We spend a lot of time correcting misapprehensions about the desert. But don't get the impression we think we're flawless! We've made our share of mistakes about the desert as well. In this episode, we share some of the things we once thought about the desert that are just plain wrong, on topics ranging from rainfall to rattlesnakes. And of course we do this on a hike in the Mojave Desert.
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[TRANSCRIPT]
**0:00:00** - (Alicia Pike): I don't do tourist plebeian exits from my nature zones. I have my own. It's like a form of birth and or death, depending on how I'm feeling when I'm entering and exiting nature. Don't take it lightly. It's time for 90 Miles From Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast, with your hosts, Chris Clarke and Alicia Pike.
**0:00:45** - (Chris Clarke): Well, hey, welcome to 90 miles from Needles. The Desert Protection Podcast. I'm Chris Clarke.
**0:00:51** - (Alicia Pike): And I'm Alicia Pike.
**0:00:53** - (Chris Clarke): And we are sitting in a great big pile of boulders enjoying an unseasonably cool June day in the Mojave Desert. And I was thinking about a story recently. Early on in my getting to know the Mojave Desert, I actually didn't like it very much. If you were going to give me a trip to the Mojave Desert, I would have gone. But my conception of what a desert was supposed to be like, or my conception of what kind of desert I wanted to hang out in was more like Arizona upland Sonoran Desert.
**0:01:30** - (Alicia Pike): The pretty desert.
**0:01:31** - (Chris Clarke): The pretty desert. The one was the cacti with air quotes.
**0:01:34** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, I'm throwing air quotes when I say pretty desert.
**0:01:38** - (Chris Clarke): This was early on before I really started noticing anything about the Mojave, but I remember impatiently speeding through the Mojave so that I could get to Arizona and the Sowarros.
**0:01:51** - (Alicia Pike): So you've been that guy?
**0:01:53** - (Chris Clarke): I've been that guy, and this is like, 35 years ago, so had plenty of time to reflect on my wrongness.
**0:02:01** - (Alicia Pike): Well, it's not just that you've been that guy, it's that I've been that guy. My friends are that guy. We're all that guy until we're not. And that's kind of what we're talking about today, right?
**0:02:12** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. We spent a lot of time talking about what other people get wrong about the desert, and that's fun. And people do get stuff wrong about the desert, and it's important to talk about why those things are wrong, but we also don't want to be scold. We get stuff wrong about the desert all the time.
**0:02:33** - (Alicia Pike): These are our that guy stories.
**0:02:35** - (Chris Clarke): Yep. And so we're just going to spend a little bit of time talking about things we got wrong about the desert or about an individual desert. And there are things that we continue to get wrong to this day. It's a constant, lifelong learning process.
**0:02:53** - (Alicia Pike): I have no stories. I didn't get anything wrong. I love the desert, and the desert loves me. I'm sorry, I just had to say that.
**0:03:03** - (Chris Clarke): You do love the desert, and the desert does love you.
**0:03:08** - (Alicia Pike): Well, I guess in a broader perspective, for me, one of the things I got wrong about the desert was thinking that it was all I hesitate to even say this out loud, but to think that it was all kind of the same. And over the ten years of living here and observing intimately the different microbiomes throughout, just this little nook of the Mojave has shown me that the biodiversity of what can grow in a desert will really take you by surprise. But out here in the wild, it did not occur to me. The variety of succulents and ferns and vibrant colored single cell organism communities amphibians the toads, the frogs, the things that you just wouldn't think would thrive and grow in the no, they're not everywhere, but where they do have their moment to shine is what it is. There are just these little micro communities within the desert that you would never expect to find such delicate, moist splendor.
**0:04:27** - (Alicia Pike): And I totally had that wrong. I grew up in San Diego, where I knew succulents from the coastal bluffs, and to find similar looking succulents thriving out here in the desert was one of those wow moments. I just didn't see that one coming.
**0:04:44** - (Chris Clarke): The whole notion of the differing biodiversity and the microclimates in a place like we are right now, I would not be at all surprised to find little dormant ferns. And there are places like where I live, there's no chance of there being any ferns unless I bring them.
**0:05:45** - (Alicia Pike): We were doing really good. We only got one little United Airlines moist towelette wrapper here. One of my favorite little corners of the wilderness. It's not so wild, but loved and respected nonetheless by yours truly.
**0:06:07** - (Chris Clarke): Oh, little spider. Oh, no, not a spider beetle.
**0:06:11** - (Alicia Pike): Looks like a squash bug, maybe.
**0:06:12** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it does.
**0:06:17** - (Alicia Pike): Let me lead us out.
**0:06:18** - (Chris Clarke): Okay. Trail boss.
**0:06:19** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, in this case, there's the easy way, and then all the other ways are going to be inconvenient in one way or another. And while this 1 may require a little bit of careful vertical stepping, it's honestly the path of least resistance. I swear. I swear it. Yeah, I've learned with you. Sometimes it's just okay to be like, oh, I know the way out of here. Old Alicia would have been like, just follow him, it's fine.
