Joshua Tree National Park continues to be popular year-round, and the holidays won’t be any different. Locals staying in the desert have out of town visitors who use the opportunity to head into the park, and the days off from the holidays through New Years usually means an uptick in visitors to our area.
The area we know as Joshua Tree National Park started as Joshua Tree National Monument, when the original desert defender and my personal hero Minerva Hoyt used her generational wealth, influence and love of the desert to persuade the state and federal government to protect 825,000 acres way back in 1936.
It’s fair to say that visitation has steadily ticked up from then, with a sharp rise in popularity for our National Park in the last decade. Here’s Jane Rodgers during a recent interview with Gary Daigneault about how the large visitor numbers can sometimes clash with the drive-through nature of the park.
Jane Rodgers: “Any national park that’s popular these days – which is the majority of them – parking is a chronic issue. At peak times when it’s a really popular time to visi…t the weather is good or maybe it’s a school break… the challenge is there’s only so many parking spots in the park. There’s only so many official places and trailheads and so forth and once those are all filled, we’re kind of at capacity in certain areas.
So the idea we’re trying to do is encourage folks to time their visit or also look at areas that maybe they haven’t thought about… visiting other areas of the park that have more parking opportunities. So those are the kind of things we’re trying to work through.”
Parking in undesignated spots in the national park is a safety issue, alongside a larger conservation problem as the vehicles damage or destroy the native plants and delicate soil ecosystems that give the park its unique beauty. This fundamental disconnect between wanting to witness the beauty of the park and actively damaging it is even more confusing when visitors choose to go off-trail.
“We remind them that the Bureau Land Management Area is a potential opportunity for them to go and visit if they would like to do more stuff off the beaten path. The rules in the park is that all vehicles must stay on a designated roadway and some of those roadways are better for four wheel drive vehicles. Those are the old Dale Road, Black Eagle Mine road… that we find on the southern end of the park… the Geology Tour Road is a really popular are for the Jeep/4×4.”
That’s Myles Landry, the Emergency Services Program Manager at the National Park. He says that even on the parks’ roads that are specifically designated for more technical 4x4ing, ill-equipped vehicles can get stuck, which can be a potentially dangerous and certainly expensive recovery.
If you are heading into the park and run into a busy area without available parking – try moving on to other spots that are less popular. It’s a subjective opinion – but our expansive public lands have so many unique and beautiful features, it’s hard to recommend waiting around with dozens of other people just to get a snap of skull rock. Stop by the visitor center and ask a ranger for their favorite alternatives, and download the National park Service app for points of interest you may not have heard of.
And if you feel the itch to get your tires dirty – save it for the thousands of miles of wild OHV lands that are reserved for you to rip around in. You can find links to those areas and other resources below:
Johnson Valley OHV Area – BLM Land for Offroading
The National Park Service App – Android + iPhone
