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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 90milesfromneedles.com/donate or text the word needles to 5355.

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 this episode of 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and today we're going to go to a long north south oriented desert Valley in between the spring range to the east in Nevada and the resting springs, Nopa and last chance ranges in California and Nevada to the west, right on the state line, the Pahrump Valley. Now, Pahrump, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a town of about 45,000 people, a little bit less, maybe 60 miles northwest of downtown Las Vegas. It's a gateway to places like ash meadows and Death Valley and the Amargosa river, and it's an interesting town. It's got a sort of municipal culture that's possibly one of the most self consciously libertarian populaces ever encountered in my life. And they're libertarian to the point where a few years back, the town voted to unincorporate itself because people wanted one less layer of government controlling what they did.

0:01:45 - (Chris Clarke): Whether or not that was a good idea, I will leave up to you. The Pahrump Valley is in the northern Mojave desert, and as a result of being in the northern Mojave desert, not too far from a lot of people who use electricity in Las Vegas and southern California, the southern part of the Pahrump Valley is being eyed for a huge amount of solar development. In October 2022, we went to the South Pahrump Valley to take part in an event that was kind of a pep rally for opponents of desert solar right outside the yellow Pine solar project, which was not yet really under construction at that point. It is being built as we speak, almost two years later.

0:02:23 - (Chris Clarke): If you want to listen to that episode, it is episode 19 of season one. It is entitled Shannon Salter fights to save the desert. Shannon set up an encampment on the verge of yellow pine solar and had a really inspiring demonstration there. I highly recommend taking a listen to that. Two years later, the solar developers don't just want to build yellow pine in the south Pahrump valley, they have their eyes on the rest of the southern end of the valley pretty much as we speak.

0:02:56 - (Chris Clarke): There are about 4 sq mi of the southern Pahrump valley that are being considered for conversion from old growth Mojave desert ecosystem to solar energy facilities 4 sq mi of solar in some places might not be that big a deal, but the South Pahrump Valley is as untouched a large stretch of Mojave Desert as I've ever seen. In 2008, when I was living in Nipton, California, which a few of you have heard of, I had time on my hands and a full tank of gas, and I got in the jeep Cherokee that a friend had given me.

0:03:30 - (Chris Clarke): I have really wonderful friends and I drove on back roads from Sema Dome, which had not yet burned. It was a good twelve years away from burning at that point. Up through the town of Sandy Valley, which you could argue is the southern end of the South Pahrump Valley, and on up into the main corridor of the Pahrump Valley, I saw ancient Mojave Yuccas and really old creosotes, wild horses, Joshua trees.

0:03:59 - (Chris Clarke): It was a striking place, and it still is for now. Today, at 90 miles from needles, we will be speaking with Kevin Emmerich of Basin and Rangewatch, a group that has been doing an absolutely crucial job of monitoring and tracking ill advised development projects throughout the desert southwest, but especially California and Nevada, and especially in the renewable energy field. We are very, very lucky to have Kevin joining us today.

0:04:26 - (Chris Clarke): But before we get to Kevin, I want to remind you that we couldn't do this without you. We have expenses that need to be paid if we're going to keep episodes on the servers. We have an occasional need for filling up a gas tank to drive somewhere. We have advertising that we need to do for the podcast. It'd be really great to be able to pay people for the labor they put into this, myself included. And we have kind of plateaued in our list of supporters right now. We do have one new one to announce in the place where we usually announce at the end of the episode, but we have bigger plans and this budget will allow.

0:05:01 - (Chris Clarke): So if you like what we're doing here and you want to help us out in a financial sense, or if you want to increase the amount that you're donating already, you can visit 90milesfromneedles.com/donate. There are a few different options for you there. You can also text the word needles needles to 5355 and in reply you'll get a link to a page where you can select an amount and a frequency. Whether you want to give monthly or annually, or just one time.

