Live camera
Joshua Tree National Park live camera — California
Dry country where two different deserts meet. Strange trees and rounded boulders, and a wide swing between day and night temperatures.
Sample August 2026What you are looking at
Trees with branches thrown out in every direction stand among boulders whose corners have been worn off. This is the seam between two deserts.
The Joshua trees spreading their arms in frame grow only on the Mojave side, which sits higher. Cross into the lower, hotter Colorado Desert and they vanish, replaced by nothing but low scrub. The boundary between the two deserts runs through this park, so what grows here depends on where inside it you are. The round boulders are granite that weathered and cracked underground, then emerged as the soil above it washed away.
A Joshua tree is not a tree but a yucca, and a single kind of moth carries its pollen; without that moth it sets no seed. The area was fenced off as a national monument in 1936, after a long campaign against the digging up of desert plants for gardens.
Dry air holds no heat, so the gap between day and night temperatures is wide. The park is also protected for the quality of its night sky.
The round boulders are also a place for climbers, with more than eight thousand named routes on them. That is among the largest numbers anywhere, and because the summer is too hot, the season people come in is winter. The ground that had been fenced off as a monument was raised to a national park in 1994, under a law that set aside a wide stretch of this desert all at once.
Pacific time runs 16 to 17 hours behind Japan, so 1am in Japan is morning there. It is a still camera, and nothing shows at night.
About this camera
| Place | California |
| Format | Still image |
| Time zone | America/Los_Angeles (UTC-8, DST UTC-7) |
| Category | Nature |
| Operator | U.S. National Park Service |
| Terms of use | U.S. government work |
The operator's own page
The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.
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