S1E3: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of Cima Dome

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Bouse Parker: The sun is a giant blow torch 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: I'm Chris Clarke.

Alicia: and I'm Alicia Pike and this is 90 Miles from Needles

Chris: for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles. I just thought, I'd tell you about my favorite place in the desert. It's the broad, broad summit of a broad, broad hill. The hill looks like a perfect Euclidean sphere being born out of the earth. Like a subsidiary, small planet, just crowning, eager to be born, expelled out into the void. But as you approach the hill that Euclidian geometric perfection fades, and the roughness of the surface comes into view. That surface is riven with washes and small canyons. Erosion has brought forth a thin

mineral soil between the low and sensuously curved outcrops of granite which  supports an amazing diversity of plants. There's blackbrush, a little nondescript shrub, it’s a major nurse plant for cacti and succulents, which seek the shelter of

its scratchy branches, until they're able to withstand the rigors of the desert. The hill is home to five different species of cholla cactus. there are four different kinds of prickly pear cactus, there's claret cup cactus, there is hedgehog cactus, barrel cacti of two different kinds. there's fox tail cactus of I think, three different species. There's Mojave yucca, and there's banana yucca with its beautiful waxy blue leaves. There are just a few places in the desert where both those yuccas grow together, and my hill is one of those places. There's just an amazing profusion of spring, wildflowers, buckwheats and poppies and milkweeds and native bunchgrasses, and most people that are lucky enough to visit this place, probably don't notice any of those things, because above all those things, along with some truly impressive Junipers and a scattering of single needle piñons is a sprawling, dense and beautiful forest of Joshua trees.

It's the largest such forest in the world. Those Joshua trees are why I first visited back in 1995, peering avidly out the windshield of my friends Jeep, and they were why I came back a second time, two years later. I had decided I was going to quit my job and write a book on Joshua trees. And this hill is where I headed.

As I tell you this, that second visit was 24 years ago and I've been back, I don't know how many times during the nearly quarter century since. After a couple of visits, I started noticing the plants that weren't Joshua trees and the rocks, and the animals. To be honest, some of the animals at first were hard not to notice. One morning early on in my history with the hill, I crawled out of my tent to see a Longhorn steer standing in my campsite, maybe 15 feet away from where I was fumbling with tent zipper on my hands and knees. The Longhorn averted, his eyes, and bowed in what looked for all the world like an apology, and he tiptoed away. Within a couple of years of my acquaintance with the hill, the cattle were all removed. It was a curious absence. And then as if to fill the void, and in fact it as precisely filling a void. Other animals started to show up. I noticed the Cottontails first. That's not surprising. A pair of cottontails can make a dozen or more new cottontails in a year. And so they showed up avidly eating the annual herbs and the grasses that would earlier have been eaten by the cattle. Antelope Squirrels came back at about the same time. They're those little white striped ground squirrels that newcomers to the desert call chipmunks. then came the Round Tailed Ground Squirrels and the Rock Squirrels, which have some of the most amazingly beautiful fur I've ever seen on a mammal. Not long after the rabbits and rodents showed up, I began to hear Coyote song at night. I'd never heard it there before. The hill was recovering from a century of grazing. 

The last night of a long road trip through the Arizona and Nevada desert. I got to my usual campsite just about as the sun was setting, and the whole countryside was suffused with this bright orange light. I walked a little way from my campsite toward the mountains that formed the Eastern skyline of this hill, and in that golden light, I came upon a wide clearing with a dozen cottontail rabbits eating plants that had grown after the spring rains. They all scattered, except for one, for some reason. I still don't understand that one cottontail decided to take a chance and save her energy, gambling that I wasn't going to eat her, turned out to be a good bet. I sat, she sat, we faced the setting sun and watched it go down slowly over the horizon together. It was a moment of calm, interspecies companionship that I still treasure to this day. One September night, a few months after my beloved dog Zeke had died, which was a far greater blow than I had expected. I got to my campsite after dark. I started my usual fire. I took some photos of the night sky, and then I melted down. I raged at the futility of life at the law of entropy. At the cruel joke that is therelative lifespans of dogs and humans. The hill withstood my rage. I slept.

