An expansion of Joshua Tree National Park would be a very good thing for Southern California’s many desert lovers.

They include sightseers, weekend campers, rock climbers, wilderness backpackers — just about anyone who likes their recreation outdoors and appreciates the desert’s rugged beauty.

And it would be a good thing for the economy of the Inland Empire, where the park is on course to draw about 2 million visitors this year — about half a million more than in 2014. Those wide open spaces are getting a bit more crowded, and could use some breathing room.

National Park Service officials are conducting a boundary study to determine whether — and how much — land in the Eagle Mountain area of Riverside County should be added to the park. This board favors the largest addition of acreage under consideration.

Actually, the whole area was originally part of Joshua Tree National Monument when it was established in 1936. But Congress carved the Eagle Mountain area out of the park in 1950 to make it available for mining. Kaiser Steel mined iron ore there to feed its steel mill in Fontana, but both operations ceased in the 1980s.

The Eagle Mountain area certainly fits the criteria for inclusion in the park. It holds significant ecological, biological, cultural and historical resources that would benefit from protection. It would enhance opportunities for public enjoyment of the desert.

Specifically, it’s home to bighorn sheep and desert tortoises that use it as a migratory pathway between the Chuckwalla Valley and the Mojave Desert. Among the bird life there are the nesting golden eagles from which the mountain range takes its name. There are Native American cultural sites and even a ghost town and other relics of mining history.

Eagle Mountain may have a familiar ring because it was long a proposed site for a huge landfill, to which garbage was to be hauled from more urban areas via a proposed RailCycle train. The landfill proposal died in 2013, but there’s now a controversial plan by Eagle Crest Energy Co. to build a “pumped storage hydroelectric project” at the old Kaiser mine site. Water would be pumped from an underlying aquifer, stored in mine pits, then later released to run downhill to turn a turbine and create electricity during peak demand periods.

The boundary study offers four options for the Eagle Mountain area, one of which is to take no action at all. The three others add different amounts of land to the park:

• 22,500 acres — the land under control of the Bureau of Land Management, minus that withdrawn for the potential Eagle Crest project.

• 24,800 acres — the BLM land, plus private land west of the Eagle Crest project.

• 28,000 acres — all the area’s land except for 2,800 acres that Metropolitan Water District owns and manages to operate and maintain the Colorado River Aqueduct.

None of the options affects anyone’s private property or mineral rights; the advantage of including private property into the park boundaries is that, should the owner at some point become a willing seller, it’s easier for the park service to buy the property.

This board favors the 28,000-acre option because it maximizes the amount of land that at some point could become part of the park. If you agree, or disagree, you may comment through Aug. 21, by email to JOTR_study@nps.gov or at http://parkplanning.nps.gov/eaglemountain.

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