Joshua Tree National Park (Part 3)

The early 1990s saw attitudes change towards the cultural resources of the monument. Passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 allowed the Chemehuevi to claim human remains held by the monument which were reinterred with associated funerary objects. After the monument received intense scrutiny for the substandard storage conditions of its archaeological collection, a new museum storage building and library were constructed in 1993. However, the following year the grave of Johnny Lang was dug up by an unknown perpetrator and his skull and other bones have not been found since.

The fight to protect the deserts of Southern California picked up again in 1993 when Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced S. 21 in Congress. The bill was repeatedly modified before being signed by President William J. Clinton on October 31, 1994. The California Desert Protection Act of 1994 protected 9.4 million acres of desert in the second largest action of land preservation in U.S. history after the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The act redesignated Joshua Tree and Death Valley as national parks and expanded each, established Mojave National Preserve, and converted 69 BLM wilderness study areas to official wilderness. About 234,000 acres were added to Joshua Tree National Park, including 163,800 acres of designated wilderness and proposed wilderness, with new lands encompassing portions of the Pinto, Coxcomb, Eagle, Cottonwood, and Little San Bernardino Mountains. New inholdings were acquired via purchases, exchanges with the state for public domain land outside the park, and three land trusts, the Wildlands Conservancy, the National Park Foundation, and the Mojave Desert Land Trust, which organized to directly buy inholdings for donation to the park.

Between 2003-2014, Joshua Tree National Park and the San Bernardino County Museum partnered to study the paleontology of the Pinto Basin. A team led by Kathleen Springer and Eric Scott unearthed fossils from a variety of Pleistocene animals including horses (Equus), camels (Camelops hesternus), llamas (Hemiauchenia), American pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), gray wolves (Canis lupus), tortoises (Testudinidae), bison (Bison antiquus and Bison occidentalis), ground sloths (Paramylodon harlani), Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi), and possibly a dire wolf (Canis dirus). They also found stone tools and artifacts used by ancient people of the Pinto Culture. The ground sloths once fed on Joshua tree fruits and dispersed the seeds in their dung across much of the plant’s current range. After ground sloths went extinct, packrats and other rodents became the primary seed dispersers which limited the range of Joshua trees whose seeds now generally sprout only a few feet from the parent tree.

In 2006, the Joshua Tree National Park Association bought a building to serve as a visitor center in the village of Joshua Tree, where the majority of visitors entered the park. The Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 designated about 36,700 acres as wilderness and added another 43,300 acres of potential wilderness, bringing the combined total to over 80% of the park. The park then named a 5,405-foot peak Mount Minerva Hoyt on the anniversary of the activist’s birthday on March 27, 2013. In 2017, Joshua Tree National Park was designated a Silver Tier Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association.

Park staff were furloughed during the federal government shutdown of 2018-2019, allowing many visitors to participate in illegal activities in the absence of authority. Some allegedly cut down Joshua trees while others started illegal fires, drove off-road, and painted graffiti on at least 17 sites. In 2019, 4,518 acres were added to the park by the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. The park herbarium now contains more than 6,500 specimens representing over 95% of the nearly 750 vascular plant species known to inhabit the park. It produced seven newly described species including the Joshua tree goldenaster (Heterotheca joshuana) and Joshua tree poppy (Eschscholzia androuxii).

When Joshua Tree was first afforded protections as a national monument, fire management was seen as a minor issue for the deserts but over the years several large fires have made their mark on the land. In 1942, a man-made fire in Hidden Valley burned 165 acres and killed a road foreman who was fighting the fire via smoke inhalation. In 1949, two teenagers started a fire that severely damaged almost every mature fan palm at the Fortynine Palms Oasis. The 1978 Joshua Fire burned 6,142 acres while the 1979 Quail Mountain Fire burned 6,000 acres. From 1979 to May 30, 1984, lightning started 39 fires while another 19 were caused by humans. Then on May 31, 1984, the Lost Horse Canyon Fire burned 4,120 acres. Between 1985-1992, 50 wildfires occurred within the monument. The 1995 Covington Fire burned 5,521 acres, including some acreage outside of the park, and the 1999 Juniper Complex Fire burned 13,899 acres as the largest fire in the history of Joshua Tree. More recently, the 2022 Elk Fire burned 170 acres in the park while the 2023 Geology Fire burned another 1,033 acres.

Joshua Tree National Park is particularly susceptible to the negative effects of climate change and has been consistently listed among the top ten most endangered national parks in the U.S. according to a variety of sources. Vegetative communities in many areas of the park have not fully recovered since protections were first granted which may be attributed to the legacy of plant poaching for landscaping, harvesting of materials for construction and fuel, cattle grazing, vandalism, and other human developments. Fewer Joshua tree seedlings in the park reach maturity and projections of rising temperatures and increased incidences of drought paint a grim picture for the future of the plant. As suitable habitat shifts to cooler areas, it is feared that rodent seed dispersers will not spread Joshua tree seeds quickly enough to prevent the plant from dying off at lower elevations.

Skull Rock formed long ago as rain accumulated and eroded small depressions in the granite called tafoni. Over time, the indentations grew larger until they resembled the eye sockets of a skull.