0:05:38 - (Chris Clarke): We have people giving dollar 100 a month. We have people giving dollar five a month. We have people giving dollar five one time we appreciate it all. Thank you for your support. A quick note about audio quality in our interview with Kevin. You may notice that there's a little bit of interference, staticky sounding stuff in this interview. When you interview people remotely who live in small towns around the desert southwest, sometimes you got to use tools that are less than ideal for the job. And because bandwidth isn't always what you would like, we do have ways to record studio quality recordings of people remotely.

0:06:14 - (Chris Clarke): We use them a lot, but they do take a little bit faster Internet connection sometimes, and that wouldn't work for this conversation. So Kevin and I met over Zoom and recorded our conversation there, and it worked pretty well. But you can hear that Zoom audio quality rearing its ugly head. I don't think it interferes too much with the ability to understand what either of us are saying, but it's definitely noticeable. And just wanted to let you know that we know we are doing the best we can with the tools we have in the ecosystem and the landscape that we are working in and that we love.

0:06:51 - (Chris Clarke): Let's go to the interview. Kevin Emmerich from Basin and Rangewatch, thanks for joining us.

0:08:08 - (Kevin Emmerich): Thank you. It's great to be here. I love this podcast.

0:08:12 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you for the kind words. So tell me what Basin and Rangewatch is.

0:08:18 - (Kevin Emmerich): Well, Basin and Range Watch is now a nonprofit organization. We're based out of Beatty, Nevada, actually. But we also have property in the Mojave Desert in California. And we started this organization really as an educational format website in 2009 because we were looking at the Mojave Desert areas around where we live and northern Mojave Desert, and we weren't seeing a lot of attention going to mining projects, what we thought were impactful off highway vehicle races and eventually renewable energy projects.

0:09:00 - (Kevin Emmerich): It turned out the renewable energy projects were our niche because a lot of folks didn't know how to touch those. And we had a good familiar sense of the desert areas that were about to be impacted by a lot of these. And so a lot of people didn't know where to go and it took off and it kind of drew people to our website. We're now a nonprofit. Our specialty is to follow large scale renewables, but we also follow energy in general. I just want to say that to some of the people who are critical. We signed on to a letter that opposes oil and gas privatization of land in Nevada as well. So we'd like to follow a lot more, but we're not a large organization.

0:09:45 - (Kevin Emmerich): But that's what led us to trying to submit some conservation proposals that could be used as potential alternatives to some of these large scale energy projects we feel are impactful. Your website is Basin and rangewatch two.org dot. We did that because our original server became somewhat outdated and very hard to update, but we want to keep the old one as an archive. So for a lot of the archived information, go to just Basin and rangewatch.org

0:10:20 - (Kevin Emmerich): for the update. It's Basin and Rangewatch two.org dot, and.

0:10:25 - (Chris Clarke): We will have both of those in our show notes as well. So you have been working, among many, many other places in the desert, in the Pahrump Valley, to alert people to some goings on there. And we had significant coverage of some of that a couple of years ago with an episode featuring Shannon Salter out at the Yellow Pine solar project, which again, we'll link to in the show notes, if people want to go back and hear that as homework for this episode. But what is this Pahrump Valley thing that you've been working on?

0:11:01 - (Kevin Emmerich): Well, what we did is in Pahrump Valley and actually in another basin called the Indian Springs and Mercury Valley, we've submitted two proposals for areas of critical environmental concern, and specifically in the Pahrump Valley. This would be a conservation proposal roughly composed of 145,000 acres of lands managed under the Bureau of Land Management, primarily on the Nevada side. And it is a response to the influx of large scale solar energy construction and applications, and even further proposals that keep coming in for transmission upgrades and etcetera, etcetera.

0:11:50 - (Kevin Emmerich): We decided that we wanted to give the Bureau of Land Management some tools to create some conservation alternatives to some of these proposals. So what we did is we nominated the entire area to be protected as an area of critical environmental concern, and that's specifically 145,000 acres. It would take up just about all of the solar applications, with the exception of the project that is being built right now, and that is yellow pine solar.

