was hardly reassuring. As night fell on the West Coast with no word from Ewasko, Winston tried to call someone at the park, but by then Joshua Tree headquarters had closed for the day. Her only option was to wait.

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Part of the attraction of Joshua Tree National Park is the contrast in landscape and environment. The park’s landscape exhibits considerable changes as the higher elevations are a mountainous ecosystem and, from the east to the west, the Mojave descends into the hotter and drier Colorado Desert.

The western part of the park is filled with Joshua Trees that stimulate a visitor’s imagination with shapes resembling stick figures. The trees (actually yuccas) are pollinated only by yucca moths that lay eggs in the flowers. The larva feed on seeds as the fruit matures. The average lifespan of the plants is about 150 years, although there is concern a warming climate is resulting in much shorter lives at lower elevations.

The park was established in 1936 as a national monument and upgraded in 1994 to national park status at the same time 234,000 acres of land were added. The 1994 expansion resulted in new boundaries with elevations that range from 900 feet to more than 5,000 feet and cover three major ecosystems. About 75 percent of the park’s nearly 800,000 acres are designated as wilderness.

Despite annually welcoming nearly 1.6 million visitors to a park one third the size of Yellowstone, Joshua Tree National Park never seems to be crowded. The lack of congestion is in part due to visitation being more evenly spread throughout the year. The park enjoys an extended season that runs from early fall through late spring. Only hot summers deter visitation to the southern California desert.

The park’s main roads are laid out in a wiggly Y-shape with entrances in the northwest, north and south with visitor centers near each entrance. Most visitors spend the majority of time in the northern and western sections of the park. These are scenic areas that serve as home for the Joshua Trees that prefer the cooler climate of the Mojave Desert.

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“I was shocked when the study came out. I wanted to look at the details and change the scale,” said Cameron Barrows, a research ecologist for the UC Riverside Center for Conservation Biology in Palm Desert.

The large scale of the study by Kenneth Cole, a climate scientist for the federal government’s Colorado Plateau Research Station in Flagstaff, Arizona, missed many of the geological nuances of Joshua Tree National Park and elsewhere, according to Barrows, which could ultimately mean survival for the Joshua tree species.

Doing his own modeling, which took a detailed look at the geography of Joshua Tree National Park, Barrows said that going into 2100, this 13,000-year-old desert plant species may survive — at the higher elevations of Joshua Tree National Park and along north-facing slopes and some canyon areas.

Although Barrows presents a more optimistic view on the future of Joshua trees than does Cole, there are still problems, he said. In addition to the warmer winters and summers, there’s air pollution depositing nitrates on the soil, according to Barrows.

That soil enrichment will transform portions of the now largely barren desert into grasslands. The location where the grasses will thrive coincides with the prime habitat for these surviving Joshua trees.

With grasses come forest fires, and the Joshua tree is not a plant that has adapted to fire. Recovery will be difficult, Barrows said, and certainly not helped by the fact that it can take 70 years for a Joshua tree to produce offspring.

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When you eventually reach the top of Queen Mountain in Joshua Tree National Park, there is little more up there than a U.S. Geological Survey marker and a Boys Scout log book kept inside a black, plastic water-tight box. That, and the sort of quiet, breezy views of the vast high desert, this perch at 5,687 feet will most surely offer, all under the careful watch of a circling hawk.

Look out in the distance in one direction, you’ll see the Marine base and the town of Twentynine Palms; off in the other direction is the beautiful openness that is Joshua Tree National Park, nearly 800,000 acres big and home to more than 800 plant species, 40 reptile species, 41 mammal species, and 240 bird species.

Hiking, as an outdoor pastime, has ballooned in interest in the region as visitors look beyond the staples of golf and pool lounging. Tourism agencies like the Greater Palm Springs Bureau of Tourism recently launched a new hiking website to accommodate and grow this trend.

The hiking site, which is hikingingps.com, began production about a year ago and was launched a few weeks ago. It’s a searchable site that includes trails across the valley as well as those in areas like Idyllwild. You can narrow your search according to location, difficulty levels or even searching for dog-friendly trails.

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The areas include Carey’s Castle and El Sid Mine, in the Eagle Mountains range in the southeast area of the park.

The areas will be closed “at least for a month” until cultural artifact teams can inventory and record the areas, and while the park devises an enforcement and surveillance strategy, park Supt. David Smith said.

“We had some looting at El Sid that started a few months ago,” he said. “We actually bought some artifacts to replace the original ones and they got stolen, too.” Both sites harbor former miners’ homesteads.

Neither site attracted many but the most intrepid cross-country hikers, until a newspaper recently printed a two-page spread about day hiking to Carey’s Castle, Smith said. Soon after, the ranger’s office received six calls in one day about the site, compared with about that many visits by individual hikers per month, along with a few Sierra Club-sponsored group trips per year, he said.

The National Park Service has struggled with the abandoned mines on its properties – there are 531 mining-related features in Joshua Tree, of which about 58 still require protection measures. Death Valley contains more than 9,000 such features.

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The year-and-a-half partnership culminated with a weeklong project in March, where architectural conservators from the University of New Mexico volunteered their skills to effectively mitigate the visual impacts of scratched graffiti from the entire surface of the dam.

The dam can still hold water, but the ongoing drought in California has severely reduced annual precipitation. Lowering water levels in the dam exposed the naturally weathered surface and vandals were quick to act. In less than a year, scratched graffiti spread across over 50 percent of the entire surface of the dam.

UNM conservators employed a method known as “in-painting” to blend the scratched areas into the surrounding naturally weathered surface. “In-painting” is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process that involves adding pigments to the scratched areas with a method similar to the painting style of pointillism. Instead of merely painting over the graffiti entirely, the paint is applied in a way that matches the surrounding colors, textures, and patterns.

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Discovered flower-clad yucca and wildflowers, and discover a fan palm oasis and an alpine wilderness high above the desert floor.

Two different ecosystems, the Mojave and Colorado deserts, meet in Joshua Tree National Park, resulting in a large number of plants and landforms sculpted by strong winds across this 794,000-acre park. The Mojave sits on the western side at 4,000 feet above sea level, and it’s home to forests of the whimsical, spiky Joshua tree, a star attraction in itself.

Hike the Maze Loop Trail, a see-all-the-park-features circuit that begins near the park’s west entrance and leads through stands of Yucca brevifolia or Joshua trees, with its treelike trunk and spiky, prickly branches all akimbo. Some bear clusters of white, waxy flowers, ready to bloom. Each tree is distinctive.

Scramble over strange rock formations and through desert washes and slot canyons to reach a maze of high walls and twisting canyons. Here, granite rock piles look like someone stacked them to resemble an eagle’s head or a recumbent Snoopy.

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