S1E19: Shannon Salter Fights to Save the Desert

Uncorrected Transcript

Chris:
Hello there, fellow desert protectors. Before we get started, we want to let you know that we are running a listener survey to get some idea of what you think of the podcast. We'd like to find out what you think we could do better, what you'd like to see more of, topics you think we ought to cover in more depth and cetera. You can fill out that survey at 90Milesfromneedles.com/survey. And those of you who do fill out the survey and provide a snail mail address in the appropriate place will receive a five-by-five inch final sticker with our fantastic and hopefully not autobiographical logo on it. Let us know what you think. 90Milesfromneedles.com/survey.

Alicia:
I haven't been here so long. It's so lovely.

Chris:
Yeah, they did a nice job of fixing it up and putting it all together.

Alicia:
I remember the uproar from the community about how degraded this area was getting with camping, illegal highlining and dirt biking. The signs are great. This place looks legit.

Chris:
Welcome to this episode of 90 Miles from Needles. I'm Chris Clarke.

Alicia:
And I'm Alicia Pike.

Chris:
And we are in the Desert View Conservation Area just south of the town of Joshua Tree up against the park boundary to record the intro of this episode and also for me to show Alicia this thing I saw the other day here, that was just really surprising to me. We'll keep that as a mystery until we get there.

Alicia:
Oh, boy.

Bouse Parker:
The sun is a giant blowtorch aimed at your face. There ain't no shade nowhere. Let's hope you brought enough water. It's time for 90 Miles From Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast, with your hosts, Chris Clarke and Alicia Pike.

Chris:
So this episode concerns utility-scale, solar energy development in the desert and the problems with it and the alternatives to it. With the effort to ramp up this society's response to climate change, that more and more people are just assuming that the highest and best use of a desert landscape not too different from the one we're walking through right now, which is protected as a conservation area, is to cut down all the plants, evict all the animals, and cover it with solar panels. And for those of us that have been working on the issue for a while, kind of like, been there, done that, I think this is where I came into this movie.

Alicia:
So I listened to the Pahrump Valley thing that you sent me, the recordings that you made, and it's like Jesus crying first thing in the morning. I listened all the way through. Simply so disheartening to think about that.

Chris:
Green Link west is a proposed 525 kilovolt power line, a transmission line that would run along the diagonal border of the western side of the state of Nevada from around Reno to just north of Las Vegas. It's being sold as a way to take solar power from the Mojave Desert in southern Nevada. And ship it up to northern Nevada where it would power things like Google server farms and Tesla Gigafactories. And in reality, almost all the power that Greenlink West transports will go to California for sale to Southern California cities. The power line is being sold as a way to create jobs for Nevadans by supporting industry in Nevada. But it's actually pretty much for exporting energy to California because Nevada is, has been, and probably will continue for the foreseeable future. To be essentially a resource colony for the state of California. Nevada deserves better than that. At any rate, we're going to do several episodes on the effects of the proposed Green Lang West transmission line. The mere possibility of this transmission line has sparked a gold rush in western Nevada. Pretty much anywhere within about 30 miles of the proposed right of way. People are proposing huge solar projects up and down the course of that line. We're talking thousands of acres. In late September, I went out to the site of one of those projects currently under construction, the 3000-acre Yellow pine solar project just south of Pahrump, Nevada. There was a protest and cultural event planned by my friend Shannon Salter, who is the founder of a group called Mojave Green, which you gotta admit is one of the best environmental organization names ever. Seriously good mascot possibilities there. It's estimated that about 90,000 Mojave yukas are going to be sacrificed for that project. Their average age is probably two or 300 years or more. And there's a bunch more solar planned right across the road and right on the other side of the fence line of yellow pine. As much as 200 acres of solar development in Pahrump Valley, which right now, despite some offroader damage and some historic grazing and the occasional herd of wild horses trampling the imperiled foliage, right now it's intact, thriving Mojave Desert upland habitat. It's home to desert tortoises and desert kit foxes and badgers and coyotes and bobcats. And there are people that want to keep it that way. And they had a little get together organized by Shannon and Mojave Green. So I went out to Pahrump and I took some recording equipment and I ran into some friends out there and this is what we heard.

