“Big Josh” gets decked out for the spooky season in the hi-desert

It’s officially the Halloween season, and hi-desert landmark Big Josh has once again transformed for the holidays. Big Josh is the enormous fiberglass man who overlooks Twentynine Palms Highway from the Station in Joshua Tree. The storefront, owned by married couple Steve Halterman and Glen Steigelman, serves as a destination for novelties and fashion, so it’s no surprise they regularly dress up their enormous mascot.

I asked about the origin of Big Josh. 

Steigelman said, ” He was down in the Salton Sea. He was considered the Mecca cowboy. And he was at a place that was called Poor Richard’s Western Auto. I think that they got him around 1980, from a local date farm down there. And Big Josh stood there and became in disarray, disrepair. His head had fallen off. So it was taken down and leaned up against a building along that road.

“Then this dude named George talked to the owner of the property, and she wanted to sell it. He loaded it up on a trailer and brought it to the Yucca Valley swap meet.”

Halterman said, Glen happened to be there that day. He fell into the right hands. So we basically took him up to the house. We took him in a car carrier up to the house, pulled him into pieces into the garage, and fixed all the fiberglass, fixed all the holes, and then repainted him, put him back together, got the clearance from the county, which took a long time. And then one Saturday morning, we got a crane, put him, and it was a big surprise. There he is!”

Jef: “When was the first time you dressed him up?”

“I think that from what we can tell, it looks like it was in 2019,” said Halterman. We dressed him up as a vampire. That was the first Halloween. And then we’ve done it every year since. 

Steigelman added, “We’ve done fun things, like on 420. On May the 4th, we have a lightsaber made that we put in his hands. One time we hugged baby Yoda between his hands. We had a giant apron made that said kiss the cook, and kiss was, you know, the kiss band letters.”

Halterman said, “The older we get, the more we realize that climbing up there isn’t the safest thing we should be doing. So now we pretty much are sticking to Halloween every year we dress him up. “

That was one of my questions, is do you have a crane? Do you bring him down, like a big ladder? We may do a crane this time for the first time because climbing up there is pretty gnarly.

“I’m pretty good at it,” said Steigelman. “I’m not afraid of heights, and I’ll climb that thing very quickly. Yeah. But just a little fun fact about Big Josh, Steve and I can carry him on our own.”

“It’s become a tradition. We had one of these statues, originally a Paul Bunyan, where I grew up in Wisconsin. We went a lot as a family, and I’m glad we’re able to create those memories here. 

They said that out of all the costumes, which they make themselves , the mummy costume they devised for Big Josh in 2021 has been there favorite.

“It came out awesome,” said Halterman. “It was a work of art.”

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He continued, “So this year hopefully will be a redemption of last year because I was not happy with last year, which was Michael Myers. It didn’t turn out that great. So I’m trying to make up for it.  It’s always a secret. So we’re not going to tell exactly what it is. But a good hint to it is that what monster would he turn into if we were waiting for the full moon?”

And if you want to go see Big Josh in his Halloween costume, you can show up at The Station, located on the highway on the east side of downtown Joshua Tree.

You can’t miss Big Josh.

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