S3E5: Protecting the Great Bend of the Gila

[UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT]
0:00:08 - (Joe G): Think the deserts are barren wastelands. Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. You.
0:00:30 - (Chris): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to another episode of 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and today I'm thinking back about 30 years to, I'm pretty sure it was 1990, and I was driving my ancient Volkswagen pickup truck, which was even then, at least 30 years old, toward organ pipe cactus national monument. I was going through a small town at night, and a couple of local police pulled me over. They informed me that my taillights were not working.
0:01:09 - (Chris): In fact, the lights were working as designed. Like I said, it was an old truck instead of the normal twelve volt electrical system that we're all used to. This one, built in 1960, had a six volt system. And what that means in real world terms is that the brightest those taillights ever got was sort of a warm candlelight. So after asking the police if it was okay if I got out of the truck, I walked to the back of the truck and cupped my hands over the lights to show the officers that the lights were in fact glowing as they were supposed to, looking for all the world like faint embers and a dying campfire. Those officers were evidently car guys, and so they were kindly disposed toward me, and they just suggested that I stop driving until morning for my own safety.
0:02:03 - (Chris): Now, there was a motel a quarter mile up the road, and so I stayed there until the sun came up. I will confess that I slept inside my sleeping bag on top of the unbothered bedspread because the place was just faintly sketchy. And that was my first encounter with Gila Bend, Arizona. Gila Bend is a town southwest of Phoenix, Arizona. It's home to just under 2000 residents. In fact, there is an elaborately designed sign at the town's off ramp from Interstate eight that reads, quote, Gila Bend, arizona, home of 1917, friendly people and five old crabs.
0:02:53 - (Chris): The sign goes on to list the aforementioned old crabs by name, and I can't help but suspect those five people insisted they be named as a point of pride. I certainly would have. Now, Gila Bend is a bit weather beaten. That motel where I stayed back three decades ago burned down in 2021, which, on the bright side, ended a string of one star yelp reviews. The rest of the town is still standing, and you can tell there's not a lot of money walking around in Gila Bend.
0:03:26 - (Chris): But the people who live there, in my experience, are as friendly as that sign claims. Gila Bend is named for a large, sweeping curve in the course of the Gila river near town. The Gila river rises in the Black Mountains in New Mexico, hard up against the continental divide, and ends up flowing into the Colorado river near Yuma, Arizona. And now that I think of it, flowing might not always be precisely the right word.
0:03:57 - (Chris): The Gila has been dammed and diverted like most southwestern streams of its size. But before the advent of the dams, things were different on the Gila. The river and its tributaries drain a huge portion of the state of Arizona from Flagstaff to Tucson and bits of both New Mexico and Sonora. With that big of a watershed, there was enough water in the river that the lower river was once navigable by riverboat all the way to Phoenix.
0:04:27 - (Chris): It's not at all surprising that native people such as the Akamala autumn and the Tajono autumn relied on the river for their livelihoods and well being. The stretch of the river near Gila Bend, in fact, possesses many thousands of significant cultural sites, and their locations are mainly closely guarded by tribes and their supporters in the anthropological community. That said, that special form of landscape conversion, usually referred to as civilization, is encroaching on the area.
0:05:01 - (Chris): Most of the land south of Gila Bend are protected by the Department of Defense, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. And then areas to the north, along interstate ten, are some of the fastest sprawling suburbs in the western US. The land around Gila Bend, in other words, is in a vice, and it's getting squeezed hard. Even on Bureau of Land Management lands, which are theoretically immune from urban development, destructive recreation, such as target shooting in petroglyph areas, is becoming more and more of a threat.
0:05:36 - (Chris): For the last few years, people who care about the natural and cultural resources near Gila Bend have advocated that the area be protected more strongly. And lately, a coalition of groups has been urging the Biden administration to establish the great Bend of the Gila National Monument, which would protect around 330,000 acres of the landscape. And I wanted to learn more about this campaign and the land that it would protect.