0:12:27 - (Kevin Emmerich): But it would protect some additional resources that we feel are outstanding, and they are not seeing a lot of protection right now. These include the old Spanish National Historic Trail, including the trail itself, as well as the view shed. The area that surrounds the old Spanish National Historic Trail is recommended and supposed to be protected under a five mile buffer from the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

0:13:04 - (Kevin Emmerich): And in 2000 or 2002, I believe it was, they created, or they added the old spanish trail into the National Historic trail system and created a comprehensive management strategy. And this strategy would protect a five mile buffer on either side of the trail. However, the BLM has not followed that. The significance of the trail is its historic route from New Mexico. That was a trade route in several areas.

0:13:40 - (Kevin Emmerich): And the Pahrump Valley is significant because it had historical larger quantities of water in different springs like stump spring. But the problem is, is that several of the solar applications overlap with that five mile buffer, and one of them pending is actually entirely within it. The proposal to protect that area would protect that butched and ultimately scale down and stop some of the solar projects out there.

0:14:15 - (Kevin Emmerich): The other resources that are really important to the area would be desert tortoise. The desert tortoise is federally threatened. As you know, this area is not designated as a fish and wildlife Service critical habitat, but nonetheless has a significant population. That's considered important. It's considered to have a density in some areas of over 6.5 /km² which indicates a pretty viable breeding population.

0:14:50 - (Kevin Emmerich): And we have some of the solar projects being managed off of surveys that happened early in 1990, 1991, where they estimated densities below 3.5. I think it was like 3.2. Therefore, when they built the alpine solar project, they underestimated the amount of desert tortoises that they got off the project. They predicted 53 adults and ended up removing 139 adults and moving them across the highway to the Tecopa road, which is also part of our proposal. But there are no current solar applications right there.

0:15:35 - (Kevin Emmerich): As some of us know, that didn't go very well. They did it on a very dry year, a drought year. You could argue that climate change is really going to disrupt not only ecosystems, but mitigation of solar energy projects, because they moved that into an area where they had very desperate badgers, which really don't normally prey on desert tortoises. They killed 33 of them that summer. And so that was pretty tragic. But it indicates that they want to build five other solar projects in that area.

0:16:15 - (Kevin Emmerich): And desert tortoise translocation has always been a little bit controversial, but as you know, you know, some tortoise biologists out there, a lot of them know what they're doing. Translocation has evolved and there are some pretty talented people that can follow and track tortoises and manage it pretty well. But on the other hand, I mean, it's a disturbance of a species that doesn't really like to be disturbed and often creates problems. They build a big fence on the alpine solar projects and desert tortoises.

0:16:50 - (Kevin Emmerich): Shannon Salter, who you did the podcast featuring before, recently saw two tortoises walking along the fence there. And so that's what we were afraid of, but that's what's going to happen, the fragmentation of the habitat. Just one more thing on that rep hat Clark county solar project would actually remove. They're predicting 114 adults from that site, and we think that's very significant. And, you know, that's why we had the ACC overlap with that. There's a lot more you could say about that.

0:17:25 - (Kevin Emmerich): The last thing I'll say is the tortoise is estimated to have an almost 40% decline range wide. And so this is why it's important not to remove big swaths of habitat, solar energy, along with fragmentation, urbanization, the creation of cannabis farms in California, the list goes on and on. Everything's impacting the tortoise, but these are huge swaths of land removal and one approval. And so that's why it's alarming to us.

0:18:00 - (Kevin Emmerich): The other parts of the conservation area. There's rare plants in the area, but there's one in particular called the purrump buckwheat, and it's only found within some of the clay alkali soils within the area. And in the Pahrump Valley, a lot of its habitat has already been impacted by growing urbanization from the city of Peru. Recreation, even some grazing at one point. But now we have solar projects, one in particular called the purple Sage Solar project, another one called the Laria, named after the Creosote bush, by the way, both of those would actually impact some of the alkali clay badlands that this rare plant has been found to occur on.

0:18:48 - (Kevin Emmerich): And so that's part of it. The other part that's really interesting about this area, and it's kind of shocking to us that they want to build solar on mesquite woodlands. And there actually are a few washes within this purple sage energy center proposed project that have a pretty dense thicket of mesquite in them. Each one of them seems to have, like, a couple hundred trees within them. We found phainopeplas and other birds on these trees right within the project.

