An Imagined Ranger Explains a Park Named for a Tree That's Leaving

Sol Fuentes is not a real person. She is an imagined interpretive ranger at Joshua Tree National Park, constructed because the rangers who could say these things out loud mostly can't. Everything she describes is documented. Her voice is invented. The distinction matters less than you'd think.

Joshua Tree National Park was established, in part, to protect the Joshua tree. That sentence used to be straightforward. It is becoming a kind of riddle.

The species, Yucca brevifolia, is a slow-growing desert monocot that looks like something Dr. Seuss would have drawn if he'd been angrier. It is now threatened by warming temperatures, worsening drought, and invasive grasses that turn the desert into fuel. The 2020 Dome Fire killed an estimated 1.3 million Joshua trees. The 2023 York Fire killed roughly another million.¹ Studies suggest that under current warming trajectories, nearly all Joshua trees could be lost from the park.²

Here is the cruelest detail. Scientists had identified specific areas within the park as "climate refugia," places where the trees could survive even as temperatures rose. The Cima Dome area was one. The perimeter of the 2020 Dome Fire almost perfectly overlapped the boundaries of the modeled refugia. A botanist later noted the shapes were nearly identical.³ The safe place burned first.

Meanwhile, the park's annual visitation has roughly doubled in recent years to nearly three million. They come to see Joshua trees. An interpretive ranger's job is to help them see what they came for.

Across the National Park Service, that job is getting stranger. In January 2026, the Interior Department ordered climate-related exhibits changed or removed at 17 park sites, including Glacier National Park.⁴ Signs were posted across NPS properties soliciting public feedback on any displays that "fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur and abundance of landscapes."⁴ A former NPS associate director for interpretation described the operational reality plainly: "You would see periods of 'don't talk about climate change'... and then periods of 'all we're going to talk about is climate change.' With that moving goalpost, as an interpreter you must be willing to do your job within the space of the executive authority that you work for."⁵

Sol Fuentes has been at Joshua Tree for sixteen years, first on a wildland fire crew, then, after a knee injury, in interpretation. She is forty-one. She has a voice like someone who has spent a lot of time outdoors and not enough time sleeping.

You spent years fighting fires in this park before you started explaining it to people. Which job is harder?

Sol: Interpretation. Not close. Fire, you know what you're doing. You have a tool, you have a line, you cut it or you don't. Interpretation is standing in front of forty people who drove three hours from LA and you're supposed to make them feel something about a plant. And the plant is supposed to be here. That's the deal. That's the whole arrangement. They came to see the thing the park is named for.

And increasingly, the thing the park is named for isn't here.

Sol: Or it's here but it's... okay, so I do this walk, the Desert Ecology Loop, and there's a section where I used to stop and talk about how Joshua trees reproduce. They need a very specific moth, the yucca moth, and the moth needs a very specific temperature range, and the whole relationship is this impossibly precise negotiation that took thousands of years to work out. Beautiful story. Visitors love it.

And now I'm telling that story next to trees that are scorched. Some of them are still standing but they're dead. They just haven't fallen yet. So I'm narrating this exquisite evolutionary partnership while the evidence of its collapse is right there, and the visitors are taking selfies with the dead ones because they can't tell the difference.

Can you tell the difference?

Sol: I've been here sixteen years. Yeah.

The climate refugia, the areas scientists identified as places where Joshua trees could survive long-term, burned in the Dome Fire. What was that like to learn?

Sol: I was on the fire crew for Dome. We were working the eastern edge. I didn't know the word "refugia" at the time. Learned it later. But I knew those trees. I knew that stand. It was old. Some of those trees were hundreds of years old. And when I found out afterward that the area we'd lost was basically the safe zone? The place the models said would hold?

I remember a botanist telling me the fire perimeter and the refugia map were almost the same shape.³ Like the fire had read the paper.

The trees are dying, yes. But the plan for saving them died too. The backup plan burned.

There's been a push across the Park Service to change or remove interpretive materials related to climate change. How does that land for someone whose job is interpretation?

Sol: [long pause] I want to be careful here. I'll say this. My job is to make the landscape legible. That's the word we use, legible. I'm supposed to help people read what they're looking at. And what they're looking at is a park named for a tree that is leaving the park. If I can't say why it's leaving, then I'm not making the landscape legible. I'm making it decorative.

