S1E7: This Desert Fish was Declared Extinct. Now It Thrives.

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by our supporters at Patreon, who give us the resources we need to produce each episode. You can join their ranks@90miles from needles.com Patreon.

0:00:24 - (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.

0:00:42 - (Chris Clarke): I'm Alicia Pike.

0:00:43 - (Alicia Pike): I'm Chris Clarke.

0:00:45 - (Chris Clarke): Welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. We're going to talk to Susan Sorrells of Shoshone, California, who found in her community a species of desert fish that had been declared extinct several decades earlier. She'll tell us how she not only restored habitat for the fish and helped it recover in numbers, but also remade her community in the process and set it on a sustainable path for economic development.

0:01:07 - (Chris Clarke): But first, for some time now, people traveling between Southern California cities and the Las Vegas area have taken a shortcut through Mojave National Preserve, which, at least on the map, is the more direct route between the two places. Problem is that road through Mojave National Preserve is a winding two lane, which means in order to make it an actual shortcut, people exceed the speed limit of 55 miles an hour in the preserve.

0:01:33 - (Chris Clarke): As a result, it's a fairly unsafe road to travel. People driving at times twice the speed limit have been responsible for roadkills of the federally threatened desert tortoise, state protected desert bighorn sheep, any number of other wildlife species, and on all too frequent occasions, themselves. Mojave National Preserve is lately stepping up enforcement of traffic laws, especially speeding on the main route used by travelers from Vegas to California. And in the following commentary, Alicia pike addresses the people who take this shortcut, which is scenic, full of wildlife, and occasionally deadly for all concerned.

0:02:11 - (Alicia Pike): Tortoises deserve our respect and admiration. They they are an ancient species that just win in the race by crawling along nice and slow. Tortoises are one of those species that allows you to, for a moment, just take yourself back in time and realize what the world might have looked like. There are certain creatures that just feel so prehistoric to me, and tortoises are definitely one of them. They're a relic of the dinosaurs, and the real threat, aside from climate change, is people driving like they are in a hot rush to get somewh and they kill them in an instant. And that's always really bothered me since I moved to the desert.

0:02:52 - (Alicia Pike): My own driving habits over the last 10 years have really slowed down with the pace of desert Life. When I moved here from San Diego, I felt like I was always in a rush, always in a rush. And the logic behind that is, well, if I get there sooner, then I can get more done. And if I get there sooner and get more done sooner, then I can be home sooner and I can get more done. And I'm not really sure what value that thought process contains for the world.

0:03:21 - (Alicia Pike): There's value in taking your time and slowing down, checking underneath your car for the tortoises before you take off out of that roadside pullout, driving a speed limit through the Mojave National Preserve. Instead of trying to save yourself a whole extra 15 minutes so you can get to Vegas sooner, start losing that money sooner. I've always felt like if you're risking the life of yourself and someone else in order to start your vacation a little bit sooner, you're doing it wrong. Slow the fuck down.

0:03:50 - (Alicia Pike): Not just for my sake, but for yours. There's so much value in slowing down, and there isn't a better banner animal than the tortoise. They really exemplify how slow and steady really does win the race. We call ourselves the human race, and it feels like we're in a race. But a race to what? I don't really see anywhere in nature where the hot rush pays off. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And I feel like that's something we can really apply to ourselves in our daily lives.

0:04:20 - (Alicia Pike): The desert can really teach us to just slow down. It's not a race. It's not the destination, it's the journey. And what a beautiful journey it can be if you stop to smell the wildflowers on the side of the road.

0:04:49 - (Chris Clarke): The Mojave Desert is one of the driest places on the face of the earth. But that wasn't always true. Up until about 8,000 years ago, there was a lot more water in the Mojave. Rain fell on frequent occasions, snow fell in the upper elevations, and the landscape looked a lot different. There were forests of conifers on the valley floors that now contain just creosote and other low shrubs. The mountaintops had forests of Douglas fir and other conifers that you might nowadays associate more with places like the Colorado Rockies or the Sierra Nevada.

0:05:26 - (Chris Clarke): But the most obvious difference to most eyes would be what was in the very bottoms of the valleys, where now there are salt flats and mud flats and expanses where there is little, if any, vegetation. There were once standing lakes of fresh or brackish water with the ancestors of minnows. And cutthroat trout and other fish. It was a rich environment. These lakes didn't exist on their own. They were connected through a series of rivers and straits, through low spots in the mountains that surrounded them.

