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0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine 0 mile from needles.com slash. Donate or text the word needles to 53555.
0:00:24 - (Joe Geoffrey):Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.
0:00:45 - (Chris Clarke)Thank you, Joe, and welcome to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke. On March 21, we passed the first anniversary of the designation of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. Avi Kwa Ame National Monument spans a little bit more than 500,000 acres of land, and it occupies, if you picture a map of Nevada, or maybe you have one right in front of you, it occupies most of the southern point in Nevada, goes right up to where the state of Nevada wedges in between Arizona and California.
0:01:23 - (Chris Clarke): It's an area that's crucially important to the cultural continuity of the river tribes. This is essentially their point of origin in their tribal cosmologies, and it's a beautiful place. And this episode is, let's just say it's been a long time coming in that even in our first season, my then co host and I wanted to do an episode on Avi Kwa Ame. In our first season, it was a campaign to establish a national monument. And we went and talked to some folks and recorded some things on site.
0:01:56 - (Chris Clarke): And then life got in the way. And then on March 21, 2023, President Joseph Biden designated Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
0:02:06 - (Joseph Biden): I'm proud to use my authority under the Antiquities act to establish the. And I want you to know it's a big deal. The Havanaqua may, I'm having trouble. Thank you. I got it. I just know it as Spirit Mountain in Nevada, one of our most beautiful landscapes. It ties together one of the largest contiguous wildlife carters in the United States. 500,000 acres. Breathtaking, breathtaking deserts, valleys, mountain ranges rich in biodiversity. Sacred lands that are central to the creation story of so many tribes who have been here since time immemorial.
0:03:01 - (Joseph Biden): Look, you know, it's a place of reverence. It's a place of spirituality, and it's a place of healing. And now it will be recognized for its significance. It holds and be preserved forever.
0:03:13 - (Joseph Biden): Forever.
0:03:19 - (Chris Clarke): In April 2023, I went to a party in Las Vegas where Interior Secretary Deb Haalland celebrated the establishment of the monument, along with the local tribes and the environmental coalition that had worked with the tribes and some elected officials.
0:03:36 - (Deb Haalland): Thank you so much for today. Greetings to everyone, to our tribal leaders, our honored guests, community members, our wonderful Nevada delegation. Thank you so much. I'm just honored to be your friend. So thank you. This is a momentous celebration. This is what's called a momentous celebration, everybody. I am overjoyed to be here alongside the Nevada congressional delegation, advocates, and partners from across the region, as together we celebrate the historic designation of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
0:04:29 - (Deb Haalland): This is what community led conservation looks like.
0:04:34 - (Chris Clarke): And then the next day, I went to a party in Searchlight, Nevada, which is right in the heart of the new monument. I talked to a number of people, recorded quite a few of them open parentheses, including my friend Alan O'Neill, who's one of the driving forces behind the monument campaign. And people who have donated to 90 miles from needles will be getting a chance to listen to that interview with Alan. If you want to check it out and you haven't donated yet, visit us at ninetymilesfrom needles.com
0:04:59 - (Chris Clarke): donate and we'll hook you up. Close parentheses there are a few reasons that we didn't get an episode together, none of which are very interesting. But the thing is, despite that lack of a timely episode, this is one of the most important places in the world for me. Even before I lived in the desert, I felt that way. And so I thought I would take the opportunity presented by the anniversary of the establishment of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument to tell you a little bit about why this place is so important to me.
0:05:33 - (Chris Clarke): That is a little self involved. I happily copped to that. But people don't get fired up about saving a place if they have just a kind of intellectual appreciation for the importance of the place. People work to save what they love. And if you have worn out shoe leather in a place, if you've left a couple of drops of your blood on the soil, if you've been unsure whether or not you're in trouble, whether or not you're going to make it back to your car. If you've shed tears on the soil there, it becomes a lot more important to you. The designation of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument a year ago protected a missing puzzle piece.