0:06:03 - (Chris): And that's how I ended up in early February, clambering unsteadily across a rough tumble of angular lava boulders west of town. I was with two advocates of the new monument, and we'll let them introduce themselves. But first I'll just note quickly that you will hear loud jets flying overhead at a couple of points as we talk. And ordinarily I would have asked people to stop talking until the jet passed or asked them to repeat themselves when the noise had died down. But those jets are important to the story, and we will explain that shortly.
0:06:36 - (Skylar): My name is Skylar Begay. I'm Dene, and I'm also Mandana Hadatza. I was born on the Navajo nation and grew up there and then moved to Flagstaff as a teenager and graduated high school there and then made my way down to Phoenix to go to ASU and then eventually ended up in Tucson, where I live now. So I've kind of been migrating south over the years. But I used to work for the Arizona Conservation Corps for many years.
0:07:17 - (Skylar): It was my first job. And growing up on the Navajo Nation, I was just always outside because there's not much to do out there aside from herd sheep and go climb on the rocks, and then when it gets dark, you come home. So that was kind of my childhood. So I just loved being outside all the time. And I learned a lot of skills that are useful in conservation because of that, as far as using chainsaws and other hand tools and knowing how to carry myself in the outdoors and what to look out for, things like that. So I was just very comfortable in that space.
0:07:54 - (Skylar): So I joined the corps and then eventually started leading crews of my own. At the time, Arizona Conservation Corps started what's called ancestral lands. Ancestral lands is now its own conservation corps, but back then it was just some crews run out of the Flagstaff office. And so that was comprised of all indigenous youth. So I started learning about other tribes, started learning how to sort of be responsible for a crew of eight people and a Ford expedition and a gear trailer.
0:08:34 - (Skylar): It amazes me now thinking back, like, they put this 20 year old in charge of eight people and that much gear. So I did that for basically my whole undergrad at ASU. I would go study in the fall and spring, then go out to Grand Canyon to lead crews in the summer, and got my experience in conservation from that. Graduated and became a field assistant for archaeology southwest. I lived out here for about four months.
0:09:03 - (Skylar): We would camp out here for four days and do survey and find sites, document sites. So that was kind of my crash course in archaeology. And then I got an email from Aaron one day saying, arc Southwest has a fellowship program and I think you should apply. And so I did. And then that's how I became involved again with the respect great Bend campaign and trying to protect great bend of the Gila. So I've been at it now for just over three years.
0:09:33 - (Mike): My name is Mike Quigley. I'm the Arizona state director for the Wilderness Society. I grew up on the mid Atlantic Delaware and Philadelphia, which didn't have a lot of access to vast open spaces or native wildlife or that sort of know the birds and the squirrels in the backyard of our subdivision. That was my wildlife experience growing up. And I happened to be a double major in school. I was a biology major and then an English lit major as well.
0:10:02 - (Mike): I've always enjoyed both sides of that, the liberal arts side as well as the hard science side of just learning about the world. And I ended up moving to Tucson in the late 1990s, fell in love with the Sonaran desert. I still remember one of the first couple of times I'd be driving to work in the morning, and I'd look up and see sunlight glinting off something on top of some mountain pretty far away. And I'd look it up, and I'm like, oh, that's like 100 miles from here. And just that idea that one could see 100 miles was really cool.
0:10:35 - (Mike): I was working in the private sector here and then in my spare time, trying to educate myself about this new place that I'd moved to. So I was going to Sierra club meetings. I was doing birding trips with Tucson Audubon society and checking out books and volunteering at the Arizona Sonaran Desert Museum. I would look around at these beautiful desert spaces on a hike or a bird trip, and then someone would mention the compromine that was proposed to go in on the other side of the ridge or the development that was proposed to take this parcel of land and convert it.
0:11:08 - (Mike): And hearing those sorts of things, it wasn't the type of thing I just brushed out of my mind. It would stick with me after the hike or the bird trip, and I'd start thinking about, well, I don't know if I particularly agree that that's the best thing that can happen. How can I help with the effort to conserve what I like about where I've moved and where I live? And so over time, I found myself trying to incorporate learning about the natural world, learning about the politics of how we care for public lands. Like when I realized the forest Service was in the department of Agriculture, I was older and shocked. And then I realized, like, oh, right, because timber as a crop.