**0:06:50** - (Chris Clarke): Keep him out of trouble.
**0:06:51** - (Alicia Pike): You know, you'll get out, but it's like, you know, you're going to hit that hedge of acacia, too. That's what's over there. You got to pass through a thorny hedge. I did that precisely once. Found my little goat trail, and I don't go back. What an absolutely gorgeous afternoon, though.
**0:07:11** - (Chris Clarke): This is really nice.
**0:07:13** - (Alicia Pike): I'll take it early June, some years, the end of May. Felt like summer. May feels like you're already in the doldrums. It's not a good sign, June. Oh, this feels great. Look at that.
**0:07:34** - (Chris Clarke): Very cool.
**0:07:35** - (Alicia Pike): That looks like a baby mistletoe on creosote, which you don't see every day.
**0:07:43** - (Chris Clarke): When you got a bunch of phenopelas up to no good.
**0:07:48** - (Alicia Pike): So we're on our way.
**0:07:51** - (Chris Clarke): Oh, I see.
**0:07:52** - (Alicia Pike): The flowers from here through the wash at Rattlesnake Canyon here in Indian Cove. Joshua Tree National Park. And driving in, we could see that the desert willows were in full bloom. Tremendous puffy white dots, like a pointillism masterpiece. Impressionist era. Oh, the butterflies are bouncing around what a scene. Scope, bury our noses in the divinity. Oh, look, this cremeria is in bloom and seed. The fresh seed pods look so velvety.
**0:08:39** - (Alicia Pike): And they do have a velvet underneath the velcro like spines. It's really soft. Isn't that just the way a lot of people are like that?
**0:08:51** - (Chris Clarke): Not me. I'm all spiny all the way down.
**0:08:55** - (Alicia Pike): I thought you were going to say you were all soft.
**0:09:09** - (Chris Clarke): This is just amazing.
**0:09:11** - (Alicia Pike): Wow. It's like the wall hit me. Can you smell that?
**0:09:16** - (Chris Clarke): I can.
**0:09:17** - (Alicia Pike): Wow. Rich.
**0:09:21** - (Chris Clarke): I think the first time I saw a desert willow in bloom was at Grapevine Canyon in what is now Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. I'd read about desert willows forever, but I just saw this plant blooming in this canyon that was full of petroglyphs, and there's just something really vibrant and magical about it. And it was the middle of summer, and it was hot and it was dry, but this bush had just sunk its roots down into a wash, like these have here.
**0:09:54** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, this is such a forest. Oh, and looking back where the light catches the flowers and all the creosote seed pods are glowing, and it feels like it's snowing. All of these blossoms just trickling, constant trickle. They're falling. There's so many of them. Oh, Chris, this is stunning, isn't it?
**0:10:21** - (Chris Clarke): Yes.
**0:10:21** - (Alicia Pike): I just got to get a little deeper and get surrounded by them. This wash is so thick with them.
**0:10:29** - (Chris Clarke): And we got acacia blooming and cheese bush.
**0:10:32** - (Alicia Pike): It's so fragrant. We're getting right into a little clearing in the middle of a bunch of trees, the willows, so we can be surrounded. Some of the blooms have the pink, and then this one is a white with a yellow. It's so neat how they all look the same, but they're exquisitely unique. This one has some purple striations with the yellow, but is mostly white.
**0:11:12** - (Chris Clarke): We are standing right now in a grove of trees that are mostly 15, but as tall as 25ft, just covered with flowers and lush green leaves. And we're in the Mojave Desert, folks. This looks like Iowa or someplace.
**0:11:35** - (Alicia Pike): Things that I got wrong about the desert, number 2361. You think you're going to learn a species, you got it, you read about it, and then you find out that there's like 25 different versions of it with subtle variations. And you've got to learn which ones have a fine hair on the stem, which ones have a tack leaf, or which ones have these minor differences. And in the beginning, it felt like, this is overwhelming. How am I ever going to learn them all apart?
**0:12:13** - (Alicia Pike): And now it feels like a challenge. That's really exciting. Like, oh, there's 25 more on my bingo card. I don't know. Like the willow, you'd think these are all the same kind of tree, but just a simple variation in their blossoms.
**0:12:29** - (Chris Clarke): Are astounding really liking the patterns of foliage up on the hills here. Some places where it looks like there's hardly any at all, except that if we got up close, we would find a whole bunch of things growing. But even from here, looking a mile and a half away at the hillsides, there are some patches that are just really densely vegetated up at that altitude.
**0:12:56** - (Alicia Pike): I'm going to guess from here that those are the scrub oaks.
**0:13:00** - (Chris Clarke): That makes sense.
**0:13:01** - (Alicia Pike): And I can see pinion for sure. And junipers do show up. So you get that nice trifecta of those three and you get that darker green, thicker cover. Whereas over here, like you said, it looks more barren. But it's funny because what looks like earth is I can see very clearly, is scrub. I can't see any bare earth, I can see bare rock.
**0:13:30** - (Chris Clarke): And there is one of the biggest clumps of daughter I've ever seen.
**0:13:34** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, that's a big one.
**0:13:37** - (Chris Clarke): Daughter is a parasitic plant that it's easy to recognize because it's a bunch of stems that look like a really badly built bird's nest and are bright orange.
