Joshua Tree National Park, a place of otherworldly rock formations, unique plants and iridescent wildflowers, smashed yet another attendance record last year in luring twice as many tourists as visited just four years earlier.

The popular desert wilderness park drew 2,853,619 visitors in 2017, a jump of nearly 340,000 from the year before, when a record also was set, federal officials said. As recently as 2013, total attendance was about 1.4 million.

“We’re in all-time, historical-record territory,” George Land, a park spokesman, said by phone Monday, Feb. 26.

Land cited several reasons for the surge in visits, including a “pretty substantial” wildflower bloom, an unusually warm Thanksgiving-through-New Year’s holiday season and the park’s growing popularity among tourists from foreign countries.

“We used to be a fall-through-spring park,” he said. “And now, with the international visitors, we are pretty much a year-round operation.”

Of course, it didn’t hurt that March of last year marked the 30th anniversary of the release of the rock band U2’s beloved album by the same name — “The Joshua Tree.”

The park’s new mark also coincided with a surge in visitation at other popular national parks across the desert southwest. Arizona’s Grand Canyon and Utah’s Zion set new marks of 6.2 million and 4.5 million visitors, respectively, according to the National Park Service, while Death Valley nearly matched its all-time record.

While park officials often have welcomed surges in attendance in the past, they appeared to be caught off guard by the unprecedented holiday crowds late last year — and even urged would-be visitors to consider bypassing Joshua for other desert attractions. Officials also urged visitors to come in through the more lightly traveled Twentynine Palms entrance on the north and the Cottonwood entrance on the south, instead of the crowded West Entrance at the town of Joshua Tree.

Crowds make park like downtown L.A.

Then, earlier this month, officials introduced a shuttle service to try to thin out the crowds.

“While we obviously want people to come out and enjoy the experience of their parks, it becomes a situation of diminishing returns when there are so many people here that it is like downtown L.A.,” Land said.

“In the park business, more is not always better,” he said.

To be sure, said Ileene Anderson, senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity in Los Angeles, the increase in visits is a good thing in one sense.

“Obviously, people love their national parks,” Anderson said.

And, she said, “I want people to go out to enjoy nature. If they don’t know it, they’re not going to love it. And if they don’t love it, they’re not going to protect it.”

From what she has been told, however, the spike in traffic has brought into sharp focus that Joshua Tree National Park is understaffed. And she said it is disappointing that scientists who should be out in the field studying wildlife have had to help collect entrance fees from the droves of visitors.

Cars line up for miles

“We need to be putting resources toward staffing so that the parks can be adequately managed,” Anderson said.

The trend has been frustrating for Chris Clarke, California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, a nationwide nonprofit that advocates for the preservation of national parks.

“You can have a line a couple miles long at the west entrance,” Clarke said.

That results in clogged traffic jams in front of people’s houses in the town of Joshua Tree.

“So you can imagine that tempers have gotten a little bit high,” he said.

Residents worry that emergency vehicles can’t reach them and that they can’t get out of their driveways, not to mention that every eatery in town is crammed.

“Locals know not to try and get breakfast in town on the weekends,” Clarke said.

Rules can be ignored

Inside the park, visitors can’t find places to park and drive up on fragile plants alongside roads. Many, he said, don’t pay attention to rules: they take dogs on trails; they fly drones; and they string hammocks from Joshua trees.

“The campgrounds are just much less pleasant places to be,” he added, “because you have people driving in at 2 a.m. shining headlights at your tent.”

Clarke said park efforts to more evenly distribute traffic among the entrances has helped some. And he praised the introduction of a shuttle.

“It seems like a really good idea and I’m hoping that it will make a difference,” he said.