The NPS interpretation strategy says that omitting the forces that shape a landscape "weakens our understanding and connection" to it.⁶ Do you think the visitors actually want to hear what's happening?

Sol: This is the thing that surprised me most when I switched from fire to interpretation. I expected people to argue. I expected the pushback. And some people do push back, sure. But most of them came here because they love this place. They drove through traffic and paid the entrance fee and put on sunscreen and walked in 107-degree heat because they wanted to be here. And when you love a place, you want to know what's happening to it. The love is the door, not the wall. A ranger at Crater Lake said something like that years ago and it stuck with me.⁷

The hard part is that I have to keep loving the place too. That's the job requirement nobody mentions. You can't make someone else feel connected to a landscape unless you're connected to it yourself. And staying connected to a place that's changing this fast, it costs something. It costs something every season.

What does Joshua Tree National Park become if the Joshua trees are gone?

Sol: [laughs] We'd still have great rocks. World-class rocks. The rocks are doing fine.

But honestly? I don't know. I think about that more than I should. There's a researcher who said that by 2100 there might not be any trees left in the park.⁸ I won't be here for that. But someone will be standing where I stand, giving a talk about a tree that used to grow here, the way I give talks about the Karner blue butterfly that used to live at Indiana Dunes before it became the first species we know of to disappear from a national park because of warming.⁹ Someone will hold up a photograph of a Joshua tree the way rangers at Kenai Fjords hold up postcards of what Exit Glacier looked like twenty years ago.¹⁰

I just didn't think I'd be the one standing at the hinge. I thought I'd be the one telling the story after. Turns out I'm telling it during.

A 2026 study in Conservation Letters found that 77 percent of the 259 National Park Service units evaluated ranked as highly vulnerable to transformative climate threats.¹¹ Approximately 1,000 probationary NPS employees were terminated in early 2025, with ranger-led programs canceled at several parks.¹² The landscape most needs narration at the moment the narrators are being reduced.

Footnotes

1. Yale Environment 360, "With Hotter, Drier Weather, California's Joshua Trees Are in Trouble." https://e360.yale.edu/features/joshua-trees-climate-change ↩

2. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, "Adapting to Climate and Fire — Joshua Tree National Park," April 10, 2025. https://www.fws.gov/project/adapting-climate-and-fire-joshua-tree-national-park ↩

3. Yale Environment 360, citing botanist Andrew Kaiser on the Cima Dome refugia-fire overlap. https://e360.yale.edu/features/joshua-trees-climate-change ↩ ↩²

4. Micah Drew, "Feds order interpretive signs in Glacier, Little Bighorn, changed or removed," Daily Montanan, January 29, 2026. https://dailymontanan.com/2026/01/29/feds-order-interpretive-signs-in-glacier-little-bighorn-changed-or-removed/ ↩ ↩²

5. Tom Medema, quoted in "Unvarnished Storytelling at the National Parks," Reformed Journal, May 12, 2026. https://reformedjournal.com/2026/05/12/unvarnished-storytelling-at-the-national-parks/ ↩

6. National Park Service, National Climate Change Interpretation and Education Strategy, 2015. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/climatechange/upload/2015_FINAL-NCCIES-508Compliant-LoRes.pdf ↩

7. Brian Ettling, Crater Lake ranger, via Yale Climate Connections, November 28, 2017. https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2017/11/park-ranger-witnesses-climate-change-firsthand/ ↩

8. National Geographic, "Joshua trees may disappear with climate change," May 4, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/joshua-trees-moths-threatened-climate-change-scientists-seek-solutions ↩

9. AFP via phys.org, "Loss and hope: US park rangers' climate crisis fight," May 13, 2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-05-loss-rangers-climate-crisis.html ↩

10. National Park Service, Kenai Fjords National Park, Ranger Programs. https://home.nps.gov/kefj/planyourvisit/ranger-programs.htm ↩

11. Michalak et al., "Relative Vulnerability of US National Parks," Conservation Letters, 2026, via Mongabay. https://news.mongabay.com/2026/03/americas-national-parks-face-an-uncertain-future-as-climate-risks-mount/ ↩

12. Yahoo News / USA Today, "Ranger-led programs canceled at Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks," 2025. https://www.yahoo.com/news/ranger-led-programs-canceled-sequoia-164653972.html ↩