0:06:14 - (Chris Clarke): President Biden referred to one of the largest contiguous wildlife corridors in the country, and he was not exaggerating this Avi Kwa Ame was a missing piece in a corridor that stretches from Joshua Tree National park in southern California to the Four Corners area, bear's ears and the monument Valley area designation of Avi Kwa Ame was really a big freaking deal when I moved to the desert in 2008. It was after a couple of decades of getting to that part of the desert as often as I could.
0:06:55 - (Chris Clarke): I had a theoretically full time job that was actually functionally three days a week for a lot of the last little bit of the 20th century. So I'd work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then on Thursday, I would throw a bunch of stuff in my pickup truck, drive down to Seema Dome, camp there, and I would explore the Wee Thump Joshua tree wilderness in southern Nevada, hike around in there. I'd go to Searchlight.
0:07:23 - (Chris Clarke): I'd go to grapevine Canyon in Spirit Mountain, which is the heart of the new national monument. I got to know the place pretty well, and it became home. I've been camping in this area since 1997, 27 years. First laid eyes on it in early 1995. It is the center of my world, and it was the center of my world even when I lived 500 miles away, to the point where in the last weeks of my marriage to my ex-wife Becky, she suggested that it was time for me to go live in the desert full time.
0:07:59 - (Chris Clarke): Which sounds like a punchline of a joke, and it is fun to remember. I get a kick out of telling the story, but she meant it in the nicest, kindest way possible. It wasn't like, go away. It was like, Chris, you are not happy here. You need to be where you can be happy. Over there in the land of eastern Joshua trees, in the land of golden eagles, dining on jackrabbits, amazing bighorn sheep, petroglyphs, sunsets, bats.
0:08:27 - (Chris Clarke): And as usual, she was right. It's really hard for me to picture my life before I moved to the desert. And when I did move, it was to a tiny little house in the community of Nipton, California, which was two and a half miles to the Nevada state line, which is now the boundary of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. When I was at my lowest point, this land took me in. It healed the worst of what I'd gone through. My marriage was in the process of coming apart at the seams, in large part prompted by the death of our beloved dog, Zeke in February of 2007.
0:09:08 - (Chris Clarke): In May of 2008, I loaded up the U Haul, took all my belongings, put them in a storage locker in Barstow, California, and ended up in the Ivanpah valley, essentially right on the state line, some of the Ivanpah Valley now occupied by Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. Moving to the desert in the summer is. I think I might have done it differently if I'd known what I know now. I loved the little house I moved into in Nipton, but it had its drawbacks. It had no functioning climate, control.
0:09:42 - (Chris Clarke): There were nights when I laid on the living room floor directly underneath a ceiling fan, trying to stay a little cool. One night at about two in the morning, after I couldn't fall asleep despite having tried to since about 930, I looked at a thermometer in the house and it was 109 degrees inside my living room. There was relief at hand because I could hop in. My jeep, Nipton is around 3100ft above sea level, and I knew a place that was up around 2000ft higher, where the nighttime low temperatures dropped solidly into the comparatively frigid range of 95 to 99 degrees, and I would sleep in the back of the jeep with the windows open, only sweating a little bit.
0:10:24 - (Chris Clarke): That place was Wee Thump Joshua tree wilderness now, right in the middle of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. The summer I moved to the desert, it took the whole Mojave to contain me, even though there were days I didn't leave my little house. Dust devils swirled on the dry lake nearby. The thought of walking directly into one to be stripped clean of my grieving flesh subsumed into the dry Mojave sky. The dust devil swirled violently and subsided in an eyeblink, leaving nothing other than patterns on my retinas.
0:11:16 - (Chris Clarke): One night, early on, I hopped in the jeep, drove uphill a few miles into Nevada, pulled off, walked into the desert, found myself a nice thick patch of creosote bushes. I sat down among them, not sure what I should do. The home I'd known for 30 years, gone. My grief over Zeke still sharp enough to pierce my lungs when I breathed. I was alone, my future utterly invisible, my thoughts dangerously bleak.