0:19:22 - (Kevin Emmerich): And it's kind of amazing to me that they might actually bulldoze this. And so the mesquite woodlands and the neotropical migrants are actually part of this nomination. There are some Joshua trees that do occur within the solar project development area, but we decided to include the area that follows highway 164 60 to the south, I would say the southeast or so. And that contains a pretty significantly large Joshua tree forest.

0:19:55 - (Kevin Emmerich): It's not the western Joshua tree, it's the eastern Joshua tree. But I think we can all agree that those were all threatened by drought. And in many cases, wildfire, I think, could actually be a problem within that area, too.

0:20:11 - (Chris Clarke): This is the same species of Joshua tree as was destroyed in the dome fire and the York fire.

0:20:18 - (Kevin Emmerich): Yeah, it is. It is. So even though it has really no recognized protection in Nevada, this is a way to get some recognition to that. So the other interesting thing about the area is the paleontological resources. In 2014, Congress designated the Tule Springs fossil beds National Monument on the other side of the spring Range. That's where Mount Charleston is, just west of Las Vegas, Nevada. However, much of that formation, somewhere around ten to 12,000 years old or so, is actually contained in the south Pahrump valley.

0:21:04 - (Kevin Emmerich): And so we did some literature searches, talked to some paleontologists, and did find out that there were occurrences where people have found fragments of colombian mammoths in the area, and I also believe camels as well. You know, ice age pleistocene animals. And there's one in the Cathedral canyon area, which it's just over the border in California, and then one near Stump Spring. Well, you know, Laura, she's my partner in crime with basin and range, which we were out there last summer looking for mammoth fossils, not thinking we'd find one, but within about, I'd say 20 minutes outside of the car, Laura said, hey, Kevin, I found one. I thought she was kidding, but we went over there, and it was a molar of a colombian mammoth with a tooth, and it was exposed by a lot of the flooding that happened from the monsoons that we had last year.

0:22:05 - (Kevin Emmerich): It would later, ironically, be covered up by later monsoons, and so it's difficult to find now. You know, we left it where it is. We reported it to the BLM. And paleontological resources are protected under a 2009 law, the Paleontological Resources Protection act. And I believe that find caused them to survey that site a lot more. And I did do have some significant delays on the project, but they still want to move forward with it, and they don't have any plans to excavate it. And they're claiming that placing solar panels over it won't damage it.

0:22:51 - (Chris Clarke): It seems like driving piles in to support the solar panels is going to risk some damage to fossils that are just below the surface.

0:23:01 - (Kevin Emmerich): Most definitely, I could have damaged that, accidentally stepping on it with my hiking boot. I mean, it's ridiculous to try to claim that that won't be damaged. Another interesting element about that particular project site is at the BLM land, but somehow got overlooked under the 2012 solar peis, the programmatic Environmental impact statement, and became the western solar plan in that they evaluated a lot of the lands for slope criteria and as it stands now, until they change it probably later this month is what I'm hearing.

0:23:42 - (Kevin Emmerich): Well, there's going to be a final EIS, but they made it so a lot of solar projects would not allow to be developed on slope over 5% in this case of the slope is there are these very steep canyons and badlands and the slope is 2020, 5% 30 in some areas. But they're not very high hills. But the company is going to literally have to cut and fill and grade all of this stuff. And so they're asking for a lot of water in order to do this. They're seeking from the state probably 1000 acre feet of water.

0:24:28 - (Kevin Emmerich): And so you can see where this is going. I mean, it's a major footprint, it's a lot of damage. And any paleontological resources out there are pretty much toast. They're actually getting an exemption from BLM's new criteria. The BLM does. They're trying. They're saying that solar site should not be graded more than 20% and they're making that criteria. But they're exempting this one called the Purple Sage solar project.

0:25:00 - (Kevin Emmerich): And the company is primergy. Primergy. They're a fairly well funded company and they've actually built the Gemini solar project, which incidentally destroyed 3 miles of the old Spanish National Historic Trail.

