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If you pay attention to the news, you probably remember hearing of problems at Joshua Tree National Park because of the shutdown. People cutting down Joshua trees, camping all over the place where it is prohibited, driving off road through the fragile desert, filthy bathrooms, overflowing garbage cans, litter everywhere.
Well, my sister was at Joshua Tree National Park last week, and she swung by my house last night on her way to a conference in Baltimore today. I was eager to ask her if the news stories about Joshua were accurate.
She had a good old laugh about that. She said they were almost entirely false. She said the bathrooms were clean, the garbage cans were pretty empty, there was no litter anywhere. She said that she saw one tree that had been cut down, that much was true. And a few cars had pulled off onto the shoulder where they were not technically supposed to. Nobody was off-roading, and nobody was camping illegally.
She said that it was a lot more crowded than she had seen it in the past, and her perception was that locals who don't normally go to the park because it is so expensive to enter a National Park these days were visiting because it was free. So there were people, but she thought they were well behaved. And there were lots of volunteers cleaning.
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