Joshua Tree National Park Trivia
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50 free Joshua Tree National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Joshua Tree National Park trivia quiz covers the Southern California park where the high Mojave Desert meets the low Colorado Desert amid piles of rounded granite boulders and forests of spiky yuccas. Questions cover the geology of the inselbergs and the Wonderland of Rocks, the two deserts and their plants, the yucca moth, the desert tortoise, the fan palm oases and the dark skies, along with the climbing scene and Keys View. The history side takes in the Pinto Culture, the Serrano, Cahuilla and Chemehuevi, the Mormon settlers who supposedly named the tree, the McHaney rustlers, the Lost Horse and Desert Queen mines, Bill Keys and his ranch, the socialite Minerva Hoyt who won Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 monument, the 1994 upgrade to national park, and pop-culture footnotes from Gram Parsons' stolen corpse to the U2 album cover tree that is nowhere near the park. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it works for a campfire game at Hidden Valley or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Death Valley and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Joshua Tree National Park lies a few hours' drive east of which big city?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles. When desert gardens came into fashion there, landscapers dug up so many cacti that the plunder set off the campaign to protect the area.
Q 02Joshua Tree National Park straddles which two deserts?
Mojave and Colorado
Mojave and Colorado. Elevation draws the line: Joshua trees grow in the Mojave uplands, while the low, hot Colorado Desert is ocotillo country.
Q 03The Joshua tree is actually what kind of plant?
A yucca
A yucca. The Joshua tree sits in the agave family, not among the true trees, and it can send up new stems from its roots after a fire or flood.
Q 04Which group is commonly credited with naming the Joshua tree after a biblical figure?
Mormon settlers
Mormon settlers are said to have seen the biblical Joshua in its upraised branches, but no record from the time confirms the tale.
Q 05Which kind of insect is the Joshua tree's sole pollinator, laying its eggs inside the flowers?
A moth
A moth. The female spreads pollen as she lays her eggs inside the flowers, and her larvae eat only some of the seeds, leaving the rest to grow.
Q 06Fossil dung shows which extinct Ice Age animal fed on Joshua trees and may have spread their seeds?
Shasta ground sloth
Shasta ground sloth. Its dung, preserved in a cave near Las Vegas, is full of Joshua tree leaves, fruit and seeds, so the long-extinct animal may once have carried the seeds for miles.
Q 07Which president proclaimed Joshua Tree a national monument in the 1930s?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt. Campaigners wanted more than a million acres, but tracts of railroad land had to be left out, and his 1936 proclamation covered about 825,000.
Q 08Which Pasadena socialite and desert-plant campaigner is credited with winning protection for Joshua Tree?
Minerva Hoyt
Minerva Hoyt staged lavish desert-plant shows in New York, Boston and London to win the desert admirers, and a peak in the park was named for her in 2012.
Q 09Which 1994 law turned the monument into Joshua Tree National Park?
California Desert Protection Act
California Desert Protection Act. Senator Alan Cranston first introduced it in 1986, and it took eight years and Senator Dianne Feinstein to get it signed.
Q 10At about 795,000 acres, Joshua Tree National Park is slightly larger than which US state?
Rhode Island
Rhode Island. Most of that land is managed as wilderness with no roads or buildings, so the bulk of the park can be reached only on foot or horseback.
Q 11Joshua Tree's famous piles of rounded boulders are made of a type of which rock?
Granite
Granite, of a kind called monzogranite. Groundwater seeping along its joints rounded the blocks while they were still buried, and flash floods later stripped the soil to leave the piles.
Q 12About how old are Joshua Tree National Park's oldest rocks?
1.7 billion years
1.7 billion years. That ancient gneiss formed deep beneath a long-vanished mountain system, more than a billion years before the rock of the park's famous boulder piles.
Q 13Which fault runs just southwest of Joshua Tree National Park, with related faults such as the Blue Cut crossing inside it?
San Andreas
Q 21What reportedly cost Johnny Lang his share of Joshua Tree's most successful mine?
Stealing its gold
Stealing its gold. As the story goes, Lang skimmed from the mill he supervised until his partners caught on and gave him a choice: sell his share or go to jail.