0:05:57 - (Chris Clarke): Water that fell in the Sierra Nevada or the San Bernardinos or the Spring Range would flow from one lake into the next lower one until they reached their final destination in either the ancestral Colorado river, flowing out to sea, or in the mother of all landlocked lakes, Lake Manly, in what is now Death Valley. In these connected lakes and streams, there lived some rather small fish, generally about an inch long, which we now call pupfish, genus Cyprinodon, Engaging little fish that fed primarily on algae, Cyanobacteria detritus, Occasionally on small animals such as insect larvae.

0:06:39 - (Chris Clarke): Every once in a while, on their own young, they were spread throughout the Mojave Desert, or at least the landscape that later became the Mojave Desert. And what happened 8,000 years ago? The desert started to dry up. The rains came less often, and there was less rain. When it did come, the temperature warmed, the snowpacks on the mountains melted. Species of trees and shrubs found the valley floors getting too hot for their liking, and they died out.

0:07:08 - (Chris Clarke): New plants like creosote colonized the valley floors. And most importantly for our purposes right now, that vast interconnected system of lakes and rivers went away, leaving only a few places where the groundwater fed springs and seeps and little creeks, tiny bits of wetland. And in some of these little wetlands, the ancestors of today's pupfish managed to survive. The great drying pupfish only live for a year, maybe a little bit more.

0:07:39 - (Chris Clarke): And so from that great drying 8,000 years ago, there have been 8,000 plus generations of pupfish in these little isolated places. And unsurprisingly, that original pupfish stock has diversified, diversified into quite a number of different species in the Mojave, Some of which are limited to only one tiny little piece of water, the most famous being the Devil's Hole pupfish. Others of which have lost the battle to survive in an environment increasingly changed by industrial society.

0:08:11 - (Chris Clarke): And some, like the Shoshone pupfish, managed to hide from people until somebody who was really sympathetic to their plight came along.

0:08:19 - (Susan Sorrells): I'm Susan Sorrells and I live in Shoshone, California. Shoshone's on the southeast border of Death Valley, perhaps five miles from the boundary of Death Valley. In another valley called the Amagosa Valley, just adjacent to Death Valley, a river runs through it, and it's called the Amagosa river. And it's a very interesting river. And then much of its course is underground. So it's also called the Hide and Seek River.

0:08:53 - (Susan Sorrells): But where it springs up as it does in Shoshone, there are communities that form around it.

0:09:01 - (Alicia Pike): How does it feel to own a town that's been in your family for multiple generations? That must be really fascinating.

0:09:09 - (Susan Sorrells): Yes, of course it is. There are quite a few small little towns in the desert that only have an owner. Like Nipton and Tecopa and Death Valley Junction. And when I went away to college, it was a huge shock to everyone. So I understand how it perplexes people. But it was a phenomenon in the desert as it became developed that a family would settle at a spring and develop it. In the case of Shoshone because of the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad.

0:09:47 - (Susan Sorrells): And my great grandfather struck a deal in the late 1800s with US Borax, or at the time Pacific Coast Borax. Headed by Borax Smith to develop Shoshone as a stop on his Tonopah Tidewater Railroad. Whereas Tecopa was pretty much the developed by one owner because of the mining in the area. I was a child of the 60s that questioned authority. And really wasn't really interested in being. Having a lot of authority. I was more interested in art, social change and writing, photography.

0:10:33 - (Susan Sorrells): I grew up in Shoshone. I could ride my horse before I could walk. And every morning I took my horse out into the wetlands. And I lived very close to nature. The wetlands and Shoshana Spring was really my playground at a very early age. I went away to school and back east. And then I traveled a lot. I did community activism in the south and went into the Peace Corps in Liberia. And I was living in Geneva, Switzerland.

0:11:06 - (Susan Sorrells): And tragically, my father was killed in a plane crash. Which was a terrible thing because especially for our family because we were all so close. So I came home to help my mother. And then my mother passed. My brother wanted to sell the property. I didn't. So I was completely prepared to be a business owner person. I've had a suspicion of business people, which is not a great way to start running a business with 30 employees.