And when I awoke, the world had changed. There had been a summer rain and the consequent late flowering of fall annuals, the local shrubs put out some flowers and the cacti and the milkweed and the Mariposa lilies burst into bloom. Cinchweed was blooming tiny yellow ground hugging daisies that smell like cumin. There were poppies that were essentially like coastal California Poppies, except 1/10 the size.

It was just a profusion of color that greeted me on the morning after my night of catharsis. And that color wasn't limited to the ground. Before I rubbed my eyes to clear the sleep out of them. It seemed as though the flowers were floating past on the breeze, my eyes focused, and I realized that those floating flowers were actually thousands, probably tens of thousands of migrating butterflies. Yellow Swallowtails and Painted Ladies and Dark Phase Swallowtails and Monarchs and Queens and Indra's and White Lined Hawk Moths, and just an absolutely astonishing spectacle of light and flight and color and gentleness and softness and resilience, and this is what this place means to me. I could tell you so many stories, from so many visits. I've been here with so many friends. I've been sleeping in that one campsite on this hill, making regular visits for almost 25 years. If anywhere in the world is home to me, it's that hill. Like I said, it's my favorite place in the desert, possibly the world, and I wish I could still go there. I wish I could still go there. But my favorite place in the desert exists only in the past.

In August, 2020, my phone buzzed, a friend had texted me. What do you know about the fire on Cima Dome? I didn't get anything done for the rest of the weekend. Monsoons had been sweeping across the desert, those summer storms that bring with them intense lightning. On Saturday, August 15th, 2020 in the afternoon, around three o'clock, a barrage of lightning strikes hit just north of the summit of Cima Dome in Mojave National Preserve. The resulting fire spread incredibly rapidly. At first, the burned area totaled a few hundred acres then 1,000, then 2,500, 10,000, 12,000 acres. It was hard to keep up, the numbers seem to jump every time I refreshed my browser, every time I looked at Twitter. I was stuck just two hours away, drowned in a feeling of helplessness like I have never known. The shrubs burned, and the Chollas, and the Barrel Cacti, and the Prickly Pears, the Mojave and Banana Yuccas, the Junipers the Pinion Pines, the grasses, and the milkweed, the wild flowers of all different kinds, the young of butterflies and bees, the incautious squirrels, and rabbits, lizards, and snakes that couldn't find deep holes fast enough, the ferns and the fungi and the lichens and the Joshua trees. Oh God, the Joshua trees, trees that I had known for 25 years. Just the whole ecosystem that my favorite place in the desert consumed by flames. Vomited into the air as smoke more than 43,000 acres of Cima Dome had been destroyed. Killing 1.3 million Joshua trees, and an unimaginable number of other plants, some of them in comprehensively ancient, many of them nurse plants essential to the survival of future generations of Joshua trees. A quarter of the world's largest Joshua tree forest had been destroyed. As I speak, that was more than a year ago. The thought of it still cuts the heart out of me. And the place that I counted on as the center of my life, destroyed, my favorite place in the desert exists only in the past.

But I wish I could show you. I wish I could show you.

Alicia: Ouch, alright Chris, why don't you show me what it looks like now?

Bouse Parker: Part Two: Seeing The Burn.

Chris: So we're going to go up here and then at the intersection, hang a left.

Alicia: Ok, so where that truck is, is that where I’m going left?

Chris: That is correct.

Alicia: Ok

Chris: Ok, heading up Cima Road. We'll be getting into the burn area in a couple of minutes.

Alicia: Is that where it's all burned out up there ahead?

Chris: Yep. We are about 50 yards from getting into the burn area here.

Alicia: No. Oh, geez. That's startling. Holy moly.