Q 22Which rancher and miner built the Desert Queen Ranch, now shown on ranger-led tours in Joshua Tree National Park?
Bill Keys
Bill Keys took over the McHaney homestead, renamed it after a nearby gold mine and ran a mill that crushed other miners' ore.
Q 23The rancher who built Joshua Tree's Desert Queen Ranch was sent to San Quentin for what?
Shooting a neighbour
San Andreas. Faults do the park a favour: they force groundwater up to the surface, and that is where its palm oases grow.
Q 14Which body of water can be seen from Joshua Tree's roadside lookout over the Coachella Valley?
Salton Sea
Salton Sea. On a clear day it glints far below the lookout, but smog blowing in from nearby cities can hide the view.
Q 15The desert fan palm, which shades oases in Joshua Tree National Park, holds what distinction?
Only palm native to California
Only palm native to California. Fire is its ally: the thick trunk survives flames that clear away rival plants and help its seedlings get started.
Q 16Which spring at Twentynine Palms, long a Native village site, now sits beside Joshua Tree's park headquarters?
Oasis of Mara
Oasis of Mara. Tradition says the Serrano planted its first 29 palms, which gave the town its name, around springs that rise where a fault blocks the groundwater.
Q 17Joshua Tree's earliest known residents, whose spear points were found in a park basin in the 1930s, are called what?
Pinto Culture
Pinto Culture. Amateur archaeologists Elizabeth and William Campbell collected the hunters' spear points along a dried-up channel in the Pinto Basin and first described them.
Q 18Which American general trained troops for desert warfare beside Joshua Tree during the Second World War?
George S. Patton
George S. Patton. In 1942 he set up the Desert Training Center at Camp Young, just south of the monument, to ready tank crews to fight in North Africa.
Q 19The McHaney brothers, who settled near Twentynine Palms in the late 1800s, were reputed to run what kind of gang?
Cattle rustlers
Cattle rustlers. Legend has the gang driving stolen herds in from Arizona and Mexico, and it seized the Desert Queen gold mine after one of its men shot the finder.
Q 20What was the most successful of the roughly 300 mines worked in the Joshua Tree area?
Lost Horse Mine
Lost Horse Mine. Johnny Lang is said to have named it after his horses strayed nearby, and it went on to yield more than 10,000 ounces of gold.
Shooting a neighbour. He killed the man in 1943 in a feud over the road to his ore mill, was convicted of manslaughter and served about five years before winning a full pardon.
Q 24Which author and former lawyer won the Desert Queen Ranch's jailed owner a pardon?
Erle Stanley Gardner
Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, believed the rancher had been unfairly convicted; his appeals won the man's release and, in 1956, a governor's pardon.
Q 25Which miner and cattleman gave his name to the dam he built around 1900 at a Joshua Tree rainwater tank?
C.O. Barker
C.O. Barker. His cattle company's dam was raised half a century later, and when its pool holds water it draws desert bighorn sheep and a steady stream of hikers.
Q 26Why did Joshua Tree rangers close Rattlesnake Canyon and a historic dam to visitors in 2013?
Graffiti and vandalism
Graffiti and vandalism. Rangers found the canyon tagged and names scratched into the dam, and blamed vandals who showed off their handiwork on social media.
Q 27Why did rock climbers first flock to Joshua Tree?
A winter stand-in for Yosemite
A winter stand-in for Yosemite. When cold shut down the big Sierra walls, its regulars came south to practise on dry desert rock, which only later became a destination in its own right.
Q 28Which Joshua Tree rock formation stands right beside Park Boulevard, just east of Jumbo Rocks campground?
Skull Rock
Skull Rock. Water collecting in small pockets slowly ate two hollows into the boulder, leaving what look like the eye sockets of a skull.
Q 29In 2017 Joshua Tree won an international designation for protecting which natural resource?
Dark night skies
Dark night skies. The park was named an International Dark Sky Park, and many visitors see the Milky Way there for the first time in their lives.
Q 30Which threatened reptile of Joshua Tree's creosote flats gets much of its water from the plants it eats?
Desert tortoise
Desert tortoise. It stores water in its bladder for the dry months, which is why a frightened tortoise that empties it may die of thirst.