But Rosenthal somehow took a wrong turn off a trail he thought he knew well. On Thursday, six days later, search and rescue crews found him severely dehydrated -- but miraculously alive -- about 2,000 feet down a canyon, where he had wandered after getting lost near the park's southern boundaries.
"He was conscious when the rescuers found him and was talking with them, but he does have some injuries and some exposure issues," park spokesman Joe Zarki told The Desert Sun newspaper of Palm Springs. A San Bernardino County sheriff's helicopter swooped in to ferry him to the High Desert Medical Center, where he was listed in intensive care, in stable condition and recovering from severe dehydration, The Associated Press reported.
"It's really very miraculous," Rosenthal's wife, Nicole Kaplan, told the Los Angeles Times. "I didn't think that he'd be around."
Kaplan said her husband is a poet who always has a pen with him but didn't have paper this time. So to keep himself sane while hoping rescuers would find him, he wrote on his hat -- telling his wife and daughter how he loved them, writing advice to business partners and instructions on what kind of funeral he wanted.
"He realized he was lost and could not go any further, so he lied low and wrote on his hat," Kaplan told the AP.
Asked what exactly he wrote, Kaplan told the Times "it's fairly personal. ... He basically wrote down everything he wanted us to know on that hat."
His wrote his last journal entry on the hat on Wednesday, writing simply: "Still here."
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"We will probably frame the hat, along with the map the ranger gave us showing exactly where he was found," Kaplan told the AP.Southern California has been experiencing a severe heat wave, but cloud cover over the Palm Springs area kept the park 15 to 20 degrees cooler than normal. "So that helped him I'm sure," Zarki told National Parks Traveler magazine.
Another 65-year-old man went missing in the same area of Joshua Tree National Park in June, but Georgia native William Ewasko was never found. The difference between the two cases -- between life and death -- was the soil that happened to absorb Rosenthal's footprints, Zarki said.
"We had a good trail to follow coming off the loop trail where (Rosenthal) made a wrong turn," Zarki told National Parks Traveler. "The one in June, we never had a clear idea where that gentleman was."