Chris: Just many square miles of dead Joshua trees, dead shrubs underneath the Joshua trees.

Alicia: Holy devastation. This is something else. Just bare earth.

Chris: There are a lot of Mojave Yuccas, and uh, Banana Yuccas burned here too. Hopefully we'll see some of those sprouting.

Alicia: Well, I just saw one that had burn damage and then it had a tight green stem coming out of the middle of it.

Chris: Yeah.

Alicia: So that, that one looks like it might just make it, I mean, the little bit of regrowth that I saw was very exciting, but it, that excitement is really tapering looking at how many, uh, dead trees really aren't doing anything.

Chris:Yeah.

Alicia: No sign of life.

Chris: So the spots in here where it's hard to tell anything happened, some nice live Joshua trees, but then you come around a little bit of a corner and see more of the devastation. Go around that rock, that way, I've learned that the hard way.

Alicia: *squee*

Chris: That white van is in my campsite.

Alicia: You've got good taste, but you’re in my way.

Chris: That tree was standing up the last time I came by.

Alicia: Mm, so just keep going down the little road here.

Chris: Yeah.

Alicia:There's some healthy ones still going in here.

Chris: Yep. It all looked like this before the fire. We're on the top of a slight rise and all we can see for what seems like miles in any direction is a once living thick Joshua tree forest.

Alicia: What would be lush and green and overflowing with life is just black and brown. Devoid.

Chris: I am seeing some sprouts of Yucca, right, just to your left here.

Alicia: Oh, you're right. Oh, not devoid. That's so heartwarming to see.

Chris: And of course there is a hell of a lot of very very dead cholla

Alicia: *squeak*

Chris: Joshua tree that is not so far resprouting, completely dead looking. You

can count on me to bring the cheerful.

Alicia: Yeah, I wouldn't expect anything less. The Yucca seems to be the real trooper coming back.

Chris: Mm hm

Alicia: A lot of activity here. Look at this old guy.

Chris: Yeah. I caught a picture of that in February.

Alicia: This one?

Chris: It was just like really, really striking. Like Silver Dollar Prickly Pear.

Alicia: I have these in my yard. I'm trying to get them to propagate.

Chris: Well, clearly you don't want to set them on fire.

Alicia: Clearly they're not a big fan. *Sigh* I feel like my heart's getting a little bit of relief driving back into where it's all alive. It’s just so painful, eerie feeling again, of being like in a really dense live zone, but just outside of it, feels like death is looming and staring you right in the face. And it's, it's everywhere you look in between all the green, death is always there, staring at you. Interesting how these little patches of Blackbrush are intact.

Chris: Seeing these really nice resprouting clumps of Yucca.

Alicia: Their root base must be intense and dense to survive that kind of heat and to already be back at it. How long has it been?

Chris: Just 13 months.

Alicia: Brilliant, shining stars. Hope. I can't believe how much joy these are bringing me. It feels like the counterbalance has been put on the scale.

Chris: I think the metaphor that came to mind for me in February when I was seeing stuff that I was delighted to see had persisted was, it's like poking through the ashes of your grandmother's house and finding a door to the basement and the cat survived and leaps in your arms. 

Alicia: Oh, the mythical Phoenix is coming to mind. To rise out of the ashes. To come back to life after life ending devastation, but here it is…

Chris: Let's stop the playback there. Um, in listening to this again, it really seems like we're desperate on this trip to find every little bit of good news that we possibly can.

Alicia: Yeah.

Chris: You know, it's like here’s 1.3 million Joshua trees incinerated, and maybe 1% of them will grow back a little bit. But, oh, there's, there's a Claret Cup Cactus that is only three quarters singed, and the Beaver Tail is growing new pads from the charcoal. And it just really seems like we're so desperate for good news in this. It's just striking to me.

