The continuing recovery of Joshua Tree National Park

It’s been six months since the government reopened after the longest shutdown in history, and Joshua Tree National Park is still recovering after an influx of visitors stretched the park’s infrastructure to the limits.

“There’s no Plan B for Joshua Tree National Park. I want this park to be here 50 years from now.”

Rand Abbott has seen it all being a long time climber, helping spearhead the community effort to maintain the park during the government shutdown. It was a grassroots effort that filled the gaps with park rangers unable to work.

“The community came together and it was amazing to see and there were people that came in from Los Angeles, people who came up from Palm Springs,” Abbott said.

The shutdown put Joshua Tree under stress as visitors flooded the park. With no entrance fees to control the flow and not enough rangers to enforce the rules, it magnified existing issues.

“They were seeing lots and lots of out-of-bounds camping. So folks who were driving into areas where there aren’t any roads. They’re driving into the wilderness,” Park Superintendent David Smith, said.

He says illegal off-roading caused some of the most significant damage in the park…

Smith says wash areas were popular areas for people off-roading illegally. In fact, they had more than 200 instances where this happened totaling 24 miles in illegal off-roading.

“These car tracks right here will last for years. It takes a long time for it to rebuild the crust that’s gone through,” he said.

Hundreds to thousands of years in fact. Smith says while to the naked eye it’s simply sand and dirt, it’s actually microbiotic crust, filled with seeds and microorganisms, creating a foundation for desert wildlife. If disturbed, it would disrupt the park’s entire ecosystem.

“As a result, you’re going to have drainage in those areas. You’re going to have more erosion in those areas,” Smith said.

Other damage during the shutdown included illegal camping and removal of artifacts at cultural sites. In all, there were 59 incidents of vandalism and 114 sites with evidence of illegal camping. He says the grassroots community effort during the shutdown was huge in mitigating the effects, like cleaning bathrooms and taking out the trash.

“It was done by people that know that these parks belong to them. These are special places that need to be protected and that all of us have a role in protecting these places,” Smith said.

He says his rangers were able to make many fixes, but the growing popularity of the park creates more challenges.

“The park for the longest amount of time was kind of a sleepy section of the California desert and that’s no longer the case,” Smith said.

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Before 2014, the park averaged between 1.2 to 1.3 million visitors a year. This year alone through May, more than 1.5 million visitors were counted with three million visitors expected by the end of December. More visitors mean continued issues in the park.

“I think most of those infractions were done, let’s say 80 percent of them are done out of ignorance. People don’t know,” Abbott said.

He says education is now the focus to gently inform visitors the do’s and don’t’s inside the park. The push could be as simple as posting on Instagram.

“Do a hashtag keep Joshua Tree clean. Keep our parks clean. Let everybody post that. The more we make it the right thing to do, the more it’s going to happen,” Abbott said.

It’s a plan they hope secures the park’s future for generations to come.