Shanon Salter:
Wow, look at all these beautiful people. I've never seen so many beautiful people on the Pahrump Valley. This is the South Pahrump Valley. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Shannon Salter. I've started an organization called Mojave Green. And for about six months, six or eight months or so, I was really just living down there at the rabbit camp. And pretty much every day I walked down this path here. So when you drove in, there's a little road and a jeep trail and I walked down that road and I spent a lot of time looking at this fence. And I've walked around. I came out here because I wanted to fall in love with this valley. And I did fall in love with this valley. We're on the precipice of something really big and bad here. So this is the Yellow Pine Solar facility. We're on the ground. That would be the golden current solar. And the Bureau of Land Management would like to have 20,000 acres of solar in this valley. This is 3000 acres. They'd like to have 20,000. And that's just the very beginning. So I have an article in the Desert Report that you can get over there in the September issue. And I wrote about the Green link line. And if that gets in, all hell's just going to break loose. I mean, they just want to do this everywhere. And I just got to tell you that if you take a height to the cleared area, you can see that they did not mow the vegetation. The Bureau of Land Management said they're going to mow it, but they didn't do that. They just totally bulldozed everything. It's sad, but so I just want to say that we all came here today together, and us coming together like this is powerful. And it's powerful the way a poem is powerful, the way poetry is powerful. Because us coming together today is an act, and poetry is also an act. It's not a process. Processes can be broken, but an act cannot be broken. And so I just want to thank you guys for coming out here today.

Chris:
At this point, Shannon gestures to her right at a stack of rocks that is almost a perfect cone, five and a half or 6ft tall, held in place by a network of rebar and rot iron. The rebar is bent into curlicue shapes that extend past the top of the cone. It looks elegant, and yet it fits in well with a wild landscape, as if it's been here for a long time.

Shanon Salter:
We built this rock pile called a mitzvah. And in the Old Testament, a mitzvah referred to a pile of rocks that marked a place of watching. It was a place where everything could be seen. And it also marked the boundary between two places or between properties. And of course, as you all know, a pile of rocks has a lot of meaning. A pile of rocks commemorates the dead, and it also marks a path forward. It marks the way. So with this pile of rocks, we honor the 920 Mojave Yucca and the 5000 creasote being destroyed at the Yellow Pine Solar site. We honor the 130 desert tortoises taken from their boroughs and the 33 killed. We honor the soil. We honor the rocks. We honor the lichen and moss. We honor the kit fox. We honor the birds. We honor the insects. We honor the coyote. We honor the human. We honor the choya and the barrel cactus and the unknown. With this rock pile we form a sacred pact with the Living Valley to destroy. Nature is the old way. With this rock pile, we enter a new way of being. Now, we've got some amazing readers here tonight before we get to some of our poets. And we've got Matthew Labis here to talk about the salt songs, the traditional salt song trail in this area. But first I'd like to have Kevin and Laura from Basin and Range Watch just to give us a little bit of context about the biology here. And Kevin and Laura from Basin and Range Watch are pretty much the only environmental organization that's making a lot of noise about this. So I just want to see what they have to say about all this year.

Chris:
A little bit of full disclosure here. Basin and Range Watch and its founders, Kevin Emerick and Laura Cunningham are people that have had more influence on my own desert activism than just about anybody else in the world. They are brave, they are uncompromising, they're compassionate, and they love the desert like nobody else I know. They're also willing to stick their necks out sort of like a desert tortoise. We're going to get to know Kevin and Laura much better in an upcoming episode on the barrage of solar projects proposed around Beattty, Nevada, which is further north on the Green Lake West route. Here's a preview.