Alicia: I feel like that's the brains, you know I once read that the brain is the storefront of the biggest pharmacy in the world. And in a case like Cima Dome, where it's just so sad and it's just so overwhelming. We're summoning that medicine to make ourselves feel better because there, there is no, there's nothing that's going to make it better. It is what it is. It's, it's burned to the ground. It's gone and it's changed irrevocably for our lifetimes. Hundreds of years. And so here we are, literally, we're just trying to make ourselves feel better. It is done, and we just need something to take the hurt away.

Chris: It really strikes me that there are gonna be places that are lost as we go through the next few decades. I mean, people that really love the beach in Southern Florida. That’s…

Alicia: Might not be there anymore.

Chris: That might not be there anymore. Pretty much any low lying country is going to lose a lot of its real estate. There are certainly plenty of examples of people that have been displaced from their Homeland, and that becomes a part of their culture, that sort of collective grief. But I don't know that there is a really good precedent for grief over a place that is no longer there to go home. And that's going to be something that we have to think about and we have to come up for tools to address it and to, to help ourselves go through it. But we're going to have to think about these kinds of things on a big scale, and it's going to be tough. There's just some big changes that are going to be coming in the next couple hundred years. And you know, we're only seeing the beginning of it.

Alicia: I feel like it's kind of peddled or sold to us as the price of survival. These are the consequences. These are the prices that we must pay to enjoy the comfortable life that we've come to know. We need to rethink the way we're doing things on a very large scale.

Chris: I mean, for me, the thing that helped most with the Cima Dome was to get involved with the National Park Services, replanting effort, which is. A way of increasing our chances that it will come back to something like the way it was.

Bouse Parker: Part Three: Planting Joshua trees.

Drew: My name's Drew Kaiser. I'm the botanist in the Mojave National Preserve. Been there for about, almost seven years now, before that I worked for Death Valley a little bit. So, been around the desert, probably about the last 11 to 12 years.

Chris: So what happened in August of 2020?

Drew: So, the Dome Fire. It was about 44,000 acres and one of the largest and densest, Joshua tree forests in the world. Iw was in the middle of August in the middle of a heat wave, storm front came through and a lot of dry lightning strikes. 44,000 acres burned within less than a week. When we're out there doing the burn severity assessment, trying to see what the true damage was, we'd estimated that there was 1.1 million Joshua trees that fully burned, and then like an additional 200,000 that were partially burned. The Cima Dome has been modeled to be a climate refugia for the eastern species of Josha Tree.

When we are going through and doing the burn severity assessment, we just noticed that there are these like really vast areas where basically nothing survived, no above ground vegetation was left there, and coupled with the drought that we were going through at the same time I knew that the recovery of the Joshua trees was going to be pretty low, that there were going to be big areas with no Joshua trees and a Joshua tree has a pretty poor seed dispersal rate.

The seeds don't really travel too far from the mother plant. And so, these really badly affected areas, were going to take a long time for Joshua trees to come back in from the edges. So that's why we decided to do this restoration project where we're, um, you know, trying to fill in some of those gaps. Being there for the past seven years, Cima Dome was like a place where I could go and just be back in primitive forest, and the fact that it was so dense was just even that much more special. When I heard about, there was a fire on Cima Dome, like my heart just sunk, and I was expecting the worst for sure. And pretty much was the worst. Driving around, doing, doing the burn severity assessment, I was just wringing my hands. Like, you know what do I do? I'm just one person here at Mojave. I may get a few people to come in and help, vegetation technicians and stuff, but that's just one person, you know, what can I do for all these trees that we lost?

Chris: Mm Hm 

Drew: Yeah, it was pretty bad.

Chris: So tell us about the Re-Veg effort. How did that arise? Because I remember in the immediate wake of the fire, people were saying, there's no way that we're going to be able to restore this. And I think that was probably more out of just shock at how big the fire was, but how did this come up? 