0:11:37 - (Susan Sorrells): But my passion and my love was the desert and the home I loved.

0:11:42 - (Chris Clarke): I wonder if you could give us a little capsule history of how you became aware of the pupfish after it had been declared extinct. And what motivated you to reshape the physical aspect of the community to make it more conducive to pupfish.

0:12:00 - (Susan Sorrells): Shoshone, the spring area had really been destroyed. By beetles and salt cedars. It broke my heart when I came home and saw that some of the seeps and springs had disappeared. And if any of you that know about apple trees, the needles are very salty, and they create a kill zone. Allograph them, and they grow like 10 to 20ft a year. And then they become very big, and they create this kill zone. And then at the same time, they can aspirate 2 and 3,000 gallons of water a day when they get that big.

0:12:40 - (Susan Sorrells): So we went in and started eradicating salt cedar and Athols and then clearing waterways. I saw what I thought was a pupfish, but they'd been declared extinct in the 50s. So then we called up Bill Peaster, who's the father of pupfish, who was also a very good friend of my grandfather's. And I said, phil, I think we found the pupfish. And he said, well, send me photos. So that process took about three weeks.

0:13:13 - (Susan Sorrells): And so he. When he got the photo, he came right over and he said, yep, that's a pupfish. So that started the process.

0:13:23 - (Chris Clarke): Let's break away for just a minute here and talk about Phil Pister, who worked as a fisheries biologist for the agency then known as the California Department of Fish and Game. It is now the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Piester is still around, still active in the Desert Fishes Council, which he founded back half A century ago, 1969, when Piester was 40, he was working with some colleagues on the last remaining population of a related pupfish, Cyprinodon radiosus, the Owens pupfish, which is endemic to the Owens river and its associated wetlands.

0:14:02 - (Chris Clarke): Found only there and nowhere else, he and his colleagues had placed the pupfish in a holding pond where they would be safe from predation by introduced bass. And then this one particular day in August 1969 was especially hot, and there was a lot of vegetation ringing the pond. It had been a wet winter, and the vegetation had grown abundantly, with lots of roots sucking lots of water out of the ground.

0:14:28 - (Chris Clarke): And they realized that that pond that they'd put the Owen's pupfish in was likely to dry out. So they raced to the pond. And indeed, the pond was very low. They caught all the fish, moved them to a second pond nearby that had deeper water in it. And then Piester suggested that his friends go into town, grab something to eat, said he'd meet them there later, was getting ready to go. But it turned out that second pond had extremely low levels of dissolved oxygen, which fish need to survive.

0:14:58 - (Chris Clarke): And we'll Let Piester take the storytelling from here. From an interview with the oral history project of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

0:15:07 - (Phil Pister): Well, just by some lucky circumstance, I thought, you know, we put a lot of effort into this. Better check and make sure the fish are okay. So I went over and checked the cages where he had these fish in, and they were starting to die in this last group with the entire remaining species. So I got my buckets from the truck, came back and got the live fish, and they were stressed. You can tell when a fish is not in good shape, it turns over on his back.

0:15:42 - (Phil Pister): And so the truck was probably about a quarter mile anyway, and the bucket's in the dark and no lights or anything. This was a traumatic thing, really, because I was keenly aware of the fact that these fish were nearly gone. I knew this because the only place that they existed anywhere, and I had the only fish in these buckets. And if something had gone wrong, if I tripped and these fish, the species would be extinct now, just that ragged edge of extinction.

0:16:12 - (Chris Clarke): The story of Peaster as a relatively young man carrying buckets full of every last individual of an entire species across uneven terrain in the dark, terrified that if he slipped or stepped in a gopher hole or had some other mishap, that there would be an extinction on his conscience. And nonetheless, making it to the truck. Saving the fish which still survive to this day, is a story of the kind of quiet heroism that I think a lot of us could emulate. It's one of my favorite stories that comes out of the California conservation movement, and I'm glad to share it here again with thanks to the Bancroft Library for the use of their material.

0:16:50 - (Susan Sorrells): So after that discovery, we had so many scientists that came to Shoshone, and fortunately for me, and I got an education on restoration and I learned how to create puppish habitat with their direction. I'd always worked in social change and community change, but it's the same principle. You create a healthy habitat for a species and they will not just survive, they will prosper. And so that's part of my passion, is not just to save species and to create healthy habitat, but then incorporate it into community.

