Mission 66

Visitor center at Cottonwood, constructed in 1964 during Mission 66.

Photo credit: JOTR 20575_1105; JOTR no. 1105, Box 9, in public domain, Fred Mang photographer

 

The first two decades after Joshua Tree National Park was established in 1936 were filled with uncertainty. Federal government funding was limited in the years following the Great Depression and during World War II, and the National Park Service (NPS) struggled with significant budget cuts as a result. After 1945, visitation numbers in parks began to rapidly increase while funding for park development remained at pre-war levels. Infrastructure at older parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite was aging and unable to handle increased numbers of visitors, but development at Joshua Tree and other sites created during the belt tightening years between 1930 and 1950 was practically nonexistent.

Joshua Tree, then a national monument, received no money for construction projects between 1936 and 1950 despite receiving over 200,000 annual visitors by the early-1950s. These initial visitors to Joshua Tree experienced the lack of funding through limited interpretive opportunities, undefined hiking trails, unpaved roads, and no supporting infrastructure such as contact stations or bathrooms. The absence of services, coupled with a shortage of park employees, meant landscapes around the park suffered from unintentional visitor misuse. Concerns surrounding the conservation of natural features at parks around the country added fuel to the demands for increased funding in national parks. Some conservationists in the early 1950s proposed shutting down parks if problems stemming from lack of funding persisted.

With the National Park Service’s 50^th anniversary approaching in 1966, NPS officials in 1956 crafted a solution that would address funding and the related issues of visitor services and conservation in time for anniversary celebrations. They proposed a service-wide, ten-year program to fund renewed development efforts across the park system, known as Mission 66 in reference to its end date of 1966. Mission 66 was endorsed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose only criticism was that the plan had not been proposed sooner. By the end of Mission 66 in 1966, the U.S. Congress had allocated over a billion dollars of government funding to provide visitors to parks around the country with improvements to services and infrastructure.

Following the start of the program in 1956, park officials around the country were asked to create a list tailored to the future needs of their parks alongside projected estimates of visitor numbers for the second half of the century. Joshua Tree was expected to welcome 600,000 visitors by the end of the Mission 66 program, and park officials identified various areas of development needed to support increased visitation in the park: expanding existing campgrounds and providing more accommodations like comfort stations, visitor services at entrances to the park, and land acquisition from private inholdings.

Today, visitors to Joshua Tree experience the benefits of Mission 66 and of federal investment efforts in the National Park system; the results of the program at Joshua Tree are still on display and used by visitors on a daily basis. Explore Mission 66 projects at Joshua Tree on the NPS app, and follow the links below to learn more about the Mission 66 program.