Drew: We are a National Park unit and the National Park Service is trying to not intervene with, but in this case a seemingly naturally occurring disturbance event, It was lightning caused. So it wasn't caused by a car catching on fire. It wasn't caused by a campfire getting out of control. Initially, we were thinking, well, you know, maybe this is a natural event park service policy doesn't tell us to restore, go actively, go in and manipulate the, the landscape. There are policies that allow us to mitigate climate change and protect and restore a sensitive species. It took a little convincing, but I think I got the rest of the management team on board with doing just this it's very specific to the Joshua Trees. And it is because they are a sensitive species, their sense of the climate change. This was modeled to be a climate refugia for the species. You know, we've got to take care of those areas and policies allow us to do that.

Chris: So you guys just happened to have access to a whole lot of Joshua tree seedlings that were ready to be planted out, sounds like.

Drew: Yeah, it was kind of serendipitous. We actually had about 1500 Joshua Trees that were about two years old when the Dome Fire happened, they were being grown for us over at Lake Mead National Recreation Area. They have a nice nursery over there, and we were going to use these Joshua trees for different purposes. We were going to be planting them in human caused disturbance areas. So like car fires on I, 15, or old cattle watering sites, areas that had been blown out by camping, and so, we were going to be, yeah, planting these Joshua trees throughout the Preserve. And when the Dome Fire happened, I was like, well, this is probably a higher priority to get these in the ground where they're needed most. Kept the announcement of this restoration project kind of small, because we were worried about getting overwhelmed or worried about too many people all coming at once, and then what do we do with all of these people. Right after the fire, a bunch of people emailed us, Hey, what can I do to help? I would love to be a part of any kind of restoration that you want to do. This is back in like 2020. So we have this list of 200 people. And so we initially just emailed that list of people. But then word got out, spread word of mouth and the kind of snowballed into a little bit bigger than what we were intending. We had probably about 200 group leaders signed up for the Dome Fire restoration, and so that's not including all of the people that were coming with those group leaders. And so, that was great. And we were worried about getting overwhelmed, but when we actually got people there and sent them out and they started coming back and realizing that was going pretty smoothly. I think we can definitely expand out and take on more people the next time. Yeah. That's what we're hoping to do, is get as many people as we can out there and get it done, you know.

Chris: Maybe you could go into a little bit of why you had to call it to a halt?

Drew: The weather did not cooperate, we got this crazy, cold front that came through. We were seeing cold like freezing temperatures in Las Vegas and up on the Cima Dome we’re getting down into the twenties and that's not great for a newly planted plants, especially if you're watering them, just basically are creating an ice cube right around the root system in the ground, and so that's why we stopped. I was hoping for some warmer weather, like we had the first weekend, but it just didn’t work out, and so I got a little worried about putting all my eggs in one basket. 

Chris: Mm hm…

Drew: And so we'll be planting the rest of them in March. It's a mixed blessing for sure. The, the rain, snow, because it was newly planted plants, it did give it a good bit of moisture, which is exactly what they need.

Chris: Well, I'm certainly planning to be up there in March, and I wouldn't be surprised if Alicia is feeling the same way. Yeah. Uh, well now, how do you, how do people get ahold of you if they're listening to this and they want to take part as well?

Drew: My email is Andrew_Kaiser@nps.gov. So you might get a response from some of my technicians. You’ll definitely see me out there in March. So definitely come up and yeah. Ready to do some good work. If you know, you aren’t able to come out and help plant that you might be able to help in up ways. Stay tuned for that. I'll say also that the restoration is going to happen every fall. You know, we're going to be out there planting an additional 1000 plants per year, every fall for the next three years. 

Alicia: So there will be lots of opportunities to help in the next few years?

Drew: Yes, exactly. Taking on a life of its own. Right now I think a lot of people were making a lot of friends at the last restoration event. We had people be like, oh yeah, we're going to come out, we're gonna water Joshua trees like us right here, our group right here. And we're going to meet up at a certain time. So yeah, it's a good time for all.