0:17:38 - (Susan Sorrells): And now we have a population of about 8,000 pupfish from being declared extinct. I don't have the power to resurrect pupfish, so surely they were there all the time. They just didn't see them. But, but to prolific and they never became endangered. But in Death Valley at Devil's Hole, and I, many, many of my friends live in Death Valley. It's a big part of my social circle and they're wonderful people, but I know them well enough that I can razz them.

0:18:14 - (Susan Sorrells): And they've spent 4 and 5 million at the Devil's Hole Refugium, and they can't keep 150 pupfish propagating. So here, with $30,000, a lot of tender love and care, blood and tears, we have a tremendously healthy Shoshone pupfish habitat. And the only place you're going to find Shoshone pupfish is in Shoshone. So I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled with that. And I think it's the brilliance of the team. And they need a habitat, but it's a very simple concept.

0:18:52 - (Susan Sorrells): Create a healthy habitat. We created the first pond. We put the 40 pupfish in there, and then we camouflaged it with the natural brush so no one knew where it was. You could never see it if you walked up there. And we nourished these 40 pupfish for, I think it was eight years. And they grew to 800 pupfish. And we were just ecstatic. We thought that we did it. This is wonderful. And then Steve Parmeter, who was the biologist from California Fish and Wildlife in Bishop, we were down at the Crowbar having a cold beer and he said, susan, what would happen if someone found these pupfish and they put chlorine?

0:19:42 - (Susan Sorrells): All of our pupfish are in one pond. All of our pupfish genes are in one pond. We need to expand the habitat. Development was so popular with the community that there were actually signs that kill the gutfish because of the devil's whole decision by the courts stopped development. So pupfish weren't the most favorite species on the planet. And we were really worried 1 quart of chlorine could wipe them out.

0:20:19 - (Susan Sorrells): And I was like, oh, my God, Steve, I've never. I just. It's gone so well and everything's so great. I just didn't consider that could happen. So he said, I think I can get funding. So he got a Desert fishes grant for $30,000. And we created a series of pods. And some of them, one pond is separate from the other, so we can keep a genetic diversity. But now there's petfish and retinas. They've self propagated. We're still using adaptive management, tweaking things. We're doing restoration into the wetlands and some of that area will be pupfish habitat. The saga continues.

0:21:03 - (Alicia Pike): And we'll be back after the break.

0:21:07 - (B): Here's a 90 miles from Needles Public service announcement.

0:21:11 - (Petey Mesquitey): Hello, I'm Petey Mesquite, host of Grow we 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.

0:21:40 - (Chris Clarke): Do you have a desert related podcast or website or newsletter or something similar that you'd like us to promote? Let us know. 760-392-1996.

0:21:51 - (B): You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. One gallon of water per person per day. And that's if you're not hiking.

0:21:59 - (Chris Clarke): We are back. And it's at this point that I should mention, just for the sake of transparency, that I am on the board of the Amargosa Conservancy, which works with Susan to protect the Amargosa river watershed. And so I thought which better organization to turn to to get a take on what Susan's work means to the Amargosa? Here's that.

0:22:19 - (Mason Voehl): Take this story about Susan literally bringing these fish back from believed extinction is a great sort of micro narrative for the way that I think about pupfish as a whole. They are these species that are just absolutely full of contradictions. I'm Mason Voehl. I'm the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy. The Amargosa Conservancy is committed to the Amargosa Basin. We serve the basin in a wide variety of ways, but principally through science, stewardship and for advocating for especially water based issues in the area.

0:22:54 - (Mason Voehl): Pupfish live in these incredibly small worlds, these worlds that are often the size of a bathtub and these this kind of hidden worlds, worlds that unless you sort of walk right up to them, you don't really know they exist. And yet they also hold a space in deep time. They are these ancient species, these species that at one time we're all joined together in this big body of water. These lakes that occupied most of the basins that have over time slowly receded.

0:23:21 - (Mason Voehl): And they've left these individual species to develop in their own worlds to evolve into completely new things based on the environment they were surrounded in. And I think that environment itself is just a testament to who they are. Most of these little waterways that we tend to find, pupfish are, they're small, they tend to be brackish, hot waters, places that not much has really found its ability to withstand over a long period of time.

