Just a day after announcing that Joshua Tree National Park would close, at least temporarily, so officials could clean up the place and assess the damage from visitors creating their own roads and fucking with the Joshua tress inside the park, now the National Park Service has announced that the National Park will remain open by using revenue generated by fees because the government is really being run like a well-oiled machine right now.
“In addition, recently closed areas of the park will once again be accessible to visitors starting January 10. Some visitor services, including campgrounds and entrance stations, will reopen utilizing recreation fee revenue,” the National Park Service said in a news release (via the Desert Sun).
How the National Parks were not able to do this earlier in the Trump Shutdown is a good question that you are asking right now as well as what this money would have been used for had it not been suddenly found to keep the park open at the last minute? Also, can they do the same thing to pay for all those TSA agents and other officials being forced to work without a paycheck? Who knows? Maybe? It seems like anything can happen now and, honestly, it’s nice to reflect on when things functioned sort of normally. That was nice.
Whatever the case, the Hi-Desert depends on Joshua Tree National Park for a crap-ton of tourism money and this would be their high season, so remaining open is a good thing.