0:11:48 - (Chris Clarke): And yet, sitting in the creosote that night, I slowly started to feel something od. It was a glimmer, just a wisp of a feeling, growing more substantial with each minute that I sat there. It was home. It's an OD feeling. Was it some kind of defense against my fatiguing grief? Was it the pharmaceutical effect of volatilized creosote resin? Was it the canopy of Creosote offering a little bit of psychic shelter?
0:12:18 - (Chris Clarke): Whatever it was, I felt my new life start there in the creosote, and I felt the old one slip away. There was this one day, and I don't remember which day of the week it was or anything like that. To be honest, I had kind of lost track of what week it was, what month it was. Piecing the evidence together, I'm guessing it was July. I had tried for a couple of nights to sleep comfortably in the house with no climate control swamp cooler that didn't work, no ac.
0:12:52 - (Chris Clarke): Sleeping on the floor of the living room on a camping pad directly underneath the ceiling fan. I thought for a moment about shedding as much clothing as possible just to get as comfortable as possible, and found out quickly that that summer in the Mojave desert, there was a bloom of tiny little moths that had emerged after monsoonal rain and whose business it was to find whatever moisture they could to survive, including sweat, on whatever parts of my body they were closest to.
0:13:27 - (Chris Clarke): It was uncomfortable. After the second night of trying that, about two in the morning, got up, looked at the thermometer I had handy. It was 109 degrees in my living room. I threw a pillow and some water into the jeep, drove into Nevada, pulled off on a side road that drove around the edge of Wee Thump Joshua tree wilderness, and I slept in the jeep. The temperature was a cool and refreshing 98 degrees or thereabouts.
0:14:13 - (Chris Clarke): Avi Kwa Ame National Monument would not have happened without a huge amount of work from local tribes, and we will be reporting on that work as the monument progresses. We're still waiting for agencies to put together a management plan for the monument. That's going to be an interesting process. The tribes are going to be involved in that, and we're going to be talking to them about that. In the meantime, here is a little bit more from the ceremony on March 21, 2023, in which Avi Kwa Ame National Monument was created with one of the tribal leaders that was closely involved, Timothy Williams from the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe.
0:14:53 - (Timothy Williams): Thank you. Thank you, everyone. What a day. What a day. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Timothy Williams, chairman of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe. Kamadu and Yup Pimui as Pachakwa patahanch capitani doom and Yup Simu and Yolj Williams. Imanchitum I want to Avi Kwa Ame iman Vinch the Mojave people, known as the people by the river, hold Avi Kwa Ame in our hearts. Avi Kwa Ame, also known as Spirit Mountain, lays within the vast landscape of this pristine land of southern Nevada.
0:15:40 - (Timothy Williams): It is a place we know as our creation. It is the beginning of our traditional songs, and it is a place that native nations throughout the southwest hold sacred. When the president committed to protecting the sacred area at the White House tribal Nation summit, our community was filled with joy. What had once been a distant dream for our people suddenly seemed possible. Since the beginning of the Biden and Harris administration, president has demonstrated the commitment to respect tribal nations and our nation to nation relationship.
0:16:17 - (Timothy Williams): Under his leadership. We have a seat at the table, and we have seen an unprecedented era and opportunity for our tribal communities. And we are all grateful to the president for taking historic action to combat the climate crisis and conserve and restore our nation's land and waters.
0:16:44 - (Chris Clarke): On one of those anonymous days that blended into each other back in eight summer day at 10:00 in the morning, I left my house. There's 104 degrees out. I went back up to Wee Thump, and I tried to lose myself. There's one official trail in Wee Thump. It's an old 19th century trail that linked the mines at Nelson near the Colorado river, with settlements in California to the west, and that trail stays pretty close to the paved road.
0:17:13 - (Chris Clarke): The road doesn't have much traffic, but I still didn't have any interest in paralleling the pavement on this walk. So when I started walking, I headed for a wash that I knew that was perpendicular to the pavement. Flash floods come through these washes every so often, clear out the plant life. So it's a lot easier to hike in the wash than it is to pick your way through the thorn scrub and the cacti up on the banks.