0:25:17 - (Chris Clarke): I wrote some comments on that for NPCA and it was pretty startling the degree to which they were willing to just trash the historical landscape there.

0:25:26 - (Kevin Emmerich): Yeah, yeah. And you know what they did for mitigation? They took high resolution photos and put them in the Smithsonian and we thought that was particularly interesting. And so. But yes, so that's the same company. The other one other element of the ACeC is I'm not going to detail too much of the Salt song trail, but we wanted to include this just to give a better access to BLM to some of the tribes out there.

0:26:01 - (Kevin Emmerich): And we're still working on an additional letter where I'm contacting some tribe to get some support. We had initial support from this idea when we first came up with it a year and a half ago. And so we're still working on getting an official letter where I can get a. Some of the tribal signatures on it. But the Salt song trail is a very interesting concept. Songs that I'm not. Probably not doing justice to this at all, but that represent actual location or trails that connect spiritual areas.

0:26:40 - (Kevin Emmerich): And I hope I'm saying that right. But what I can say is the South Pahrump valley is a very significant part of that, and the landscape, the cultural landscape as well. And so I'm going to have to say, stay tuned on that, because we're trying to develop a little bit more of a rapport with the BLM and some of those tribal representatives. We're trying to help, at least with this ACC nomination. So some other elements about the ACC is that in 2014, the Bureau of Land Management actually was trying to update their local resource management plan. And in Nevada, there are 49 million acres of public lands managed by the BLM.

0:27:29 - (Kevin Emmerich): And each area in Nevada has a district, and it's supposed to have a governing plan. In 2014, they were updating the Southern Nevada Resource Management plan plan. And that in that plan, the BLM wanted to protect a lot of the areas in the Paurrump Valley. And we're simply trying to expand that and tell them that this is the alternative for the ACCEC. Unfortunately, in order to approve all the solar projects, the Bureau of Land Management has to degrade its visual resource management.

0:28:09 - (Kevin Emmerich): And they're supposed to do that in all of the BLM districts. They manage them at four levels, one being the most protected, four encouraging development. And what they're trying to do is really downgrade the entire area to four in what they call resource plan amendments. And that's with all, with the approval of these different solar projects. So we're using that as a vehicle to submit this conservation alternative.

0:28:40 - (Kevin Emmerich): And we already submitted it through comments, through a transmission line upgrade. It's going to have several of these plan amendments, and the timing is really good, that if there is a change of administration, and if it becomes the Trump administration, it's likely that they will dismantle this recent Bureau of Land Management public land rule. But there's a lot of advantages to referencing that particular rule within some of these ACec nominations, because the BLM would actually like to use as one of their better vehicles for conservation.

0:29:25 - (Kevin Emmerich): And that's simply to be honest, an ACEC is a much weaker management and say a national monument, they can change it, and they can do the nomination based on one or more elements and not manage any of the others in the ACEC. And so the BLM kind of likes that because it gives them a little bit of flexibility to change them, you know, during the updates of their plan. But we are actually saying, because you can do that, this is what a lot of people want. And I am kind of amazed that I have a lot of folks that live in the Pahrump Valley that are really supporting this because in 2014, when the Bureau of Land Management tried to upgrade or change the resource management plan and create more acecs, they had protesters.

0:30:21 - (Kevin Emmerich): They were directly, like, you know, influenced in support the whole Cliven Bundy fiasco that was going on back in that time. But now it's ten years later, and it doesn't really matter. A lot of the rural people that I'm talking to are saying, oh, we would much rather have this than solar panels everywhere, blocking off our access and destroying our view. And if you get to know a lot of the folks that live in this south valley, whatever their political affiliation, many of them moved out there because they love the desert, they love the open space, and they see this proposal and they say, hey, that looks a lot better than a sea of solar panels.

0:31:07 - (Kevin Emmerich): And we're making sure we don't recommend closing any of their favorite roads or routes or anything like that. This isn't meant to be inflammatory in that regard. It's simply meant to give BLM some tools to scale down some of these, what we think are pretty greedy solar proposal. They just want so much land.