0:11:43 - (Mike): So that kind of awakening and realization and education was happening at the same time that I was getting pretty burned out on living a cubicle lifestyle, nine to five job. And then an opportunity presented itself with a local environmental group here in Tucson called Sky Island Alliance. I applied, and for reasons I still don't understand, they hired me, and I worked there for seven years. And learned a ton about the desert, about how to handle oneself in the backcountry, how to read maps, how to go to Capitol Hill and talk to elected officials. It was a really intense period of education that I'm super happy I had the chance to do that.
0:12:21 - (Mike): And then around 2010, the Wilderness Society, I had met several people that worked there when I was with Skyline alliance, and they were looking for someone to help out with some of their work in Arizona. And so I was fortunate enough to make the transition and start working for the wilderness society at that point in time, which, ironically, was on a campaign in this very landscape that back then was called Sonaran Desert Heritage.
0:12:42 - (Mike): And we had been making a lot of really good progress on that. We had a lot of good support. And then for political reasons, it didn't happen, and it got put on the shelf for a while. But I don't like to give up on stuff. So it was always in the back of my head, one of these days, we're going to have to go back and finish that unfinished business. And so a couple of years later, I guess about three years ago, when you were joining Archaeology southwest, I went to talk to Archaeology southwest because we knew they were active in the area. They'd been a previous partner of ours on Star Desert heritage.
0:13:16 - (Mike): We kind of lost touch. I wanted to know, are you all still working out there? What do you think? And it sounded like, yeah, they were definitely still working out here, as Skylar mentioned, documenting all the glyph sites on other things. So we started to think, maybe we take another run at conserving this part of Arizona. And that became the genesis of the current great bend of the Hila national monument effort.
0:13:39 - (Chris): Now, this is as good a point as any to talk about the nature of national monuments and how they're created. National monuments are often confused with national parks, and with good reason. They are pretty similar on paper. National parks are set up to preserve an entire place, an entire landscape with many, many different things in it. Think Yellowstone, and there's geysers and there's bears, and there's waterfalls, and there's picturesque rivers and mountains.
0:14:05 - (Chris): National monuments, according to the law, are set up to protect one or two prominent, important objects. So think the Statue of Liberty, devil's Tower, places like that. Objects can be defined very loosely. It can be a landscape. Sequoia National Monument was set up to protect a sequoia ecosystem. There's a lot of fuzziness around the edges. The big difference these days is that Congress alone can establish a national park.
0:14:34 - (Chris): National monuments can be established either through Congress or by presidential proclamation under the authority of the Antiquities act. Ideally, if we had a better political climate, we would run national monument proposals through Congress, and that, if successful, would show that there was broad nationwide support, or at least enough to get something through Congress. It's a more politically bulletproof way of getting land protected.
0:14:58 - (Chris): If it goes through Congress, it least has the support of a significant number of the american people. And obviously, that's not going to work these days, since the House of Representatives majority party can't even agree on how to tie their shoes. And so activists that want to preserve an area as a national monument generally get a champion to introduce what's called a marker bill into Congress. A marker bill is a piece of proposed legislation that no one expects to pass.
0:15:25 - (Chris): It's introduced just to show that the local member of Congress has enough public backing that they can support the idea without a lot of political fallout, which means that a monument designation won't blow up in the executive branch's face. Once that Marker bill is introduced, the president can designate the area as a national monument through the Antiquities act. I've worked on several different monument proposals, and these days, they're pretty much all the same process.
0:15:51 - (Chris): You got to build the public support, you enlist a champion in Congress, and then you go through the Antiquities act to get it designated. We go side hilling across the lava stream cliff face, and it's easy to see why local advocates think this place is worthy of protection as a national monument. The petroglyphs in particular are just absolutely stunning. I follow Skylar and Mike into a little protected area with an extremely large rock face covered with rock images.
0:16:23 - (Chris): What are we looking at here, Skylar?
0:16:25 - (Skylar): This is a pretty large panel, has a lot of different age glyphs. Over time, the igneous rock develops what was referred to as a patina. Some people call it desert varnish, basically a black accumulation that grows on the rocks. Over time. You can see where the rock is cracked off. In places, you can see the natural color of the igneous is that kind of dull gray, and then it becomes black over time.