Kevin Emmerich:
Hello and thank you for coming out here. And thank you Shannon, for bringing so much attention to this particular issue. It really is important because of the amount of land that they want to convert here. Our organization has followed solar and renewable energy development and some other issues since about 2009. It's coming waves. It's a very political issue, as you know, and there's a very big push by some that says we need all of these public lands to develop a lot of this energy because it's essential for a clean energy future, blah, blah, blah. As we can see here, the Yellow Pine Solar project is beginning construction. 3000 acres is 4.6 sq mi. That is what is going to be modified and essentially geoengineered for millions of, I would say millions of solar panels. That's a pretty big area and there are big plans for the area. There's a big giant cluster of holes and power lines up there that are relatively new called the Trout Canyon Substation and that can accommodate several solar projects which will hook into a grid that will eventually export all the energy to California. We have a pretty big visibility factor from Clarke Mountain, mojave Preserve, kingston Range in California Wilderness Area, south no, Par Range, Mount Charleston and Nevada. And so the visual impacts are great. And we have a demand now for, as Shannon said, 20,000 acres of solar projects here. That means there's going to be an additional five projects considered in this area. Two kind of close to Perump are getting near the environmental impact statement process. That's where it reaches public comment, but it also means there's a really strong agenda to approve them. They're called Copper Rays and rough hat. Clarke Solar Collectively. 7200 acres. What people are really getting pissed off about today is this one called Golden Current, a 4300 acre application which would also hook into the Trout Canyon substation and export energy to California. The BLM did a preliminary review and pretty much canceled anybody's ability to stake a mining claim here, which is a grim sign that they want to move forward with some kind of solar project over here. Not only are there desert tortoises that Shannon mentioned, they found mammoth fossil in some of the Badlands over there. It's a really valuable area near the old Spanish Trail. There's another project, 3400 acres called Mosey Solar right next to it, hugging the California border. The BOM tried to do a landscape level smart planning here by only allowing the area north of to Copa Road, west of highway 160 and south of Pahrump to the California border to be developed. But we have really aggressive solar developers, one called EDF that once about 11 sq mi now on that side of the road. And what's the problem there? Well, they dig up all the tortoises here, desert tortoises, put them on that side of the road. Now what are they going to do if they build another 11 sq mi of solar panel? Is this getting insane or I just losing my mind here. So we have a lot of issues right here. This area is aggressively being pushed for development. It goes all the way to the top. The BLM people I talked to quite honestly are shocked by this. So it's something to keep track of and if you want to, you can follow our website. I'm dominating the conversation if Laura wants to talk here. Thanks.


Laura Cunningham:
Thanks, Kevin. Laura Cunningham, I'm also co founder of Base and Range Watch and I just want to also acknowledge that we're now standing on unseated land of the Payut Shoshoni Chimmel Wevy and the other original caretakers of this beautiful land. And we thank you. And we came here five years ago and hiked all over this solar project before the fence was up, before the right of way was in, and it was beautiful. There are wildflowers in the spring, tortoises, kit foxes, western kingbirds tarantulas, zebra tail lizards. I mean, there's life out here. So all we're trying to do is save a cultural landscape and all of this biodiversity. So thank you. Shannon.

Chris:
I definitely understand why people think the desert is the best place to put solar. It is a really good place to put solar. I think of all of the times I've driven around down in Palm Springs or someplace like that, looking for a parking spot that has a tree shading. It what better place to put solar than parking lots in desert cities and.

Alicia:
Over all of our above ground canals that are running all over the place, all this already tampered with graded, improved, call it what you want. Space is already there.

Chris:
It really comes down to something that I believe has come up in our conversations on this podcast before, and that thing is corporate profit.

Alicia:
Insert gagging noises here.

Chris:
I know we spent some time talking about this in our introductory episode that we were recording out at Sand Draw that we released getting close to a year ago. This is episode 19 that we're working on right now. That's pretty awesome.

Alicia:
Look at us.

Chris:
But the energy companies are really used to having control over every aspect of that transaction. They create the power, they transmit the power, they get the power to our houses, and then they bill us for it. And they really want to keep that going. They like that relationship.

Alicia:
They like to ignore what the real cost is, the real cost of their doing business, the wholesale destruction of the environment.

Chris:
Lizard little tiny side blotched just went in there.

Alicia:
They seem to always be having a good year. Yup, I see them all the time, every year.