0:31:30 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. So you mentioned that the areas of critical environmental concern aren't quite as stringent in protection as a wilderness area or a national monument or something like that. How do you foresee an ACEC actually protecting the landscape? I mean, what kind of mechanisms will it include for slowing down the solar? Is there going to be like a. Just an outright ban on development within the ACEC or a cap or something like that?

0:32:00 - (Kevin Emmerich): Well, there's what we're asking for and what the BLM would actually do. Right. So, you know, what we're asking for, best case scenario, is that the ACEC would be the conservation alternative to the solar projects. And yes, we have a strong message. We don't think they should build any more after they're finished with yellow pine solar. So, you know, that's the idealistic goal. There's what the BLM would do, and this could be used as a tool, perhaps, for them to say no to a couple of the up and coming solar projects and to perhaps shave off acreage to some of the existing project proposals that are now getting along pretty far within the National Environmental Policy act review.

0:32:52 - (Kevin Emmerich): Currently, there's, I would say, maybe 9000 acres of BLM land that's going in through the scoping process or the draft EIS phase of the NEPA review right now. And so the idea of the BLM just agreeing to stop that and protect it is not necessarily realistic. But on the other hand, when you read some of the documents, like the review for one of the solar projects called Roughhat, Clark County Solar, we don't feel that the BLM seriously considered the conservation guidelines of the large regional resource management plan, and we don't think that they considered a conservation alternative.

0:33:43 - (Kevin Emmerich): And so we have that here. Let's say a group out there wants to litigate. We've given them a tool to use, a pretty powerful tool to do that. If the BLM decides they want to ignore us, which they have so far on this one, I'll add, there could be some problems later on down the road. I just will say that we are not the only organization that's highly disturbed about the impacts these projects are having on the desert tortoise, and some of those other ones are a little bit more powerful than we are. And so there are some advantages in that regard. So in many ways, this is a symbolic gesture.

0:34:26 - (Kevin Emmerich): Like, for example, we had a pretty good article from the Las Vegas Review Journal come out about this. I thought it was pretty well done. It was myself and Laura that met with them, but they talked a lot about the ecology that Laura was explaining to them and the impact that these projects would have. And the ACEC proposal is what inspired them to come out there and have a look at it. We've done everything, including ask the interior secretary to cancel the review of a project, because we know they can do that. They did it with Crescent Peak wind in 2018.

0:35:06 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:35:06 - (Kevin Emmerich): You know, they really didn't respond to us, but it made a lot of press. And our whole plea was based on the desert tortoise. I mean, the desert tortoise is seeing a great decline. And here you are moving forward with a project that will remove more square miles of its habitat. And so, of course, if they agreed to that, that would set precedents, and they'd have to consider that for every other project that some local community can't stand.

0:35:37 - (Kevin Emmerich): But on the other hand, getting it in the newspaper, getting it on the website, getting the reporters to be interested in it, really sends a direct message to a lot of the. The land managers out there. We do have one successful ACC where we took up the chain of command to the deputy director, Nada Culver, and met with her over it. And that's over Cactus Springs near, over the hump from Mount Charleston, the spring range.

0:36:09 - (Kevin Emmerich): And that area is described as the most crucial desert tortoise connectivity area, Nevada. And it got her interested enough to have that considered, you know, in the review of one of the solar projects. But at this point, no, we're not getting any feedback about the Pahrump Valley. We believe that, you know, the BLM wants solar and they want it there. And it's not something that you can necessarily point fingers at to this. The field offices for the Bureau of Land Management, there's a lot of good people working for them, but upper management is really directing a lot of these to move forward.

0:36:48 - (Kevin Emmerich): And so this is a way of saying, just stop, slow down, you know, cut it out with the desert tortoise, manage the old spanish trail better, communicate with the tribes, better, recognize the rare plants, and definitely look at these paleontological resources. Take that more serious.