0:17:37 - (Chris Clarke): After 3 hours and change of hiking by around two that afternoon, I was pretty low on water. When I started walking. I was carrying a two quart plastic juice bottle that I'd filled with ice water, but I had drunk most of that. A half inch of the water sloshed noisily inside my pack. It was blood warm. There were maybe a couple of good swallows left, and that was it. I got curious about how hot it was, and I found a spot of shade in the wash.
0:18:06 - (Chris Clarke): A cut bank overhung by a fallen Joshua tree took off my backpack, sat, and I looked at thermometer hung from the pack zipper pull. This thermometer in particular topped out at 105 degrees fahrenheit. There was a little pink smudge where the alcohol had burst through the top of the tube. I thought that only happened in cartoons. It had been six weeks since I had put the last of my belongings in the U Haul and drove away from the house becky and I had shared, and each day in those six weeks had been hotter than the one before.
0:18:39 - (Chris Clarke): I pulled the water bottle out of my pack, twisted the lid, heated air hissed out of the bottle. Quick safety note rationing your water in the desert is a bad strategy if you're hiking. Thirst plus heat equals disorientation. If you drink when you're thirsty, your mind stays that much sharper until you run out of water and I sat there about to do just that. The jug still had a faint aroma of the grapefruit juice that had come with it.
0:19:10 - (Chris Clarke): I drank all the remaining slightly grapefruit scented water. The Joshua tree I was under didn't cast much shade, but there was enough to make a difference. So I stayed there a little bit. The Wee Thump wilderness is about 6000 acres. It's not huge. You'd think 6000 acres of open desert plain with scattered joshua trees and shrubs and cacti would be hard to get lost in. But the plain isn't exactly flat.
0:19:39 - (Chris Clarke): It's what geographers call a bajada, an apron of debris and sand and silt and rock and gravel washed down out of the nearby New York and McCullough mountain ranges by one catastrophic storm after another over many thousands of years. All 6000 acres of this wilderness is incised with braided washes whose paths intersect and merge and diverge. Small storms will come by and the rain from them digs the washes deeper.
0:20:08 - (Chris Clarke): Bigger storms fill them up with washed down gravel. They rearrange them. Sometimes a flood will carve a new deep cut right across an old wash, leaving the old one high and dry. The Wee Thump wilderness is in fact a maze of washes carved by random chance and gravity, by the whims of flowing water and falling rock. The wash I sat in was about 3ft deep that day. Haven't been back in a couple of years. It might be deeper now or shallower, but on that day the banks on either side sloped up abruptly and I thought, if I climb out of here, maybe I'll be able to see where I am.
0:20:47 - (Chris Clarke): That sounded like a good plan. A good plan for later. I stretched out on the sand and watched the sky through the sparse canopy of the fallen Joshua tree. I started thinking about kangaroo rats, which I often do when I'm thirsty. In the desert. Kangaroo rats metabolism breaks down fat and starches and proteins in a way that creates water, which they then use to stay hydrated. They don't have to drink water, they get all the water they need from eating plants. And at that particular moment I envied them that capacity.
0:21:21 - (Chris Clarke): It sure would have made that dry wash nap a bit more carefree. We humans also create metabolic water, but it's only about a 10th of what we need on an average day when it's not a frillion degrees in the shade. I closed my eyes and I tried to will my metabolism to turn the hot plate cheese omelet I made for breakfast into drinking water. It didn't work off. Somewhere in the distance I heard what sounded like an od voice, a faint and throaty and hollering something. It seemed emphatic, but the words faded into unintelligibility before they reached me.
0:22:00 - (Chris Clarke): I climbed up the bank, and from the top I had an excellent and unimpeded view of the broad swath of the desert. I saw where I was, and my heart sank. My jeep was right there. I could throw a rock and hit it. I had failed to get sufficiently lost to suit myself. Looks like my grade school teachers were onto something with their admonitions about my not fulfilling my potential. I clearly had not been applying myself.