0:23:48 - (Mason Voehl): And so I think about Susan Discovering this believed to be extinct species in a culvert, something so humble, and it contains this relic fish that that kind of, despite everything else, has found a way to persist. It says a lot about the character of pupfish in this landscape. They are tolerant and adaptable and they'll find a way. But simultaneously, they're also incredibly vulnerable. They are these things that depend on the most finite resource in the desert, which is groundwater. And because of increased human activity, it's a resource that is constantly changing and perhaps changing in ways and at a pace that the species can't adapt to. So again, there's just these puzzling, contradictory little things that I think say a lot about the place that they inhabit.

0:24:33 - (Chris Clarke): How have visitors reacted to the presence of the pupfish? Have they shown interest?

0:24:37 - (Susan Sorrells): Now, instead of posters that say kill the pupfish, there's hats that say save the pupfish. I thought it was short sighted to look at, to concentrate on the species instead of looking at the ecosystem. And of course, with my background, I thought that people have to be a part of that biodiversity. So I thought, this is perfect. We can pivot to ecotourism. Of course, my husband would never work. And then at our 25th wedding anniversary, we went to Australia and I booked nothing but eco villages and eco tours.

0:25:17 - (Susan Sorrells): And he just fell in love with the whole concept. And it's been amazing. We have never been as profitable as we are now. People, you can't even go up there except in the summer without running into people. And we built a network of birding trails and hiking trails. So now we have about 10 miles of trails. I feel that families and children are yearning to have the exposure to nature. And that's what we try to provide in Shoshone.

0:25:49 - (Alicia Pike): It's so inspirational that you've taken a historically industrial and exploitative trade zone and turned it into an ecotourism hotspot.

0:25:59 - (Alicia Pike): Fantastic.

0:26:00 - (Susan Sorrells): We're also starting a new campaign to get this area declared a national monument.

0:26:07 - (Mason Voehl): Because there are tremendous threats just downriver, so to speak. We have an important analog in the Tecopa pupfish, which unfortunately is extinct. And that pupfish occupied groundwater pools around Tecopa that Unfortunately, in the 50s and 60s, became hot spring resorts. And so these resorts came in and pumped the water, of course, modified flows, and all of that led to the eventual extinction of the Tacoba pupfish.

0:26:35 - (Mason Voehl): And so the truth is, these systems that pupfish occupy, these groundwater systems are such that, I mean, we are just beginning to understand a lot of how the water flows in a desert basin and These fish have been at it for a long time. Unfortunately, we are playing catch up in understanding what it takes to have a stable groundwater system. They're all thoroughly interconnected and we've seen evidence of pumping some distance away, upwards of even 30 to 40 miles in an adjacent basin that has had an effect on spring flows in that area.

0:27:07 - (Mason Voehl): The threats posed to the pupfish are so numerous because anything that has the potential to change the direction of groundwater flow, the volume, the salinity or temperature of the water, it doesn't take much to throw these fish into a imperiled situation. They've developed to this particular microclimate for such a long, long time that it doesn't take a great change to that microclimate to make a big impact on their populations.

0:27:34 - (Susan Sorrells): First of all, we got the lands declared national conservation lands. That was a big fight. I was right in the middle of the fight to get the Amargosa declared a wild river. That took some convincing, but we especially saw in the trunk years that all of those kinds of of protection are fragile. And so what would really be much more protective is a land status change to a national monument. So we just incorporated Friends of the Amargosa Basin a year ago.

0:28:12 - (Susan Sorrells): We have over 40,000, almost $50,000 in donations.

0:28:17 - (Chris Clarke): Nice.

0:28:18 - (Susan Sorrells): I think it's amazing. It shows that there's a real love for the area. And we have over 300 friends, so we're moving. And the thing that really pleases me is that now we're partnering with the Amargosa Conservancy so that you have two organizations whose complete purpose is to protect the Amargosa Basin. You can go to amagosconservancy.org and you'll see a beautiful website and all that you would like to know about them. And you can go to friendsoftheamosa basin.org

0:29:00 - (Susan Sorrells): and actually see our 150 page prospectus that, that displays the incredible richness, including the indigenous history of the area and the South Song Trail for the Amcosa Basin National Monument. So these two very strong organizations are working together with different specific goals, but both totally committed to the overall goal, protecting the Amargosa Basin and its people for future generations.

