The damage to Joshua Tree National Park during the historic 35-day government shutdown has come into clearer focus. The Park’s staff found one Joshua tree knocked down by a driver, two juniper trees and several pinion pines cut down and used for firewood, 24 miles of vehicle tracks in wilderness areas not authorized for driving and 120 illegal campsites with evidence of campfires, park Superintendent David Smith announced Tuesday.

Smith said he and the park's staff are still finishing an official report, which will have more details about the damage and be sent to the U.S. Department of Interior in "coming days."

To add to the problems, Smith said the park also lost out on an estimated $1 million in fees. The park was free to visitors during the shutdown, which coincided with holidays that historically attract lots of parkgoers. The losses, Smith said, are going to delay park improvement projects.

“I would ask the community’s patience as we re-evaluate the situation, as we re-evaluate what we can actually get done this year,” Smith said. “We may not be able to do the wildlife studies that we wanted to get done. We may not be able to get road projects that we really wanted to get done this year, but we’re gonna try our darndest.”

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George Land, a spokesperson for the park, said the $1 million loss in fees is based on the park’s estimate of the number of visitors who didn’t pay the park’s $30 entry fee during the shutdown.

Visitor counts taken before the shutdown started, along with observations by the partial park staff that returned to work on Jan. 10, when funds were set aside to cover essential services, indicate the park had another record-breaking year of visitors – a record that's been broken every year for the past five years.

“We hosted 2.8 million in 2017,” Land said. “And while we’re still finalizing the numbers, we’re certain we had nearly 3 million in 2018.”

The announcement comes after a whirlwind of reports of rampant damage by the troves of park visitors, some inaccurate reports were made by park staff and others were simply sensationalized through social media, Land said.

“We had people making it sound like there were hordes of people wielding chainsaws running around and chopping down trees,” Land said. “Over the last three or four years, we’ve just had a different kind of park visitor. They don’t want to harm the park necessarily, but they just aren’t visiting with knowledge of how to minimize their impact.”

While Superintendent Smith’s speech on Tuesday attempted to set the record straight on what damage was done, he highlighted the hard work of the volunteers, community members, and park staff who worked with no promise of pay to protect the park and its visitors while the government was shut down.

When the park’s staff was sent home, Smith said, a patchwork of nonprofit organizations, local business owners and volunteers showed up on the first day of the shutdown, ready to provide services furloughed park staff couldn’t.

“No one likes a government shutdown, we realize it’s an inefficient way to run our nation’s crown jewels, like Joshua Tree,” Smith said. “But members of this community stepped up in ways that I could have not possibly imagined.”

When the park eventually reopened its main visitor center on Jan. 9, it was staffed by employees of the Joshua Tree National Park Association, who are not officially employees of the Department of Interior, the agency that manages the park. The approximately 250,000 people who visited in December, Smith said, came to the visitor’s center staff with their questions and needs during the shutdown.

John Lauretig, executive director of Friends of Joshua Tree, and local climbing guide Seth Zaharias helped coordinate groups of up to 80 volunteers to make daily trips into the park to clean bathrooms, pick up trash, and remind park visitors to pack out what they packed in.

At the height of the federal government shutdown, Friends of Joshua Tree received a surge of donations to support the volunteer maintenance trips. And with the shutdown at least temporarily over, Lauretig found he had more donated money than the organization needed.

When the federal government came to a temporary compromise to reopen the government until Feb. 15, and with an agreement in principle for a permanent resolution in the works, President Trump announced that furloughed federal employees would receive back pay for the time they were forced out of work.

But there is a segment of workers that Lauretig said got shortchanged.

The Great Basin Institute, an environmental nonprofit, has 19 research associates and others working among Joshua Tree’s patchwork of staff. The workers were not granted back pay, like federal employees.

Lauretig decided to give back to the members of the park community who didn't get paid after Trump announced the federal government would reopen for three weeks.

Jane Rodgers, Chief of Science and Resource Stewardship, said that on average the Great Basin Institute workers missed 140 hours of work.

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On Monday, Friends of Joshua Tree donated $9,500 of their shutdown donations and Joshua Tree National Park Association donated an additional $1,900 to give $600 to each of the 19 Great Basin Institute staff for the wages they lost during the shutdown.

“I think your pain is much more acute financially than the pain that a lot of the civil servants went through,” Superintendent Smith said to the institute staff who gathered on Tuesday. “I just want to say thank you to everyone for helping them out.”

And before the cake was cut and the event attendees dispersed to the day’s free tours of the park’s nursery and its historical archives, Smith said that the shutdown has brought the park community closer together than ever before.

“All of these different partners came out to tell the story and to protect the park and do the job we were unable to do at that time,” Smith said. “Many of you who are sitting here today, you chose to live in Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley and Twentynine Palms because you love this place. And because of that you feel a certain sense of responsibility for taking care of this place.”