Chris: Here's where I have to come clean with all of you. I had run the idea of recording for this podcast past the people that were running the revegetation effort. And they said it was fine. And I loaded recorder and microphone and headset and all the usual accessories into my backpack. My friend, Brendan and I got in the car, drove up to Cima Dome, and then I didn't record any planting. I intended to. I had thought we'd get some good sound effects of people walking around in the soil and shovels going into the earth and people talking about how to plant things and be colorful. And I could do a little voiceover explaining what was going on. And then I got up there with my friend and it was, it was raining. It was cold. People were enthusiastic, but I couldn't count on them being patient enough to stand in the rain while I asked them questions. Our hands were full of seedlings and rebar and chicken wire, tools, water, and perhaps most importantly, I wasn't sure what the rain was going to do to the recording equipment. I got a little bit of audio of some of the recalcitrant camels at base camp who were objecting to the idea of being out in the rain and generally being very engaging and cuddly.

[SFX: Lady in the background of camel recording: Yeah, he’s chatty…

Chris: But I didn't record any of the planting. I'll be back in March, the replanting effort's going to resume and we will see if it's possible to record some audio for you then, for use in a later episode. But we did get some trees planted.

Cima Dome has played such an important role in my life. And I don't think that's over. I think it's gone through a radical shift. I think we've had a change of direction of our relationship, Cima Dome, and I, I owe the place so much. For a quarter century, I looked at Cima Dome and thought about what it can do for me. It's time to turn that around. I owe this place my life, the least I can do is return the favor.

And now I've got a little bit of work to do. 

[SFX: raven caw, footprints approaching on gravel]

There it is! Okay, little tree. I'm really glad to see you're doing all right. A little water for you.

[SFX: The sound of water being poured]

Chris: A little bit for me

[SFX: The sound of water being chugged]

Chris: And A little more for you.

[SFX: The sound of water being poured]

 Chris: It looks like it actually might've put on a little bit of new growth sitting here in the dappled shade of a crispy fried pencil Cholla, something I didn't notice when we were here in December. Possibly because it was socked in overcast raining and possibly because it was f*$@$!g cold, is that there's a really nice view from this spot. You can see the New York Mountains, Kessler Peak. I don't know if some of the physicists are right in the apparent forward motion of time is an artifact of our limited perception that I'm still here. 38 years old, camping in an unburned forest. If other physicists are right, then there is some universe somewhere that branched off from ours a couple of years ago where this fire hasn't happened yet. Neither of those ideas is particularly comforting. This is still my favorite place in the desert. There were a couple of years where I wasn't sure about that. But my appreciation for it has gotten a lot more complicated, a lot more nuanced, a lot more tied up in how people react when a beautiful thing they love suffers a catastrophic loss. Is that the pharmacy of my brain, trying to make chemicals to make me feel better? Maybe. All that is way beyond my control and way out of my pay grade. This is still a beautiful place. It's just harder to see the beauty. Okay, little tree. I'll see you in a couple of months.

Bouse Parker: This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia Pike and Chris Clarke. Editing by Chris. Thanks to Drew Kaiser for the interview. To find out more about the Cima Dome replanting effort, see our show notes. Podcast artwork by the very talented Martin Mancha. Intro and outro music is by Brightside Studio. Other music by Slipstream. Follow us on twitter @90mifromneedles and on facebook at facebook.com/ninetymilesfromneedles. Find us at ninetymilesfromneedles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Call us at (760) 392-1996. And tell us what you think of the podcast or leave a review on your favorite podcast app.

Thank you to our newest Patreon supporters: Kathy Davies, Scott Fajack. Parker James Lloyd and Lisa Morgan. Join them and support this podcast by visiting us at ninetymilesfromneedles.com/Patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as five bucks. Crucial support for this podcast came from Tad Coffin and Lara Rozzell.

All characters on this podcast went into the Maverick bar in Farmington, New Mexico and drank double shots of bourbon backed with beer. I'm Bouse Parker. Don't be a stranger.