**0:13:49** - (Alicia Pike): So let's keep walking, shall we?
**0:13:51** - (Chris Clarke): Yes.
**0:13:54** - (Alicia Pike): Beautiful wash. So things I had wrong about the desert, number 241. I always thought that when a flash flood happened that it was going to be like a wall of water. Dead wrong. I've looked for videos of the wall of water and while there are some extremely gratifying wall of water flood videos, it's never met my expectation for what I thought. Even hiking in these dry washes, I've seen the high water line, so I have my ideas how deep the water can get.
**0:15:52** - (Alicia Pike): But having come out to this very canyon and perched up on high rocks and watched the floodwaters come down in all varying stages, I've seen it. And it's not like I thought. And it's way cooler. It requires patience and timing to catch it. It feels like a very rare event, but it's really just a matter of stalking the weather and making sure you have the time to go sit out in the rain and stalk a wash.
**0:16:23** - (Chris Clarke): So what does it look like if it doesn't look like a wall of water?
**0:16:27** - (Alicia Pike): Well, that's the funny thing. So in this wash, it started as a trickle, just a teeny inconsequential trickle. And I do have some really cool video footage of that that we can share in another situation. I saw the water had already been flowing, but then it reminded me of a tsunami. People think also that tsunamis are going to bring this wall of water, but it's more like a tidal surge. And this surge came that had this first pre surge that was literally a few ripples, but clearly more water was coming.
**0:17:11** - (Alicia Pike): And then the next surge, you could feel rocks tumbling around you and the water was now moving and the water only continued to rise. And it was just so weird to see that just to happen, to have been out there standing in the road while it was flooding, and to see that calm rain runoff turn into OOH. I might need to go put on my water shoes because there are rocks tumbling in water. It's crazy, but yeah, the gentle trickle, that's how people get killed, though, is that little gentle trickle that it starts with is so deceiving.
**0:17:47** - (Chris Clarke): It doesn't look like much.
**0:17:48** - (Alicia Pike): No. And that wall of water, I feel, is the parable story behind that trickle. Do know that there's a wall of water coming for you behind a trickle like that in a desert wash? You just need to be smart about it. Keep on high ground.
**0:18:08** - (Chris Clarke): Here comes the flood. Something I got wrong about deserts for a long time, and I still get it a little wrong just because of reflex is I was terrified of running into rattlesnakes when I first started visiting the desert. My then girlfriend in the 1980s, I was living in DC. And my ex was applying for a job in Southern Arizona at a legal clinic. She was going to law school at the time, and I imagined us living on the Tahona Autumn Reservation west of Tucson.
**0:19:15** - (Chris Clarke): And we had two cats at the time, and I thought, how the hell are we going to keep the cats from getting eaten by rattlesnakes?
**0:19:24** - (Alicia Pike): Wow.
**0:19:24** - (Chris Clarke): And I spent some time being actually nervous about that.
**0:19:30** - (Alicia Pike): Wow. Danny, are you listening? Can you believe that?
**0:19:35** - (Chris Clarke): And then I actually started to run into rattlesnakes, and it was completely different.
**0:19:42** - (Alicia Pike): Because they're just like you. They're like, oh, no, man. Hey, hey.
**0:19:46** - (Chris Clarke): I'm not starting anything.
**0:19:48** - (Alicia Pike): I don't want to hang out with you. I'm pretty sure you don't want to hang out with me. Look, you don't want to hang out with me. Let's just go our own way.
**0:19:56** - (Chris Clarke): And we will need to do an entire episode on snakes and especially rattlesnakes, just because there will be people that will be interested in having an entire episode, and then there will be other people that won't listen to that episode with a ten foot pole. But I was hiking above Palm Springs about ten years ago, and this guy breezed past me on the trail, and there weren't earbuds then. It was like corded earphones, and he was just booking on past, and he waved at me and he was happy.
**0:20:33** - (Chris Clarke): And I walked about five more feet and there was a red diamond rattlesnake in the middle of the trail that he had clearly stepped over.
**0:20:41** - (Alicia Pike): Oh, my goodness. And he just went past it without even noticing.
**0:20:45** - (Chris Clarke): Yes. And that snake rattled at me, and I said, all right. And I just sat down, like, 5ft away from it.
**0:20:53** - (Alicia Pike): It gave you the o. Thou shalt not pass.
**0:20:57** - (Chris Clarke): What is your favorite color? And so I had a conversation with a snake, and I probably still have that video somewhere where I just waited for the snake to get tired of being where it was, and it decided to head uphill. And it was a very pretty snake. And it stuck its tongue out at me a couple of times trying to figure out who the hell I was.
**0:21:19** - (Alicia Pike): This warm thing is still nearby, and it's big.
**0:21:23** - (Chris Clarke): And same with speckled rattlesnakes. Hart walked right past one at one point that I hadn't seen, and then she walked past it again and I saw it, and she was maybe 2ft from it, well within striking range, but this snake was just not wanting to be bothered. Even after I'd run into a few snakes and gotten much calmer about them in general, I still had this mystique in my head about the Mojave green, a northern Mojave rattlesnake, which is reputed to be aggressive and ill tempered and nasty.