0:16:57 - (Skylar): When people in the past put these petroglyphs down, what they were doing basically is using another rock, and they would redirect percussion, basically pecking. Put down these petroglyphs. So over time, the patina grows back on the petroglyphs, and that can give you sort of a date relative to other petroglyphs on the same panel, like, which ones are older, which ones are newer, depending on how much of the varnish has come back.
0:17:25 - (Skylar): So you can see here there's some really dark ones that are almost the same color as the rock itself. And then on top of that, there are some that are a little bit brighter. So you can affer that they were put down after the darker ones. And then you can see most of the vandalism that's done looks like it's done with some sort of sharp instrument. So rather than pecking by hitting, people are scraping most of the time when they do their graffiti. And you can kind of see that in the stroke of their lines, when you see some of the size of some of these glyphs and the quality of the glyph, how much they've removed from the rock, just to make, like, a circle or something. The size of your hand would take 1530 minutes, maybe more.
0:18:10 - (Skylar): So when you see some of these glyphs that are 6ft tall and 6ft wide, you wonder how much time somebody put into putting it down. We kind of refrained from using the term rock art nowadays, most people are moving towards rock imagery, but when I've spoken with other people from tribes, they say, this is like, it's not art, it's more like a library of information, because there are knowledge holders who know what these things mean, how to interpret them.
0:18:47 - (Skylar): But I never personally try to interpret them because I don't have that knowledge. So even if you see something, it looks like a bighorn sheep without the context of the culture, you could just be totally misinterpreting it. And some of them, they're more abstract designs, circles and lines and things like that. What we've done, studying them and documenting them, is just to get a baseline of the quality and the state of them, so that when we see vandalism in the future, we can have a good idea of what's taking place out here.
0:19:29 - (Chris): Just a quick note. It's understandable when we're talking about rock images that may be centuries, or in fact millennia, are tens of millennia old, that we would speak about the creators of those images in the past tense, that's appropriate. But speaking about native people in the past tense in general, is a bad habit that a lot of us have that we need to break. Especially in a place like Arizona, where tribes still exercise sovereignty, they still have cultural continuity, they still have thriving governments and people that those governments, at least theoretically, take care of and those tribes enjoy.
0:20:06 - (Chris): That's not the right word, but let's go with it. They enjoy legal status as sovereign nations equivalent to that of the United States. They're still very much here, in fact. And speaking about them in the present or future tense is a good idea. There are 13 of those present day sovereign tribal nations that have connections, either historical or current, to the living landscape of the great bend of the Gila area.
0:20:33 - (Chris): They are the Akchin indian community, the Cocopa indian tribe, the Colorado river indian tribes, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, the Fort Mojave indian tribe, the Fort Yuma Katsan Indian tribe, the Gila river indian community, the Hopi tribe, the Pueblo Zuni, the Salt River Pima Maricopa indian community, the Tohono Autumn Nation, the Yavapai Apache Nation, and the Yavapai Prescott indian tribe. And, of course, that listing shouldn't be taken to mean that all those tribes support the monument effort.
0:21:08 - (Chris): The process of getting tribal support is ongoing, and not all of them have had a chance to go through the formal decision making process yet. Let's get back and explain what those jets are doing.
0:21:20 - (Mike): I don't know if your microphone is picking it up, but while we've been talking, a couple of jets have flown overhead. The loud ones are f 16s out of Luke Air Force Base, which is just to the northeast of us here. And they are flying back and forth between Luke Air Force Base and the Barry Goldwater Gunnery range, which is south of the monument proposal. So they're basically flying over the monument and having that clean land below them is an advantage for Luke one, because it's loud when the jets fly over, and as more and more people move under the flight path, they get more and more noise complaints, and then they have to deviate flight plans or deal with it.
0:21:57 - (Mike): The other aspect here is they're headed to the Barry Goldwater range, which is a million acre plus piece of Sonaran Desert south of us. That is a live fire range for the Marine Corps and the air force and people. Our allies come from all over the world to train here and to train there. And one of the big encroachment threats for the Barry Goldwater range is endangered species concerns. One of the examples that we use here as a cautionary tale is Camp Pendleton. Back in the day, there was a lot of great coastal southern California habitat. There was native wildlife that lived in that habitat, and over decades, most of it got chopped up and fragmented and transitioned into other uses, development or housing.
