5-Day Itinerary for Visiting Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Parks in One Trip

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This post is to serve as a very high-level itinerary to give you a glimpse as to what the trip entailed. For more details, see the longer posts linked at the end.

I have a goal to visit all the national parks and hadn’t been to Death Valley or Joshua Tree yet. This trip started with a text to my bff, Cindy, asking if she’d visit the desert with me – it had been a long winter, even in Texas, haha! To my surprise, she said “heck yeah”!

I was waffling between the two parks and had decided to just go to Death Valley but after hours of research, we decided we could hit them both up in one trip. I read tons of opinions on blogs and IG – and many people felt like they needed more time in both parks. But I figured we could hit the highlights and if I wanted more time in either, I could always plan another trip.

For both Cindy and me, we felt like one day in Death Valley and half a day in Joshua Tree was the perfect amount of time to see all the must-see spots and still feel like we experienced them. Long story short – we both flew into Las Vegas, rented a car and drove to Death Valley and then Joshua Tree and drove back to Vegas to fly home.

Here’s our 5-day Itinerary – which actually could have been 4 but it was nice to have a little buffer:

Day 1 – Fly into Las Vegas and pick up rental car. Drive to Pahrump, NV, about an hour away. Stay at the Holiday Inn Express.

Day 2 – Visit Death Valley National Park, drive back to Pahrump to sleep. It’s about an hour each way from Pahrump to the park.

Day 3 – Drive from Pahrump to Joshua Tree National Park. It’s about a 4-hour drive. Since we arrived around noon, we went straight to the Joshua Tree NP Visitor’s Center and then to the park. We felt like we were able to see everything we wanted to see in about 5 hours, but we could have gone back the next morning if we wanted to. We stayed in 29 Palms that night at the Campbell House Inn in the Sunrise Cottage.

Day 4 – Head back to Vegas. Knowing what we know now, we could have flown out Sunday evening but we didn’t know how much time we’d need so we basically had a free day. We took our time driving back to Vegas and had time to stop at the Seven Magic Mountains outside of Vegas and then drove thru Red Rocks Canyon – it was incredibly beautiful and I’m so glad we had time! We dropped the car off so we didn’t have to pay for an extra night and pay for parking. We took an Uber to the hotel and stayed the night in Vegas. Cindy used Vegas.com to book our night at the Horseshoe (formerly Bally’s). It was only $50! And a great hotel.

Day 5 – Fly home! Our flights were at 9am, which was perfect because our brains were on Central Time so we had no problems getting up early to make it to the airport by 7am to fly home. We both got home in the early afternoon, which was nice!

We went April 27-May 1, 2023 and it was super hot already so keep that in mind when planning. Temps hit 103 degrees at the Furnace Creek Visitor’s Center while we were there at noon.

This itinerary worked out great! If you’re thinking of planning a trip to either park and want to know more details, check out my post, Long Weekend Trip to Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Parks, which has all the details of where we stayed, ate and what we did. Or, if you’re just looking to do Death Valley, you can read One Day in Death Valley National Park here. Happy travel planning!