Chris:
That could actually be a nice mascot for this podcast. They're just like, they're here. They're enjoying the desert.

Alicia:
OOH, look at that.

Chris:
That is what I brought you here to see.

Alicia:
Holy moly.

Chris:
We will be right back after the break.

Bouse Parker:
Desert news for October 10, 2022.

Chris:
Bonaventure Nevada, Inc. Is asking the Bureau of Land Management to approve lithium exploration permits for the Bonnie Clair Exploration Project northwest of Beatty, Nevada, on a dry lake next to Death Valley National Park. The area known as Sarcobata's Flat is critically important habitat for the threatened desert tortoise and the western Joshua Tree at the northernmost end of the ranges of both species. Sarcobatus Flat will be crucial to any northward migration of the torts and trees as the planet warms. If the company finds lithium at Bonnie Clare, it could mine more than 4100 acres of open desert. Admirers of unique desert species got some good news last month as the National Park Service reported a startling jump in the numbers of the Devil's Hole pup fish, which is restricted to one small deep waterfilled cave in Death Valley National Park. Biologists counted 263 of the diminutive fish, a big increase since the low of 39 fish a few years back. An earthquake induced wave in Devil's Hole cleared some algae from the fish's 80-foot-deep habitat, which may have made it easier to count the fish. Kevin Wilson, aquatic ecologist for Death Valley National Park, said recent high spring and fall counts show the importance of maintaining long term data as we work to find out what's changed. Climate change is threatening the pinion juniper forests of the west, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Nevada Reno. A longterm study of two species of pinion pine and three species of juniper found that all of the species, aside from the Utah juniper, are declining across their range. The study looked at both older tree mortality and survival of younger tree seedlings. University of Nevada Reno's Robert Schreiber, the study's lead, said, in the driest, warmest locations, up to about 50% of populations are declining. It's pretty severe in those locations, which are usually at lower elevations that tend to be hotter and get less water than woodlands at higher elevations. Utah junipers are adapted to hotter, drier climates. More information on all these topics can be found in our show notes.

Petey Mesquitey:

Hello. I'm Petey Mesquitey host of Growing native from KXCI, Tucson. Each week since 1992, I've been sharing stories, poems, and songs about flora, fauna, family, and the glory of living in the borderlands of southern Arizona. Recent episodes of growing Native are available@kxci.org. Apple podcasts and PRX. The desert is beautiful, my friends. Yeah, it is.

Bouse Parker:
You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast, and you're going to need more water than that ridiculous little bottle there can hold.