**0:22:02** - (Chris Clarke): And they are the rattlesnake that I most enjoy running into now because there is no question of accidentally stepping on one. They rattle at you from 30ft away and they say, hey, excuse me, I'm over here. You want to stay over there? And they're such wonderful critters, and I just really love them.
**0:22:26** - (Alicia Pike): It's neat how they all have their own personality type. The speckled seems to be very quiet and chill. Unless you get really close and hover for too long, it's just going to be quiet. Now that's interesting. This wash is closed up, but the sign post is here. And the level of evasive oh, these are almost all purple. They're like a lavender.
**0:22:57** - (Chris Clarke): Oh, nice.
**0:22:58** - (Alicia Pike): With deep fuchsia. Striations. Again, these willow blossoms. Oh, they're covered in ladybugs and carpenter.
**0:23:09** - (Chris Clarke): Bees and biological diversity. I'm starting to get a red light on the battery.
**0:24:15** - (Alicia Pike): Mine's still happy. Okay, this very buggy here, I got to move out of this area. They're like, oh, fresh meat. Get her. Shall we head up in oh, who's this little guy? How do you pronounce that?
**0:24:40** - (Chris Clarke): Penstamin penceman. Looks like it might be certainly has gotten beaten up.
**0:24:46** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, well, look where it chose to grow. Yeah, smack dab in the middle of a wash.
**0:24:53** - (Chris Clarke): I think you're blaming the victim there.
**0:24:55** - (Alicia Pike): Oh, no, it was the environment that the victim was subjected to.
**0:25:03** - (Chris Clarke): Oh, there's something else I've gotten wrong about the desert.
**0:25:05** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, what?
**0:25:08** - (Chris Clarke): Thinking that it's really a durable environment.
**0:25:13** - (Alicia Pike): Dead wrong.
**0:25:15** - (Chris Clarke): Thinking that you can ride your dune buggy or your quad or explode your nuclear weapon or have your cows stomping on the crypto or whatever and it just all was no big deal because everything here is tough and there are aspects of that that are almost true. The plants here are really tough, and they are used to being defoliated, a lot of them. So they will come back after a flash flood in a wash or something like that.
**0:25:47** - (Alicia Pike): And I think universally all of this matter is going to be continually recycled by the universe over and over. It's closed loop system, but at the.
**0:25:55** - (Chris Clarke): Same time as an ecosystem and as individual things living in the ecosystem. They are very sensitive, and it took a while for me to get that.
**0:26:04** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. How does this bladder sage?
**0:26:07** - (Chris Clarke): Yes.
**0:26:09** - (Alicia Pike): Had a good year. This bush did.
**0:26:11** - (Chris Clarke): Used to be called Salazaria. It's called something else now.
**0:26:14** - (Alicia Pike): Paper bag bush. This is what happens year after year. You study the names and then you start learning their second names, their Latin names, common names. And that's when I noticed progress, because I could not say paper bag bush. My brain wanted to say parachute plant. For years I struggled with that. Before I even moved out here full time, I knew what this bush was, but in my mind, it was parachute plant.
**0:26:43** - (Chris Clarke): Like MC. Hammers clothes.
**0:26:45** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. Are you dead or are you still going?
**0:26:47** - (Chris Clarke): I'm still going.
**0:26:49** - (Alicia Pike): This is a big yucca yucca developing.
**0:26:54** - (Chris Clarke): Fruit up at the top.
**0:26:57** - (Alicia Pike): Sometimes they look like little watermelons. When they get those green, the modeled green looks like little meloni. These are little daggers. Ouch. Wow. It's such a big group. What would you say, 12ft?
**0:27:22** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.
**0:27:22** - (Alicia Pike): Tallest one.
**0:27:23** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Probably well into the four digits as.
**0:27:25** - (Alicia Pike): Far as age and the crown on this relatively new growth, it could be 30 years. It could be. That would be, I would say, what, like in the eight to ten foot range?
**0:27:39** - (Chris Clarke): Six, maybe.
**0:27:40** - (Alicia Pike): Six to eight.
**0:27:41** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Now, admittedly, this has gotten more water than the typical mojave yucca, so it might have grown a little bit faster than the others.
**0:27:52** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, that's true.
**0:27:53** - (Chris Clarke): But I'm still thinking it's got to be more than a millennium old.
**0:27:58** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, it's a millennial. Do you remember the calculation for the ring diameter?
**0:28:06** - (Chris Clarke): I do not, because now I'd say.
**0:28:09** - (Alicia Pike): That ring diameter was in the eight to ten foot range easily.
**0:28:13** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, that's for sure.
**0:28:15** - (Alicia Pike): If not more like ten to twelve, because some of these are pushed out.
**0:28:19** - (Chris Clarke): And we've got a woodpecker hole.
**0:28:21** - (Alicia Pike): Oh, look at that. Good spot. I want to get closer, but I know and have much respect for this bush. And every time I find myself lurching forward, I lurch right back.
