Joshua Tree National Park turns 75 today:

Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a proclamation designating 794,000-acres — an area slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island — a national monument. It became a national park in 1994.

Joshua tree is the common name for the Yucca brevifolia, which only grow in a small swath of the Mojave Desert, from southwest Utah, southern Nevada and western Arizona and into southeastern California, in elevations from about 1,300 to 5,900 feet above sea level.

Mormon pioneers encountered the species in the mid-1800s and named it after the Biblical story of Joshua, who raised his hands to the sky in prayer.

Just totally by coincidence, we wrote about Joshua Tree in UJBR Plunges Into National Parks (page 121). And also in UJBR The World’s Gone Crazy (page 365), in that case about a guy who spent two years driving through Joshua Tree throwing thousands of golf balls, and hundreds of cans of food, out his car window. (When he was finally caught, he said he did it to “leave his mark.”)

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