In the morning, when the sun rose over the mountains like the dawning of a new planet in a low budget sci-fi movie, I discovered that I was staying in one of many cabins spread out at somewhat regular intervals across the area called Wonder Valley — an unincorporated community at the farthest reaches of the Morongo Basin. Some of these cabins had been duded up, fenced in and turned into compounds with jury-rigged satellites and dirt yards filled with old pickups and rusted trailers. Some, like the place where I was staying, had been taken over by an early generation of artists for whom the desert seemed to provide a challenging canvas. But many sat empty, their windows boarded up or missing.

Except for a bar and a used bookstore that’s rarely open, there were—and are— no amenities in Wonder Valley. There are no stoplights or streetlights, nothing to punctuate the night sky. After dark, dogs howl and coyotes yip in anticipation of a kill.

The landscape is monotonous — a flat and almost ghostly expanse of scrubby desert whose most impressive feature is the tenacity of the flora, fauna and human beings who survive there. But there’s an unsettling sort of beauty in the challenges Wonder Valley presents, especially after dark. For night is when this far corner of the Mojave gave me its odd reassurance that it was still possible to go somewhere unexpected, that it wasn’t only O.K. to be lost, it was somehow necessary.

Image Credit... The New York Times

A few days after soaking up the silence and marveling at the isolation, I went in search of supplies, a cocktail and human contact. That is how I found the 29 Palms Inn, a collection of timber and adobe cabins clustered around an oasis ringed with palm trees — the sort of place that makes you feel as if you’ve stepped back into a 1950s dreamland and are the first person to discover its charms. The pool, adjacent to the bar, is enclosed by cinder block walls painted in gradients of purple to intensify the color of its water; the gradients of orange on the wall’s exterior capture the sunrise and the sunset.