**0:28:36** - (Chris Clarke): We will take a photo of the.
**0:28:38** - (Alicia Pike): What a great little dugout. And of course, here's a critter den of some sort. I'm not seeing an immediate proliferation of pack wrap poops. I'm seeing more bunny poops. And the size of that hole makes me think that this might just be an audubon nest.
**0:29:02** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.
**0:29:03** - (Alicia Pike): What do you think?
**0:29:05** - (Chris Clarke): It looks about right.
**0:29:07** - (Alicia Pike): Needle. Cotton tails.
**0:29:08** - (Chris Clarke): There's a bone there.
**0:29:09** - (Alicia Pike): I was just going to say, is that a portion of a vertebra?
**0:29:12** - (Chris Clarke): Ouch.
**0:29:14** - (Alicia Pike): Stats, you're getting too close.
**0:29:17** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. This is like a coyote vertebra.
**0:29:21** - (Alicia Pike): Well, that's a good warning sign. Bun buns. Put that on your doorstep. That's smart.
**0:29:25** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Eat that. Calcium.
**0:29:27** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah.
**0:29:27** - (Chris Clarke): Gain the coyote strength. So a little secret that we haven't really talked about, at least in anything that made it into the published version of the podcast, is that we, on occasion will get out to places like this and have our recording equipment and it will be running low on batteries. And it's like an ongoing running joke the universe has in this podcast. This has been very simple. I'm just looking at the battery indicator light turning a sort of red color. But there have been times when we have talked for an hour and a half talked for an hour and a half and then not had it record or paid close attention to whether or not the battery was still good and gotten three sentences in and had cheap rechargeables just sort of peter out because they've been sitting outside the charger for two weeks and lost all their charge.
**0:30:32** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, we've had it all the ways, but I feel like we're just budding little babies. Our equipment. As people learn about our podcast and our support grows, we're going to be able to upgrade our equipment and supply closets so that when we go out on trail, we have a second and third set of batteries and perhaps even a second and third F two just in case.
**0:31:02** - (Chris Clarke): And if you want to help with that, you can text the word needles to 5355. That will bring up a little link that you can hit and donate to us.
**0:31:15** - (Alicia Pike): Because redundancy is key with technology. Got to always have at least two copies. Three is better because we don't want you to lose this data. We got a lot of good stuff to share with you. These bugs want me to share my blood with them?
**0:31:30** - (Chris Clarke): Yes.
**0:31:31** - (Alicia Pike): They really don't want to.
**0:31:33** - (Chris Clarke): Precious bodily fluids.
**0:31:35** - (Alicia Pike): You can't have it. It's mine. So I think we should just loop around this creasote and walk back around the rock pile because I don't like walking out that main trail. Right. I don't do tourist plebeian exits from my nature zones. I have my own. It's like a form of birth and or death, depending on how I'm feeling when I'm entering and exiting nature. Don't take it lightly.
**0:32:04** - (Chris Clarke): So there's sort of a twofer for something I've gotten wrong about the desert and still get wrong about the desert.
**0:32:12** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. What's that?
**0:32:13** - (Chris Clarke): When I first started coming to the desert and learning about it and I was already a professional environmentalist, I assumed that everybody was really into the desert. Anybody that had an environmental sensibility at all, I thought that they would at least appreciate the desert from an aesthetic standpoint.
**0:32:36** - (Alicia Pike): Right.
**0:32:37** - (Chris Clarke): And then we get to 15 years ago and I'm hearing from all these environmentalists that I know that they think the desert is the best place to pave for solar. So then I started assuming that nobody likes the desert except for desert rats.
**0:32:59** - (Alicia Pike): Oh, wow. You're riding that spectral wave.
**0:33:03** - (Chris Clarke): And so that's wrong too, because there's a lot of people out there that love the desert.
**0:33:10** - (Alicia Pike): The cat claw has got me.
**0:33:12** - (Chris Clarke): Wait a minute. It's a wait a minute bush. I was just saying what the bush said. But people love the desert, and there are more people who love the desert now than there were back then.
**0:33:23** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah.
**0:33:24** - (Chris Clarke): So I'm really glad to be wrong about that.
**0:33:28** - (Alicia Pike): I want to go back to that basilisk over there.
**0:33:33** - (Chris Clarke): All right.
**0:33:34** - (Alicia Pike): I did enjoy checking out this cute little cubby of a nest, but I just feel very drawn to this rock when I cross it.
**0:33:44** - (Chris Clarke): Another thing I got wrong about the desert is that I never expected that I would actually get to live here. And I'm still surprised by that. And it's 15 years since I moved here.
**0:33:56** - (Alicia Pike): I definitely had that wrong about the desert, too, because I always envisioned myself living in the forest, in the woods. And even though I was drawn to that, there were a lot of reasons why it didn't make sense. My body type is just so thin. I can't deal with real winters. The bugs, they love me wherever I go. It doesn't matter what continent I'm on. I do not belong around lakes and trees because I'll just be getting eaten alive all the time.