Chris:
I want to make something really clear. We here at 90 Miles from Needles support solar energy. We agree with a scientific consensus that humanity's addition of quadrillions of tons of greenhouse gases to the Earth's atmosphere have created climate change that is already catastrophic for a lot of people and promises to get even worse for even more people. We like solar. All the electronic work that goes into this podcast, the recording and downloading of interviews and music and the editing and the uploading, all that work is done with solar power generated on rooftops. We are big fans of solar here at 90 Miles from Needles, but there is solar and then there is solar. There are hundreds of ways to do solar right, and there are a few ways to do solar horribly wrong. Given a certain set of assumptions that people have about the way the world works, it kind of makes sense that the deserts of the Southwest are bearing the brunt of pressure for solar development. What are those assumptions? There's three that I can think of. The first is the assumption that the desert is empty space, that it's useless land waiting for us to turn it into some useful thing for humans to profit by. The second is that the people who want to build those big utility-scale, solar power plants in the American Southwest, are motivated by doing the right thing. The third assumption is that we have no choice. All of these assumptions are completely wrong. Now, unless this is the very first episode of 90 Miles and Needles, you've listened to, you know what we think about the assumption that the desert is useless, that it's land waiting to be turned into something useful for people. The desert teams with life. It teams with native organisms that are in complicated and unique relationships that are themselves irreplaceable. And in fact, the organisms that live in the desert have every bit as much right to that land as you do or more. It's their home. You want to put solar on that land and evict those organisms, the burden of proof that they need to give it up is on you. And by you of course, I mean mostly the energy industry flax and functionaries who want to bulldoze deserts and replace them with parabolic mirrors or solar cells or gigantic garage-door-sized mirrors aimed at boilers on top of power towers. Once solar becomes a multibillion-dollar industry, once building solar becomes a vehicle for insanely rich corporations to maintain their business plans and just shift the source of the revenue from fossil fuels to photons. As soon as solar becomes the renewable energy industry, you might as well just drop renewable off that phrase. It's the energy industry, period. The people making the policy, making the decisions, the people conducting the public relations are energy barons. They are energy industry flacks. I like to presume the best of people and I say all this having come to this conclusion after a lot of disappointments and a lot of hard lessons that I would rather not have learned. Renewable energy industry executives lie. Renewable energy industry executives lie to cover up the amount of damage their projects do. They lie to distract attention from the effects of their projects. They lie to agencies that are charged with regulating them. And possibly worse than the lying they will march into your Congress and into your state legislatures and they will demand to be exempted from environmental assessment laws and migratory bird protection laws and air quality laws. And when you ask them why they should be exempt from the rules about environmental protection that the rest of us have to follow, they will tell you it's because they're saving the world. Goddamnit! they are energy industry functionaries and they lie. How can you tell big Solar is not in it to save the planet? Because Big Solar spends millions of dollars trying to discourage people from putting solar on their own rooftops. People with solar on their own rooftops can sell power back to the grid and offset the cost of their electric bills. It's a little bit of energy democracy in action. And the big energy companies spend millions of dollars lobbying to end that practice because they want to stick with their 19th century business plans that involve generating electricity somewhere far away from where you're going to use it. Getting it to your house by way of gigantic high powered transmission lines that are pure profit for those corporations no matter how much it costs to put transmission lines in it's. No loss for the companies because the companies aren't paying for it. We are. Utilities and energy companies want to generate power remotely and then sell it to us as monopolies using transmission lines that we pay for. And if we talk about pursuing that kind of energy democracy by taking a means of energy production into our own hands, their business plans are threatened. The week we released this, the California Public Utilities Commission is coming up with new rooftop solar policies that are extremely friendly to opponents of rooftop solar like the utilities and the energy companies. If you happen to be in Sacramento on October 11 at 11:00 a.m. At the state Capitol, there's a rallying festival to tell the CPUC to lay off rooftop solar. We'll have a link to that campaign in our show notes and this all brings us to the assumption that we have no other choice. But at this point you've probably figured out that we do have other choices. A few years back, the Luskin Center at UCLA calculated that rooftops in Los Angeles County could power the entire state of California. But still the desert is in the crosshairs. And with renewed fervor, with a passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and its subsidies and incentives for large scale utility scale solar, public lands with intact habitat are coming under extreme threat. Appreciate your listening to that clarification. Let's go back to Shannon and Pahrump.

Shannon Salter
So now I want to introduce Matthew Lavis. We are very, very lucky to have him here. Matthew  Leivas is a widely revered Chemehuevi elder. He's a tribal leader, a fierce advocate for the land and for his people, and a protector of the cultural ecology which is constantly threatened by industrial development. I had the privilege of visiting Matthew at the Lake Havasu  Chemehuevi Reservation last year. He graciously showed me an ancient Chemehuevi dwelling place called Westwell, where an artesian spring had stopped flowing but had since been brought back to life. Matthew had tended to this place with a traditional prayer stick. He asked for the water to come again, and it did. Matthew  Leivas is a founder of the Native American Land Conservancy, the mission of which is to preserve and protect sacred lands, as well as provide educational programming for native youth and the public. Matthew is also the co founder of the Salt Song Trail project, which includes song recordings, videos and maps for youth by the new movie People. Matthew  Leivas and the Native American Land Conservancy have been central to the fight against the notorious Cadiz water project, which would pump 16 billion gallons of water per year from a Mojave aquifer and sell it to Southern California. Just last week, they celebrated a huge victory when a federal judge threw out a crucial pipeline permit for the water mining project. So please welcome the incredible Matthew  Leivas.