0:22:27 - (Chris Clarke): Nonetheless, I trudged to the jeep and opened the rear hatch, burning my hand a little bit on the chrome handle, and there, in the back of the jeep were seven gallons of water. I refilled my bottle, drank about half, refilled it again, and slipped it into my backpack, locked the jeep, not that I needed to, and walked back out into the Joshua trees. No one knew where I was. No one knew when I would be back at my little house.
0:22:56 - (Chris Clarke): If I walked in the door in the next hour or a week later, no one there would have missed me. No one would care. I was entirely on my own, at the mercy of my distractions and my clumsiness and my passing whims. I liked that a lot. My life was pared down to the essentials, eat, drink, walk, rest, observe, where possible, avoid dying. It kind of simplified things. There had been moments like this sprinkled throughout my life before, but they'd always been a guilty pleasure, shoehorned in between responsibilities, the occasional impromptu escape here and there.
0:23:41 - (Chris Clarke): And now I had an uninterrupted string of such moments stretching into my future. As far as I could see, the thought was immensely liberating. And yet I still fought the urge to go back to the jeep and drive back down to my house to see if she had called. And what if she had? What would I do then? There was a conifer a hundred yards or so from the jeep, and I walked to it. A single leaf pinion pine, a gorgeous tree about 15ft tall, blue green needles, light gray bark growing way too far downhill, about a thousand feet lower than it was really supposed to be.
0:24:19 - (Chris Clarke): How did it get there? The pine cone, caught in a flash flood, planted by a seed caching pinion jay with a really bad sense of direction. The pinion pine was incongruous, even though, from the look of it, it had been sinking its roots into the place. For at least a century. I stuck my face into the tree, took a deep pine scented breath, and loped down into the wash. Past Mojave yucca, banana yucca, past blooming rabbit, brush mantled and preoccupied bees, past fat barrel cacti with crowns of bright yellow blossoms, four different species of choya.
0:25:01 - (Chris Clarke): I walked past red soil and white soil and gray soil interwoven in different bands. I was drenched with sweat. There was that shouting again. I stopped to listen. It got a little louder, a little clearer. Whoever was yelling seemed strident and offended. I could almost make out individual words, and then the voice abruptly became completely clear. Its owner came around the next bend in the wash, robin sized, dark brown with white speckles, a white stripe over each eye to give it a permanent frown.
0:25:40 - (Chris Clarke): It was a cactus ren, largest member of the Wren family. Very common bird around here. The wren's harsh staccato call had been softened by the acoustics of the Joshua tree forest, transmuted and muffled into something vaguely resembling human speech. It was suddenly awash in deja vu. In 1996, in the summer, Becky and Zeke and I were camping a dozen miles off the pavement on the banks of the Green river in Utah.
0:26:11 - (Chris Clarke): I walked onto a sandbar that stuck way out into the green, and on the riverward side of the bar a great broad arcs of sand had been scooped away, as though with a pastry knife cut by flood and eddy, a sandy waste washing down into the split mountain gorge. Cliff swallows flew up and down river in the cooling air. I lay on my stomach on the bank, my head and shoulders over the brink. Clear water flowed past me, a foot beneath. The surface of the green flowing water had molded smooth ripples in the bar's yellow sand, and there was black sand, too, from some outcrop upstream of basalt or obsidian or magnetite washed down from Wyoming.
0:26:56 - (Chris Clarke): This black sand rolled downstream, collecting in the troughs of the yellow sand ripples, making smooth and slowly shifting sentences in an accidental calligraphic hand, which I tried to read, but they always shifted, just as I felt I was on the verge of comprehension. On that day in Wee Thumped. 22 years later, the incomprehensible voice turned into a cactus wren. Just as I felt I was about to understand it.