**0:34:25** - (Alicia Pike): And I don't want to soak myself in bug spray all the time. Just to exist outside the desert is more me than I would have ever thought. I'm the one who gets chilled easy, so being able to walk around for most of the year with average to minimal clothing on in order to protect myself, even in the summer, just draped a loose cotton dress with a loose cotton overshirt is plenty of sun protection and breathability.
**0:34:53** - (Alicia Pike): And I would have just never thought, even though I bitch and I get real angry every year from the heat, I still never would have ever thought in a million years that I would elect the desert. I ended up here by chance. That's just how the dice came down the table in my life at the time. I will stay here. It's my home.
**0:35:35** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, that's a bigon right there. I mean, this guy doesn't even know what to do with himself. Two of his bloom branches broke off because they're so heavy. Look at this one growing all wonky on the side.
**0:35:51** - (Chris Clarke): That's fantastic.
**0:35:52** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. This situation here reminds me that really wonky one we saw on the 640 property.
**0:35:58** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.
**0:36:01** - (Alicia Pike): Scale wise also. That was a big fucking yucking. Explicit lyrics. All right, how are you feeling? Is it time to get back to the car?
**0:36:12** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, probably just oh, I didn't even put my watch on after I showered.
**0:36:16** - (Alicia Pike): Look at you.
**0:36:17** - (Chris Clarke): Probably just in terms of me. Who is that?
**0:36:23** - (Alicia Pike): That's the bird that I say it sounds like he's laughing.
**0:36:26** - (Chris Clarke): Oh, that the Canyon run.
**0:36:28** - (Alicia Pike): Okay.
**0:36:29** - (Chris Clarke): No, I was talking about the one I saw flying. It looked like I'm not sure what it looked like. May have been a quail.
**0:36:38** - (Alicia Pike): The morning doves often fly through here looking exotic. So that's canyon run.
**0:36:46** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. I was thinking of getting an audiogram of a Canyon Ren's song as a tattoo.
**0:36:53** - (Alicia Pike): How do you get an audiogram tattoo?
**0:36:56** - (Chris Clarke): You'd have to print an audiogram out and take it to the tattoo artist. If you're using Merlin or something like.
**0:37:03** - (Alicia Pike): That, I thought you might implant a little music box thing in your art.
**0:37:07** - (Chris Clarke): That would be much preferable.
**0:37:10** - (Alicia Pike): So you've got some sort of an image and then you can tap that and then the song will play. Wouldn't that be trippy?
**0:37:16** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.
**0:37:18** - (Alicia Pike): That sounds like some bizarre future shit that I don't want anything to do with. Things I got wrong about the desert number 4541. Well, at least it's a dry heat. Dead wrong. That does not fucking matter. Actually, dry heat is lethal. You and I were talking earlier about maybe this year number ten. I can not get heat illness this summer. Let's try to not do that this year. Things I've been getting wrong about the desert every year since I moved here.
**0:38:17** - (Alicia Pike): Taking this heat seriously. It is so easy to just forget how short of a period of time it takes to put your life on the line, and you could be dead in 15 to 20 minutes from where you're at and you're really not aware because, first of all, getting grumpy, disoriented and agitated are some of the first signs that you always in trouble.
**0:38:38** - (Chris Clarke): And who's going to notice if I'm grumpy and irritated if you're not speaking.
**0:38:44** - (Alicia Pike): And you're by yourself, sitting in your car in the drive through with no AC? It's 115 outside, you're waiting for your food. Yes, it's the middle of COVID so half of 29 Palms is also in that drive in. And you did not know that when you rolled into that line it was going to be a 45 minutes wait in your no AC.
**0:39:05** - (Chris Clarke): And that's something that I keep getting wrong too, not only for myself, but for people I care about. As witnessed the hike you and I took three weeks ago. Was that over by the Calamets? The Calamit Mountains east of Joshua Tree. And it was a really good hike. I'm glad we did it.
**0:39:26** - (Alicia Pike): Beautiful hike.
**0:39:27** - (Chris Clarke): And there was amazing cryptobiotic soil crusts out there. It wasn't untouched by humans. There was definitely a lot of evidence of historic mining attempts and fence posts and things like that. Some two ruts where people had driven Jeeps. But it was unspoiled desert and really beautiful. And at the same time it was almost a six mile slog in sand and it was in the upper ninety.
**0:40:01** - (Alicia Pike): S and it felt like it was 110. And on days like that. It's just you can't fight it when your water is dis. That's, for me, that is the first sign that I'm in trouble, is I'm going through my water quicker than I would if everything was in balance. I don't remember when we stopped first, but when I pulled my camel back off, I remember having this feeling of, OOH, like half the weight's out of here already, and we aren't even at a halfway point yet. And as we know as seasoned desert people, that's the turnaround.
**0:40:32** - (Alicia Pike): But I did have that. I was carrying a bag with four sparkling waters in it, which we did consume.
**0:40:39** - (Chris Clarke): And I did have extra water myself, but still.
**0:40:42** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, those little signs are things you learn through those experiences and committing those acts of neglect against yourself multiple times where you think, I'm going to be fine, and then you realize, oh, shit, I should have brought more water. But yeah, the heat. I'm going to really do it this year, I swear.