0:22:39 - (Mike): And so the only remaining intact southern California coastal habitat, most of it's on Camp Pendleton. Where are all the animals that depend on that habitat type? Now they're forced onto Camp Pendleton. There are fewer of them because there's less habitat space. So now a lot of them get listed as threatened and endangered, and then who gets the management responsibility for that? The Department of Defense, not the people that cause the problem.
0:23:03 - (Mike): So we're looking at the Goldwater Range here, and the big charismatic animal species in this part of the world that's probably most at risk is the sonar and pronghorn. At one point in the 1990s, the number of individual sonar and pronghorn animals in the United States and southern Arizona, you could probably count them on the fingers of both hands. There's a larger population south of the border in Mexico, but in the United States, it was grim.
0:23:30 - (Mike): And the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Defense, and the Arizona Game and Fish Department started a captive breeding program on the Cabeza Prietta National Wildlife Refuge. When the captive breeding program started to become successful, they've been releasing animals into the wild, and that population has rebounded. So now I believe there are a few hundred Sonaran pronghorn in the wild in southern Arizona. It's a great success conservation story in the great Bend of the Gila. If this gets developed or disposed or turned into other uses where it's no longer suitable for a starring desert pronghorn, that's a loss of their native habitat.
0:24:04 - (Mike): And so if they come to depend on the native habitat of the Barry Goldwater range, that's a potential Camp pendleton problem waiting to happen. So we're looking at this landscape. Besides the cultural values that are here and historical values that are here and the wildlife values that are here, we're looking at preserving the same habitat type in the great bend of the gila, immediately across the interstate from Barry Goldwater, as effectively a no cost conservation easement for the Department of Defense.
0:24:32 - (Mike): The Cabeza Preeto Captive breeding program was so successful, they opened a second captive breeding program on the Kofa refuge, which is immediately adjacent to us, to our west. And sonar and Pronghorn are notorious for being skittish about crossing roads. And interstate eight is between Kofa and Cabeza Prietta. The kofa breeding pen, doing releases of animals into the wild, too, for a number of years, is creating a second population of sonar and pronghorn north of interstate eight.
0:25:01 - (Mike): And this area of the grape end of the Gila is their type of property, and I'm pretty sure they're already moving into here. And if they're not, as that herd gets larger, this is certainly an area that can support storm pronghorn, and that would be one of its best uses.
0:25:19 - (Skylar): I was wondering Chris, about your thoughts on just doing this little walk here and hike.
0:25:26 - (Chris): I'm just so glad to have a chance to see this, to be in the presence of reminders like this, that there are people that have known this place far better than I ever will, and that they've been here living with the desert and helping to shape the desert before it was even a desert. I've just seen so many pieces of land get protected with intense tribal input and activism, especially in the last few years.
0:25:55 - (Mike): I happened to come out last year. Vice President Harris, Secretaries Holland and Grand Holme were out for the ten West Link transmission line groundbreaking, which is on the north side of Saddle Mountain. The whole deal is it's supposed to be taking solar energy from Arizona to California. I was there for the groundbreaking because when ten Westlink was being planned, the wilderness society was pretty heavily engaged in trying to steer it away from the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge and other sensitive lands and find a routing that wouldn't be too damaging. And we prevailed with the project proponent. And in fact, the line, as approved and as it's being built, does avoid kofa, follows interstate ten.
0:26:36 - (Mike): So we got invited to the groundbreaking, which was a super fun thing to do. But while I was standing there watching the podium and the vice president over her shoulder is saddle Mountain. And I got talking to one of the engineers from the project later in the day on the bus ride back to the parking lot, and I said, you know, that's the groundbreaking. When do you think you'll have power going down the line? And he said, oh, I think we'll probably be throwing the switch sometime in 2024, like we're moving.
0:27:02 - (Mike): And then it occurred to me it would be a great thing for President Biden to come out, flip the switch to send renewable power down this new transmission line, and at the same time do the great bend of the hill, a national monument, to show that there are multiple ways that public lands can address the climate crisis. Yes, you hear every day about how wind and solar energy development and transmission is a suitable use of public lands and necessary for addressing the climate crisis.