0:27:21 - (Chris Clarke): I felt the same frustration that I felt on the green river that day. Revelatus interruptus. I remembered being happy that day with Zeke and Becky on the green river, no one else around for miles. I called the two of them over to watch the rippling sand with me, and as Zeke reached the riverbank, a sudden splash greeted him. A beaver across the river, alarmed, had slapped the water with his tail. 2 hours later, the sky was full of stars.
0:27:53 - (Chris Clarke): The cactus friend scolded me, cocking its head as if expected me to answer. Suddenly I missed both Becky and Zeke more than I could bear. Again, I wondered if I should drive back home and call her. Around the next bend in the wash, I found the dirt road that runs the perimeter of the wilderness, and I knew where I was. My jeep was 3 miles down that way to the right. If I paced myself, I thought I should have enough water to get back to it comfortably.
0:28:27 - (Chris Clarke): I took a drink. I thought about how I spent too much time sifting through the wastes of my past in search of dead bits of my precious old life. Precious old life that I spent most of longing for something else in the desert. I finally had the life I'd spent the previous decades longing for. At long last, I had stopped waiting for someone to hand it to me, and I took it. This is my life now, I thought to myself as I stepped onto the road, turned left, and walked away from the jeep farther into the Joshua trees.
0:29:09 - (Chris Clarke): This is my life at last. Earlier in this episode, I mentioned a celebration in Searchlight, Nevada that took place after designation of the monument. Searchlight is not inside of Avi Kwa Ame National Monument per se because there is a keyhole in the monument boundary carved out for Searchlight, but it is at the heart of the monument and the people of Searchlight were overwhelmingly in favor of the monument, which is a lot of what helped it get established.
0:29:47 - (Chris Clarke): Everyone from conservative business folks to liberal artsy types generated an astounding amount of support for the monument, given the fact that Searchlight is a small rural town and has a lot of the politics that you would expect from a small rural town. At any rate, this celebration went on at the community center in Searchlight, in the multipurpose room there, and it was noisy and I tried to record a bunch, but most of what I recorded turned out not to be usable just because of the overwhelming noise.
0:30:21 - (Chris Clarke): However, a closing statement by Searchlight resident and pro monument activist Kim Garrison Means is definitely worth sharing. I've cleaned it up as best I can. Let's listen.
0:30:34 - (Kim Garrison Means): I wanted to say a few additional words about the name of Avi Kwa Ame and what that means to Searchlight and how special it is that in a landscape in rural Mojave desert, southern Nevada, we have a new name for this special place that we live. We've been called a lot of things in the past here. We've had our landscape call things like desolate wasteland, no man's land. Don't ask, don't tell. What happens in the Mojave stays in the Mojave, right? Derogatory names for the beautiful landscape that we call home.
0:31:19 - (Kim Garrison Means): And it's so precious to us. And when we started to work together in cooperation and collaboration with the four Mojave tribes and all of the other tribes and the Mojave people said, we will give our sacred name, or our most sacred place on earth to us, to y'all, so you can call this whole landscape by our name. That was such a gift that they gave to us because they gave this place a sacred and holy name, an esteemed name.
0:31:59 - (Kim Garrison Means): And the United States of America gave us a designation that is only held by 133 places in the country. It said, this place is a national treasure. And that name says, this is a place to eat treasure. So this is a new name for us in Searchlight, to embrace the landscape around us. And new is different. It's three words. It's a big Rome, and you can say it however you want. I've learned that from Ashley and the folks at Mojave tribe.
0:32:40 - (Kim Garrison Means): They're okay if you butcher the name, because we all are protecting this place, and we love it, and that's what's important. But that name of equipment to us, thank you, Fort Mojave tribe. Thank you, all the tribal leaders, all the people who worked on this. Thank you for giving our community a name we can be proud of for this area. You.
0:33:23 - (Chris Clarke): August 16, 2008, was an extremely hot day. A new friend of mine and I had spent time near the Colorado river in the day's ferocious heat. It was 115 degrees in bullhead City, Arizona. Even the sidewalks beneath our feet shimmered wildly. We drove into the mountains, past granite peaks that desert winds had carved into improbable spires. Earlier in the heat of the day, we had walked among those spires, tracing grapevine canyon full of petroglyphs, watching bats chase dragonflies in the shade of the rock walls.
