Joshua Tree National Monument
| Joshua Tree National Park | |
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IUCN category II (national park)
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Joshua Tree National Park: Cyclops and Pee Wee Formations near Hidden Valley Campground at sunrise
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| Location | Riverside County and San Bernardino County, California, United States |
| Nearest city | Yucca Valley, San Bernardino |
| Coordinates | 33°47′18″N 115°53′54″W / 33.7883944°N 115.8982222°WCoordinates: 33°47′18″N 115°53′54″W / 33.7883944°N 115.8982222°W |
| Area | 790,636 acres (319,959 ha) |
| Established | October 31, 1994 |
| Visitors | 2,505,286 (in 2016) |
| Governing body | National Park Service |
| Website | Joshua Tree National Park |
Joshua Tree National Park is located in southeastern California. Declared a U.S. National Park in 1994 when the U.S. Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act (Public Law 103-433), it had been a U.S. National Monument since 1936. It is named for the Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) native to the park. It covers a land area of 790,636 acres (1,235.37 sq mi; 3,199.59 km2)—an area slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island. A large part of the park, some 429,690 acres (173,890 ha), is a designated wilderness area. Straddling the San Bernardino County/Riverside County border, the park includes parts of two deserts, each an ecosystem whose characteristics are determined primarily by elevation: the higher Mojave Desert and lower Colorado Desert. The Little San Bernardino Mountains run through the southwest edge of the park.
The earliest known residents of the land in and around what later became Joshua Tree National Park were the people of the Pinto Culture, who lived and hunted here between 8000 and 4000 BCE. Their stone tools and spear points, discovered in the Pinto Basin in the 1930s, suggest that they hunted game and gathered seasonal plants, but little else is known about them. Later residents included the Serrano, the Cahuilla, and the Chemehuevi peoples. All three lived at times in small villages in or near water, particularly the Oasis of Mara in what non-natives later called Twentynine Palms. They were hunter-gatherers who subsisted largely on plant foods supplemented by small game, amphibians, and reptiles while using other plants for making medicines, bows and arrows, baskets, and other articles of daily life. A fourth group, the Mojaves, used the local resources as they traveled along trails between the Colorado River and the Pacific coast. In the 21st century, small numbers of all four peoples live in the region near the park; the Twentynine Palms Band of Mission Indians, descendants of the Chemehuevi, own a reservation in Twentynine Palms.
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Wikipedia