0:27:30 - (Mike): But also important is intact habitat for native species, wildlife movement. Also important is riparian systems. Also important is having places like the desert of the great bend of the Gila for us humans to go into, to recreate and find solace and connection with other people and with the land. And they're both happening right here in this little patch of Arizona. So to me, I was just sitting there thinking, like, these stories get told in isolation. These stories, I don't think I've heard them told in the same piece. And wouldn't it be nice if we did a preservation action at the same time we were taking advantage of the renewable energy opportunity that this landscape provides.
0:28:15 - (Mike): So, I don't know, maybe if that happens, you can come out for that.
0:28:19 - (Chris): Yeah, I'd really like to do that. And it occurs to me that if this area isn't protected, this is pretty much what the preferred alternative in the solar Peis would direct solar development to.
0:28:34 - (Mike): Yeah, that's a good point. One thing that we get asked sometimes is like, well, it's already public land. Isn't that Protection? Why do you need a national monument? Why do you need some other conservation designation overlay? And the answer to that is the Bureau of Land Management. Their mission is decidedly multiple use. And so it's not conservation first. And our view is that there are places where intensive recreational use might be appropriate. There are places where solar development might be appropriate, and then there are places where the highest and best use of that landscape is preservation for the cultural and natural history that it embodies.
0:29:15 - (Mike): And we think a place like great Bend of the Gila is one of those places and deserves a higher standard of protection. So when people say, oh, it's already public land, it'll be fine. No, not necessarily. And that's why we're doing what we're doing.
0:29:33 - (Skylar): Yeah, I think something that happens over and over again when it comes to protecting desert landscapes is that we're often not proactive. We're reactive. We hear about some sort of mine that wants to go in or any kind of development that wants to go in, extractive use or whatever it may be. And then we put together our activists and we do our grassroots organizing, and we fight in courts often, and we tie up an already bogged down system.
0:30:03 - (Skylar): And here we have an opportunity to be proactive and protect it while it's still in its natural state. For the vast majority of this land, it's pristine sonoran desert.
0:30:18 - (Chris): And that about wraps up this episode of 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. And I want to thank both Skylar Begay and Mike Quigley for joining me out near Gila Bend, giving me a tour and talking to me about the proposed great bend of the Gila National Monument. If you want to learn more, you can go to the campaign's website@respectgreatbend.org, I also want to thank brandy Wood for joining us on Patreon at the Mojave Green rattler level with $20 a month it's a lovely, generous commitment.
0:30:49 - (Chris): I am, as some of you will remember, just recently back from a trip throughout the southwest deserts, at least the warm part of the southwest deserts, spoke to a lot of people, put together about four or five more episodes that are in process. And I have to say I emerged from this trip newly charged up to report on and advocate for these desert lands. Witnessing the beauty and fragility of the desert ecosystems, as different as they are, ignited a renewed commitment within me. I did a lot of sightseeing, but it's not just about observing.
0:31:24 - (Chris): What I want to do is advocate on their behalf. These deserts, with their unique challenges, deserve our attention and protection. Traveling across them, you see how the different kinds of desert are related, how they differ, just how one grades into the other. You see the commonalities, you see the differences. And that's true of both the natural landscape and the people. I am, after this trip, even more committed to building this podcast and the desert advocacy media network, and you can help. In fact, I won't be able to do it without your help.
0:31:55 - (Chris): If you go to 90 miles from needles.com donate, you can give through Patreon, which will get you a little bit of swag, or you can give through givebutter, where we get all of the donations that you make. Thank you for checking it out. I'd also like to thank Joe Geoffrey, as usual, our voiceover guy. I'd like to thank Martin Mancha for our podcast artwork. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio, and in weeks to come you'll hear episodes on border politics, on the attempt to push an interstate highway through protected land near Tucson, on a small organization doing exciting and inspiring land preservation work in the chihuahuan desert near El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, and any number of other places that are worth defending. We are very excited about the next few weeks.
0:32:46 - (Chris): Thanks for listening. We will see you at the next watering hole. Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.