0:34:03 - (Chris Clarke): One bat flew up to us where we sat, observed us carefully, then arched away to flit among those spires. This kind of thing only happens when I'm with you, she said. As it grew dark, the spires became a bit more ominous, and the flashes of lightning east of us that threw the rock spires into stark relief only accentuated that eerie feeling. We drove the rental car farther west into the mountains, climbing nearly the whole time, and the scope of the storm behind us became plain as we gained elevation.
0:34:41 - (Chris Clarke): It was massive a wall of clouds stretching at least 150 miles across western Arizona, easily 100 miles to our east, and the air so clear, so uninterrupted by artificial light, that after dark each flash of lightning spoke itself out plain against the night. West of Searchlight, in Wee Thump. I pulled off the pavement, took the road that outlines the wilderness. There, 2000ft above the river, the temperature was comfortably in the double digits.
0:35:15 - (Chris Clarke): The rental mustang was a convertible, so we put the top down and arranged ourselves in the backseat, facing east, and we watched the storm. We dared not imagine what damage its heat stoked violence was doing to the landscape. A few weeks earlier that year, I had woken at 40,000ft at 02:00 a.m. And looked down from my window seat at a monstrous storm that seemed to span the breadth of a continent. Its western front was sharp and tall.
0:35:47 - (Chris Clarke): I imagined at the time that it might have reached halfway from the ground to my seatback tray. That storm had already killed people. I'd watched the news in the airport terminal at SFO before my flight took off. Black tornadoes came out of the night sky, flicking out lives as I might snuff a candle with wet fingers. I felt an od remove, sitting on an olympian perch with a foreknowledge that the storm mantled a greater storm of grief below it.
0:36:15 - (Chris Clarke): In the time since that flight, I had done my share of time looking at life from a metaphorical 40,000ft. I was pushing 50 at that point, and I had learned so little I confused contentment for happiness and attention for love. That killer storm was just the first in a barrage. Over the next week, I'd watched roads washed out before the storm's fury. I landed in the desert, a wreck storm rack tossed up against the unforgiving rocks and stunned and bleeding.
0:36:49 - (Chris Clarke): And then, on the night of August 16, it all shifted. My new friend, who I will do the favor of leaving anonymous, sat with me among the Joshua trees of Wee Thump, facing east, watching that wall of storm from the north rim to Prescott. The storm stood before us, glowering. A hundred bolts of lightning. A minute flared within the cloud across the length of Arizona, the thunder dying out long before it reached our ears, the silhouettes of Joshua trees all around us illuminated as if by a strobe light, the tiny desert hamlet of Searchlight laid out prettily before us 10 miles downhill.
0:37:33 - (Chris Clarke): The Milky Way just barely washed out by a moon. A half day past full, my heart near bursting, I wrote the next morning that the night was sufficient recompense for a dozen of my lives, to sit here, motionless and content between the earth and moon, the certain violence of night flash floods diffused by miles into a spectacle of quiet, flashing light. My new friend dozed her head on my shoulder. It was a sublime spectacle. It was a reminder that my problems, as overwhelming as they had seemed for weeks, months, were really trivial. The anguish of a moth that lives for a day to feel inconsequential and yet able to observe this amazing beauty with someone there to witness it along with me in this amazing place of equame. It didn't turn me around, but it started the process of my turning myself around, of starting my life in the desert, of eagerly anticipating the beauty yet to come. That friendship did not end well. We haven't spoken in a decade, but I remain grateful to her for bearing witness to my transformation.
0:38:40 - (Chris Clarke): And of course, life went on as usual after that evening. The next day, we learned that the storm that had enchanted us and made our evening magical had threatened the lives of dozens of people in Havasu Canyon. That's how I remember the date, August 16, 2008. Havasu is a really interesting Google search, and you should do it. But on a broader scale, where I saw sublime and astonishing beauty, where I saw landscapes that healed the people that visited, others apparently saw only opportunities to make money.