Chris:

There were a number of speakers at the Mojave Green Rally in Pahrump, Nevada, including the wonderful writers Claire Vaye Watkins and Ruth Nolan, both of whom we hope to have on the podcast before long, and our old friend Matthew Leivas. Respected Chemehuevi elder and a good friend, and we wanted to give you just a flavor of what Matthew said. He spoke for a little over half an hour, people were rapped. He spoke about the Salt Song Trail, which went right through the area between Pahrump and Mount Charleston. He spoke about the history of the Chemehuevi people. He spoke lyrically and movingly. And we can only offer a brief glimpse into what he said.

Chris:
We really just couldn't come up with better words to close out this section of this episode than what Matthew said.

Matthew Leivas:

Welcome, everyone. Quite an honor to be here and to talk about the work that we've done in protecting the desert environment. The Colorado River, the aquifers in the desert. Traditional Native American sacred sites springs and seeps the land, the plants, the animals. Because Mother Earth and all of its inhabitants have been abused for much too long. Mother Earth has been hurt so bad, it's almost contemptuous. What's happening today in these days. The trials of earthquakes and tsunamis and who knows what else. Bad things are coming and taking lives. The most piercing of the world water. BA. Can anybody say that?

Matthew Leivas:

Pah.

Crowd:

Pah. Pah.

Matthew Leivas:

Pah in the Nuwu language means water. It's sacred to us. It's holy. We speak to it. It speaks to us. It remembers us. It knows us because we help protect it. On the way over to tecopa, seeing all those little pools of water out there lets me know that up here in Nevada, parts of Southern California, there's a lot of water under this land that people don't realize and all these waters are still connected. I'm a Chemehuevi. Our traditional name of our people is Nuwu for all of the Southern Paiute bands. It means the people, our people, the Chemehuevi. We came from this area. We don't know exactly where. It could have been right here at Pahrump, could have been up in the mountain. We were just told that our people came from Mount Charleston and migrated down to the Mojave Desert and established encampments, made relationships and connections with the land and resources. And we ended all the way down to Chemehuevi Valley, California. As a member of the Native American Land Conservancy, I'm not the only one. I was one of the Founding Fathers of the organization. But being there on our reservation is what led me into land protection and protection of the sacred sites. Signs are coming, folks. Mother Earth can't take very much more. It's fighting back, just retaliating about what man has done to it. I feel as if I am just one cog in a big wheel. It's like you are, but you know, these wheels, little wheels can turn bigger wheels and bigger wheels and bigger wheels. And that's what I see here happening. Your participation, your activism, your voice that's going to take it to the next level, starting here. Use your voice. Use that power of your voice. Express yourselves. Some of you were in Shoshone a few years ago. I was there to give testimony on the solar project here at Pahrump. Do you recall that? Any of you recall that where they were going to put up two huge 700-foot towers out here? Well, it happened. And my dear friends, Richard Arnold from Pahrump here, he invited me up to testify, and I did my testimony, and we helped stop this project. And of course, here comes another project. When I read the flyer about take the solar to the city, why not put the solar over the aquifers why not put the solar over the open canals in California? Why not? Why do we have to take up all this acreage? Do you realize what you're doing to the cosmos? What's happening today with the world and all these different climate changes that are happening so dramatically back east? Temperature is reaching 100 degrees. Hey, we gotta wake up. You gotta wake up and see what's happening around you and around your people, around Mother Earth. Wake up. Wake up. Guruki, get up. Well, I'm rambling on and on. Now I'm half to stop. My voice is getting kind of rascal. I really appreciate being up here. It's quite an honor standing up here and talking for you all, because I know that my voice is going to do something to your mind and make you think. Make that gear turn a little bit more and figure out what else is going on here. If you sit down and look down, surprise yourself. Do that. Take a look down and see what's happening on the Earth. Look at those little creatures are coming out of the ground. Where they come from? What makes them live? What makes you live? Food and water. Water more than anything. The most precious element being wasted. So continue doing what you're doing and telling the truth. Let it be known that America can't take this no more. Mother Earth can't take this no more. It's got to stop you're here. Let's stop this. Mawk. Thank you very much.