**0:41:01** - (Chris Clarke): We will take care to make sure that we go to for our own hikes as premier hiking pals. Going up to altitude or doing night hikes or maybe both. There's a section of the Pacific Crest Trails just outside of Big Bear that is a fantastic place to hike even in the depth of summer. It gets to 85 degrees maybe, and there's forest, and you can hike past Joshua trees that are doing just fine. They're looking really good, so I have to check that out.
**0:41:41** - (Alicia Pike): Definitely. Now you got me jones in for Gorgonio Action.
**0:41:49** - (Chris Clarke): I am committed to getting some hikes in San Jacinto.
**0:41:53** - (Alicia Pike): All right. I got some spots up there, too. You show me yours, I'll show you mine.
**0:41:59** - (Chris Clarke): All right. I have an ex that used to respond to that. It's a dry heat observation with so is a fucking blowtorch.
**0:42:09** - (Alicia Pike): Wow. I have likened it to when trying to explain to people what to expect, or even clients who know what it's like out here. When they ask me in the doldrums of summer, oh, how is it out there today? I hear it's pretty hot. A couple of my favorite responses are, you know when you open the oven door and you've had the broiler on and you forgot about it, and you're opening the door and you get that whoosh. That's what it's like when you walk outside.
**0:42:40** - (Alicia Pike): Either that or on the worst days, it really feels like you're in a radiation chamber and you're walking into a pure radiation furnace. The UV rays are punishing. The heat is punishing. And I feel that there are days where I can feel the skin damage happening as I'm walking from my house to the car. It's just such an intense day. And the thing about the desert is it's reflecting off the soil, the sand, and it's brighter. It's not just bright.
**0:43:13** - (Alicia Pike): It is a reflective oven. In the summer. It is a real cooker. As my mom and Grandma used to say, it's a real cooker.
**0:43:22** - (Chris Clarke): It was a couple of years ago I was in Death Valley in July, july or August, I forget which, and it was up in the 120 range. And I decided that I had to just feel what it was like at Badwater, which is 282ft below sea level, lowest point in the Western Hemisphere. And I got there just around sunset. So I got a few minutes of experience of having the sun shine on me and having all the salt crystals reflecting sunlight up at me, and it was extremely intense.
**0:43:59** - (Chris Clarke): And I looked over to see my car just maybe 100 yards away with working AC and cold water and all that kind of stuff. And so I was in basically no danger if I didn't do my usual.
**0:44:18** - (Alicia Pike): Thing collapse right there on the spot.
**0:44:20** - (Chris Clarke): Right. If I didn't do my usual thing of walking another 3 miles, how was.
**0:44:25** - (Alicia Pike): The fahrenheit what would you say was.
**0:44:26** - (Chris Clarke): 123, 122 or so?
**0:44:30** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah.
**0:44:31** - (Chris Clarke): And just got the really immediate sense that it would be so easy to die here.
**0:44:39** - (Alicia Pike): And they did find a guy out there at Badwater where he walked the boardwalk past the flats, and it was like the first clump of trees. He just curled up under there and forget how long it took him to find him, but not immediately, even though it seemed like an obvious spot. I wonder if he was his energy was there fucking with you. No. Alicia, keep your hippie dippy shit out of the podcast.
**0:45:08** - (Chris Clarke): No. Bring your hippie dippy shit into the podcast by the truckload if you want.
**0:45:14** - (Alicia Pike): If they haven't figured it out by now and they're still listening, cool with me.
**0:45:20** - (Chris Clarke): For listeners who are confused as to whether Alicia might actually be a hippie, go to our website if Alicia might.
**0:45:28** - (Alicia Pike): Actually be a hamster. And look at Alicia's, the only one who doesn't think she's a hamster or a hipster. Whatever. What's funny is that I labeled the best of my dad's clothing after he passed away as, like, hipster clothes. Felt like my dad was a hipster. It's like everybody's a hipster but me.
**0:45:50** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.
**0:45:51** - (Alicia Pike): Feeling a little trumpy there. Takes one no one, as Mama used to say. Does a hipster mean someone has good taste? Because apparently that's really what it means to me. All the things I think are hipstery about myself are things that I think are in good taste.
**0:46:09** - (Chris Clarke): I think if you're calling somebody a hipster, you're accusing them of being trendy and insincere.
**0:46:15** - (Alicia Pike): Oh, I am timeless and authentic. Get out of the way. Old terms around hipster that said, back.
**0:46:24** - (Chris Clarke): Before there was such a thing as a hippie, and people were referred to as hipsters in the late 50s, early.
**0:46:34** - (Alicia Pike): Sixty s the beatnik. Hipsters.
**0:46:36** - (Chris Clarke): Yep. And I think the word hipster was coined by Herb Caen from the San Francisco Chronicle, the late columnist there. But it wasn't an insult it was a descriptor of somebody who was not concerned with making a metric fuck ton of money. Wanted to be involved in art and beauty and doing drugs and having sex.