0:39:20 - (Chris Clarke): About the time I was trying to get lost in the overheated desert, the community of Searchlight found itself fighting a gigantic wind turbine project that would have utterly changed the character of the town, ruined the dark night skies, decimated the local population of golden eagles. Have I mentioned that this is one of the best places for golden eagles I've ever seen in my life? I've seen more golden eagles in Avi Kwa Ame than I have everywhere else combined.
0:39:51 - (Chris Clarke): Through diligence and heroism and stubbornness and erracibility and all those things that desert dwellers often possess in large amounts, the people of Searchlight beat back that wind project, only to have another one rear its ugly head even closer to Weathump wilderness and Castle Mountain's national monument. The people in Searchlight weren't alone in their opposition. The tribes along the river, Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and the Colorado river Indian Tribes and the Chemehuevi and others realized after a couple of years that they could either fight these projects like a nonstop game of whack a mole with incredibly high stakes, or they could prevent them.
0:40:33 - (Chris Clarke): And so the idea of the national monument was born. On March 21, 2023, I was sitting in my office at home, watching the Biden administration designate the national monument. I watched the ceremony, listened to the proclamation, and then I tried to keep working. I found it essentially impossible to do so. I jangled the leash, looked at my dog Heart, loaded her up in the car, drove a couple hours from our home in 29 palms to get to Avi Kwa Ame.
0:41:08 - (Chris Clarke): There is a chance that Heart was the very first dog to walk in Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this landscape. To me, it's been home in one way or another since 1997. I belong to this land. It's protected from industrial development now, but national monument designation doesn't do much to prevent wildfires and 2023's York fire edged its way into Avi Kwa Ame and burned several hundred acres of the place.
0:41:42 - (Chris Clarke): In short, the land is still under threat, and so are we all. Our only recourse is to take a hint from the people of Searchlight, from the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, and crit from environmental activists throughout the state of Nevada and elsewhere to take a hint from all those good folks and work together to make a better world. And that about wraps up this episode of 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.
0:42:50 - (Chris Clarke): We want to thank Shane Stead for joining us on our Patreon site, which you can reach at 90 milesfrom needles.com patreon. Also want to thank Michael Gordon for going to Patreon and doubling his annual pledge. Much appreciated. Thanks to Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover announcer, and Martin Mancha, who put together our beautiful podcast artwork. Our most excellent theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. We remain grateful for their hard work.
0:43:23 - (Chris Clarke): After we put this episode to bed, I'll be heading up to Salt Lake City at 11:00 on the 20 eighth of March 2024. A bunch of folks will be gathering at the state capitol in Salt Lake to celebrate a petition urging the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect Wilson's fallarope under the Endangered Species Act. Wilson's phalarope is dependent on the wetlands that are created by the Great Salt Lake. And as the powers that be in Utah increasingly divert water from the lake in order to, I don't know, water, immense lawns on corporate campuses and things like that, the lake is drying up and taking the phalaropes' habitat along with them. We don't want that to happen. So if you're anywhere in the neighborhood, check us out. Come say hi. That episode will air shortly.
0:44:13 - (Chris Clarke): Remember, we can't do this without your help. It is contributions from listeners like you that are, for example, paying for the travel and lodging necessary for me to get out and cover this event in Salt Lake. You can help support us by going to nine 0 mile from needles.com donate, taking your choice of the options there. You can also text the word needles to 53555, and our website will send you back a little form that will allow you to make a small or large one time or recurring donation as you see fit.
0:44:54 - (Chris Clarke): It's getting to be a beautiful spring in the desert, seeing desert lilies come up in random places. More rain to come. Don't step on the flowers when you come out to take a look at them. Stay on the trail. Take care of yourself. The desert needs you, and we will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.
0:47:25 — (Joe Geoffrey): 90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.

joshua trees

S3E9: How Avi Kwa Ame Transformed My Life

S1E9: Saving the Western Joshua tree