0:37:11 - (Chris Clarke): That all sounds really good. How can listeners get involved and help you guys out?

0:37:16 - (Kevin Emmerich): Well, when I can, and I'm probably talking about the week after next, I'm going to put out an action alert from our group that will be kind of a form letter to a state director, the BLM national director, Tracy Stonemanning, to consider this. We do have approximately, I think it's now, I can't remember the count of organizations, it's 13 or 14 that are supporting it. And so we're going to try to keep up the momentum for that.

0:37:51 - (Chris Clarke): Okay, so do you have a place for people to sign on for a mailing list or anything like that?

0:37:56 - (Kevin Emmerich): We do actually have one off of our basin and range watch 2 website. Okay.

0:38:01 - (Chris Clarke): So basinandrangewatch2.org. and go. And actually, as soon as we're done recording this, I'm going to go do that myself. Go and sign up.

0:38:11 - (Kevin Emmerich): Okay.

0:38:12 - (Chris Clarke): And Kevin, I just really appreciate you taking some time, and I know you got a lot on your plate, but this is a really interesting and important issue, and we will. We will be reaching out to get updates.

0:38:25 - (Kevin Emmerich): Well, thank you very much. And like I say, I mean, keep up the good work with this podcast. It's really good to get this information out there. I learn a lot from it.

0:38:35 - (Chris Clarke): Well, great. Thank you so much for saying that. And maybe we'll run into each other out in the desert sometime pretty soon. I mentioned in our last episode a couple of weeks ago that I was going to be doing some traveling, personal traveling, that is, not work traveling. And in fact, my wife Lara and I spent four or five days in Buffalo, outside of Buffalo, anyway, in the woods a little bit in the small towns ringing the very small city that I grew up in in western New York.

0:40:10 - (Chris Clarke): It was an important visit. It was really good to see all my siblings in the same couple of days. The purpose of this visit was to go to a picnic that was celebrating the 40th birthday of my eldest niece and the 90th birthday of her grandfather, my father. And it was really good to see everybody. It was really good to get out of the desert for a little bit. You know, I've lived here for a little bit over 16 years.

0:40:40 - (Chris Clarke): I had been coming to visit for at least 30 years before that. The desert is definitely home, and I hadn't thought of western New York as home for a long time. But somehow on this trip it was. This was my first visit to upstate New York in 25 years, and I get the sense that it won't be 25 years before the next time I visit. First off, I'm not sure I'll be here. Confident, but not certain that I will be here in 25 years. But there's also a bunch of stuff I wanted to show Lara that we just didn't get a chance to do because there was a hurricane and it was raining on us. Kind of takes the fun out of stomping up a creek to hunt for brachiopods.

0:41:20 - (Chris Clarke): At any rate, it's really good to be back in the saddle. Really good to be back recording another episode of this podcast, and I want to thank you for listening very much. Want to thank Kevin Ammeric of Basin and Rangewatch for joining us. You can keep track of what basin and Range watch is up to by going to Basin and rangewatch two.org dot. Also want to thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, our podcast artwork artist Extraordinaire.

0:41:51 - (Chris Clarke): Our new donor joining our ranks is Amanda Cox. Thank you, Amanda. If you want to take Amanda's place as our newest donor, go to 90 milesfromneedles.com donate and you can bumper from that privileged slot. Take it for yourself. Our theme music, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music used in this episode comes from slip.stream, and even though we are in the end of August, it is still hot out there.

0:42:23 - (Chris Clarke): People are falling ill from heat injury throughout the southwest, actually across the country, but especially so in the southwest. Remember, stay inside when you can. Air conditioning and swamp coolers are your friends. Stay hydrated. Drink more water than you think you need. Drink when you're thirsty. Do not go on strenuous hikes, not too much longer. And we should be getting those typical autumn desert temperatures in the chilly nineties and even the upper eighties. That's way better hiking weather. In the meantime, take care of yourself. The desert really needs you, you know, and I will see you at the next watering hole.

0:43:04 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now.

0:45:11 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy media network.

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S3E24: The Fight to Protect the Pahrump Valley