**0:47:02** - (Alicia Pike): Oh, sounds great.
**0:47:04** - (Chris Clarke): This was such a great idea.
**0:47:07** - (Alicia Pike): What?
**0:47:08** - (Chris Clarke): Coming here. Okay.
**0:47:09** - (Alicia Pike): I'm glad you feel that way.
**0:47:14** - (Chris Clarke): The breeze is picking up, and I'm a little concerned that it's going to just keep getting worse, even with a dead cat.
**0:47:21** - (Alicia Pike): Okay, well, do you want to meander back to the vehicle with the mics hot or not?
**0:47:29** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, let's do that.
**0:47:31** - (Alicia Pike): All right.
**0:47:32** - (Chris Clarke): That is just absolutely stunning, the color coordination of the rock and the buckwheat.
**0:47:38** - (Alicia Pike): Right. It's like they coordinated their outfits.
**0:47:42** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.
**0:47:43** - (Alicia Pike): Those trees smell divine. I'm going to have to bring others to experience it. Got a few friends visiting soon. Hopefully they will still be I don't know. At the rate that they're blooming and falling, it looks like we've probably got another couple of weeks.
**0:48:05** - (Chris Clarke): Yes. Show off.
**0:48:09** - (Alicia Pike): Right. He's on his pulpit singing the sermon to the canyon.
**0:48:20** - (Chris Clarke): They're raving all the way at the top of this ridge. Sitting very prettily on a boulder on top of the ridge.
**0:48:28** - (Alicia Pike): What would you call that? A promontory. I'm trying to find all the fancy words for the spot he's sitting on.
**0:48:33** - (Chris Clarke): Promontory.
**0:48:34** - (Alicia Pike): There's a biblical term about what is it on the Mount.
**0:48:38** - (Chris Clarke): Oh, he's doing the Sermon on the Mount.
**0:48:40** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah.
**0:48:41** - (Chris Clarke): Blessed are the cheese bringers.
**0:48:45** - (Alicia Pike): Trash is thine gold in the world of bounty. Trash is our currency. I don't know what he would be saying, but praise all ye tourists who come to give us trash.
**0:49:01** - (Chris Clarke): All right, we are back at the car, and I have one last thing I got wrong about the desert.
**0:49:05** - (Alicia Pike): What's that?
**0:49:06** - (Chris Clarke): I moved here, I thought I would never find a community of like minded.
**0:49:10** - (Alicia Pike): Souls, even with five that Joshua Tree branded with.
**0:49:17** - (Chris Clarke): Well, when I moved to the desert, I moved to Nipton, so it was a lot smaller. When you met me, I was complaining about it was more of the romantic relationship kind of thing, but I just was having trouble picturing really fitting in here. And it's home now.
**0:49:36** - (Alicia Pike): So was I. I'm glad we figured we could fit in together.
**0:49:40** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.
**0:49:41** - (Alicia Pike): All these years later, now we're doing this great podcast and sharing the desert love. Let me see if I can think of any last minute things I got wrong about the desert. Things I've gotten wrong about the desert. Number one, you can never drink enough water. And for me, the ultimate sign that I am drinking enough water is that it's running through me. And I'm peeing very quickly after drinking that water.
**0:50:06** - (Alicia Pike): If your body is taking anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half or 2 hours or more to pee after you drink 12oz of water, pay attention to that. It's important.
**0:50:17** - (Chris Clarke): And as you're doing that, you want to bring salt in, because one of the things I got wrong about the desert is I didn't realize that hyponatremia exists. So you want salty snacks. It's way easier to get hyponatremia than you think. That's basically you drink so much that it washes the sodium out of you. But it's really easy to take sodium into your body, and it's an excuse to bring potato chips on your hike.
**0:50:45** - (Alicia Pike): Or any other of your favorite salty snacks like almonds or beef jerky or.
**0:50:50** - (Chris Clarke): Just a shot glass full of soy sauce.
**0:50:54** - (Alicia Pike): Oh, yeah. Some straight salt and pepper on a hard boiled egg.
**0:50:59** - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.
**0:51:06** - (Alicia Pike): I wonder if it picked up that.
**0:51:09** - (Chris Clarke): I'm sure it did. I can capture it.
**0:51:11** - (Alicia Pike): That's beautiful.
**0:51:14** - (Chris Clarke): I think we've got another episode in the can here.
**0:51:17** - (Alicia Pike): Yeah.
**0:51:18** - (Chris Clarke): Please check out our other episodes 90 Miles from Needles.com. We will keep you apprised of our progress in getting that nonprofit established. We're really looking forward to that. If you want to be kept abreast of what's happening with the podcast, check out our newsletter. Just go to Nine 0 Mile From Needles.com newsletter, and you can subscribe there. It's a substac. That's because we're hipsters.
**0:51:48** - (Chris Clarke): And once again, I am Chris Clarke.
**0:51:53** - (Alicia Pike): And I'm Alicia Pike signing off our channel.
(Chris Clarke) We hope you've enjoyed this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. The episode was produced by Alicia Pike and Chris Clarke and edited by Chris. Special thanks to Martín Mancha for our podcast artwork.
This is the first time since we've launched that we don't have any new subscribers. If you want to become the first one in the while, check us out at nine zero miles from needles.com/donate or text the word "needles" to 53555. Thanks for listening!