0:29:33 - (Chris Clarke): So what can listeners do to help the Shoshone pupfish and its cousins that are scattered in wetlands throughout the deserts of the Southwest?

0:29:41 - (Mason Voehl): I would say the first thing listeners can do is just to go see them. I think it's one thing to hear the stories about the Shoshone pupfish and of course the Devil's Hole pupfish being Almost infamous in this environment. But I think it was, for me, something that I had read about and didn't really understand until I saw them. There's just something epiphenomenal about walking around in the hottest, driest desert ecosystem and coming upon not only water, but something that has managed to survive in that water, and it's a species of fish. So I think the first thing people can do is to a just go out and see and appreciate how wonderful and rare and delicate and playful these pupfish are. I think it's had a lasting impact on me.

0:30:25 - (Mason Voehl): I think more practically, one thing we can do is paying attention to the proposed projects in these desert basins that are adjacent to pupfish populations, especially in the. At the northern end of the Amargosa river, we're seeing a number of proposed projects ranging from solar to gold mining, that are in close enough proximity to these pupfish populations that it's a serious cause for worry because we've seen a historical pattern of increased groundwater pumping and that has had a negative impact on these populations.

0:30:58 - (Mason Voehl): So I think the average person, I think just having a critical eye for some of these projects and appreciating, again, as we spoke about earlier, the effects of this project. This could affect a groundwater pool some distance away. So I think looking at the greater watershed and appreciating how connected all of these things are will help us have, I think, a better understanding of what we need to do to ensure these pupfish populations just stay.

0:31:21 - (Mason Voehl): Keep on doing their thing as they've done for a very long time.

0:31:24 - (Alicia Pike): Can we tell the people about how they can come and visit the pupfish? I understand there's a specific pool that has, like, a viewing area.

0:31:32 - (Susan Sorrells): Yeah. Some of the scientists, when I started working with them, were adamant that we fenced the area, that it was just too fragile to keep it open to the public. But I insisted that it has to be open to people. And of course, the thought was, is it going to be destroyed? And, well, that's a chance we're going to have to take, because if humans as a species cannot be educated and exposed to nature so that because something they love and protect, we're doomed.

0:32:08 - (Susan Sorrells): So we're going to try this in Shoshone. We don't charge for it. It's open to anyone that takes interest, so anyone can come.

0:32:18 - (Alicia Pike): It's really admirable that you're allowing that risk to be taken and having success with it. I'm greatly looking forward to coming out and getting to visit myself.

0:32:29 - (Susan Sorrells): Well, let me know, because I would love to show you around but I'd love to. I'd love to show you our little piece of paradise here.

0:32:37 - (Alicia Pike): Thank you. I look forward to coming for a visit.

0:32:40 - (Susan Sorrells): I've never known a circumstance where one person has moved mountains, but a group of like minded people, they can move mountains.

0:32:50 - (Alicia Pike): And that is eloquently said. As to why I'm involved in this podcast in the first place is I've been struggling for years to find my place and how I can help the problems of the world that I see that need help. And Chris has given me an outlet to getting to meet new people, getting to learn more and becoming more involved in the conservation and activism community. So I'm really excited to be meeting you and to be doing this stuff so that I can continue on with a purpose for all of those feelings for nature.

0:33:25 - (Susan Sorrells): I'm always happy to meet someone, someone that has fallen in love with the dancer.

0:33:35 - (Bouse Parker): This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia pike and Chris Clark. Editing by Chris. Thank you to Susan Sorrels and Mason Vale for the interviews. Podcast artwork by our good friend Martin Mancha. Theme music is by Bright side Studio. Other music by Slim Upstream. Follow us on Twitter or Instagram @90from needles and on Facebook at facebook.com 90miles from needles listen to us at 90miles from needles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Support this podcast by visiting us at 9zero miles from needles.com

0:34:10 - (Bouse Parker): Patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as five bucks. We are planning excellent benefits for our Patreon Patreon friends, including an exclusive Joshua Tree national park campout in fall 2022. Stay tuned for info. Crucial support for this podcast came from Tad Coffin and Lara Rozzell. All characters on this podcast saw a creature naked bestial, who squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands and ate of it. This is Baus Parker asking you to remember your blood contains the ashes of exposure exploding giant stars. See you next time.