Bouse Parker:
Meanwhile, back at the Desert View conservation area.

Alicia:
Area I love listening to Matt's stories, the changes he's seen, and the feelings that I feel so strongly as well. Like Mother Earth is she's hurting and we are ignoring all of it. People who are going to pay the ultimate price. It's us.

Chris:
We are in a canyon that is above what locals call coyote hole here. And just lots of really beautiful boulders in hillside and desert varnish, turning the tan boulders into sort of a rosy pink.

Alicia:
Look at that.

Chris:
That is what I brought you here to see.

Alicia:
Holy moly.

Chris:
It's not a barrel cactus.

Alicia:
What is it?

Chris:
Barrel cacti have there's the barrel cactus right over there. Red to yellow to orange spines. This one has gray spines, the characteristic shape.

Alicia:
Did someone plant a saguaro out here?

Chris:
That is what it is. Sound of the spines. But when I saw this the other day, I thought, okay, that's a good 8ft tall.

Alicia:
Yeah.

Alicia:
Jeez.

Chris:
And I'll have to double check the math, but this is a good spot. It's about six or 8ft up a rocky wall next to a wash. So get some water, but get good drainage. But it's got to be colder here than they like. And I wonder about how long it would have taken to get to this size.

Alicia:
I would say, and I'm basing this on my friends that live up the way, they've had their property for about 30 years, and they said they planted small saguaros from Cactus Mart 30 years ago. And I'd say they're about half this size.

Chris:
Okay, so maybe my age somewhere in The low sixty s.

Alicia:
I mean, this is a chonker.

Chris:
Yep.

Alicia:
Very healthy.

Chris:
Wondering whether this was planted as just a plant by some random person back in the 50s or 60s, or whether it was a seed deposited by a bird. And if so, where did that seed come from? Was it one of the ornamental saguaros down by the highway? And then that raises the question of were they old enough back then down there to actually bloom and set seed? Because it's only 120 miles to where the closest native saguaros grow, just on this side of the Colorado River, it's not impossible that this could be one that a bird planted after eating sugar fruit over in Arizona or right up against the line. There are a few that grow in California right up against the river.

Alicia:
As I'm looking at it, there's almost like really clear growth delineations. It looks like right around here, it fluffs up on the top. And then this looks like a slimmer section. Do you see that? Yeah, that silhouette. I've got it backlit. So it looks really obvious on this side, but it seems like maybe those are almost like outside tree ring type indications of how it's been growing. I don't know.

Chris:
So by the time listeners hear this, I will have taken the time to check on iNaturalist to see if somebody else has found this and if there is discussion about its origins. But it is just really remarkable.

Alicia:
What's the time? I know you've got to keep an eye on it.

Chris:
It is just before nine.

Alicia:
Okay. Should we start walking back?

Chris:
Yeah.

Alicia:
All right, that's all for this time. Please do check out our website at 90 Miles from Needles.com, where you'll find show notes, photos, videos, and all sorts of other little goodies. I'm Alicia Pike.

Chris:
And I'm Chris Clarke.

Alicia:
This has been 90 miles from Needles. Signing off.

Bouse Parker:
This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia Pike and Chris Clarke. editing by Chris podcast artwork by the lovely and talented Martine Mancha. Theme music Is by Brightside Studio other Music by Slipstream Follow us on Twitter or on Instagram at 90 mi from Needles and on Facebook@facebook.com. ninetymiles from Needles. Listen to us at 90 Miles from Needles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to our newest Patreon supporter, Fred Bill. Support this podcast by visiting us at Nine Zeromilesfohn Needles.com Patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as $5. Or visit nine 0 mile from Needles.com Kofi to make a onetime contribution. Our supporters enjoy privileges, including early access to this episode. Crucial support for this podcast came from Tad Kauffin and Laura Rosell, all characters on this podcast. With thee in the desert, with thee in the thirst with thee in the tamarind wood leopard breeze at last. This is Bous Parker reminding you that solar belongs on rooftops. See you next time.

Chris:
Sit Heart sit. Good dog.