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With Superintendent David Smith leaving for San Francisco – he’s looking back over his nearly decade long tenure at Joshua Tree National Park – and over those years there have been significant changes to the Morongo Basin and the amount of people who visit it.
During a recent conversation with Gary Daigneault, Smith reflected on those changes and talked about upcoming plans to address some of the most pressing issues that come from the National Park’s explosion in popularity.
“I think the music festivals in Joshua Tree and Coachella had been going on for a number of time and people were looking for that next step. Palm Springs had a resurrection and folks were coming to Palm Springs looking for something to do… all of those things coming together with the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service really put Joshua Tree on the map.”
The proliferation of Instagram along with the pandemic created an increase in visitors – at first from 1.3 to 1.6 million in the early years, to where it now sits at over 3 million visitors a year. The park’s west gate gets most of that traffic, and over the years residents on Quail Springs Rd. have had to sometimes grapple with how to leave their house when traffic is gridlocked. A new west gate has been in the works for a while – and Smith hopes that it can move from planning to construction soon.
“Taking the funding from our revenue, we have that money set aside and we’ve done all environmental compliance on the project. It’s just a matter of being able to follow the the bidding process that allows for contractors from around the United States to bid on this fairly, so I’m expecting any day to be able to reopen that bid and then look at the bids so that we can actually assign a contractor to begin the construction. That will increase it from that one booth to four booths for people to go through with an additional pass-through lane, and with an additional bike lane so that we get a steady flow of traffic into the park instead of these huge bursts when we have to open the gates because so many people.”
Along with an increase in booths and lanes, the new entrance would be set deeper into the park, giving even more space for cars to line up during the busiest seasons like spring.
As David Smith prepares to say goodbye to the Morongo Basin – for now – he hopes that the west gate project will offer relief to residents who love the national park, but are on the receiving end of some of the annoyances that come with the popularity.
“And so my my hope is that folks that live in Monument Manor and that portion of the park that they never have an experience of 10 cars in front of their house so they can’t get out of their house…”
As the west gate project moves from planning to construction – we’ll keep you informed on on the schedule along with any other news that comes out of our area’s treasured national park.
You can hear the complete interview with David Smith, or read and listen to other stories from his farewell interview with Gary Daigneault below.
