S1E12: What's Happening to the Monsoon?

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Alicia): This podcast was made possible by the generous support of our Patreon patrons. They provide us with the resources we need to produce each episode. You can join them at 90miles from needles.com Patreon.

0:00:25 - (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.

0:00:45 - (Chris): It's that time in the desert when the temperature, which had been in the comfortable 70s and 80s and low 90s, suddenly reaches for the triple digits where the sun gets up well before you want to get up. The annual plants, if there are any, have long since dried out. The wealth of pollinating insects and little critters that eat pollinating insects and animals that enjoy the more temperate climes of winter in the desert have retreated for the north or burrowed down into the ground.

0:01:19 - (Chris): My friends, it is hot. In other places where there's more rainfall and thus more vegetation, that vegetation transpires water. It takes liquid water and evaporates it into water vapor. And as anyone with an evaporative cooler or one of those old school canvas water bags that you hang on the front of your car knows well, evaporating water cools the surroundings. This is why fancy desert restaurants with outdoor patios put on misters in the summer.

0:01:48 - (Chris): In the desert though, there's a lot less vegetation, and the vegetation that's there tends to not transpire any more water than it has to. Water becomes currency and vegetation holds onto it tightly, and so there is no hydrological trickery to hide the fact that it is hot. There is nothing to shade the ground from soaking up all of the heat. The sun bakes the earth, the earth bakes the sky. It's only in the hour or so on either side of the sun crossing the horizon in whichever direction you prefer that there is some semblance of comfort to be had out in the desert.

0:02:29 - (Chris): Now, I say this as someone that likes the heat, and we will talk about this in the very next episode, but even I have to admit that the temperature has gotten less conducive to outdoor productivity, to to digging holes or pruning trees or going on hikes or bicycling up 4,000 foothills. This is a temperature that you need to take care in, and the wildlife knows this. You'll see lizards out in the morning.

0:02:58 - (Chris): Why, just this morning as I record this, we had a very handsome 10-inch-long desert iguana lurking behind me as I carried pails of water to the nopalis along the chain link fence, watering each one in turn. I was clearly a monster, but I was carrying a large amount of liquid water and thus merited some close attention. When I had the chance, I picked a handful of delicious desert willow blossoms off of the tree blooming in the side yard, threw them to the iguana.

0:03:28 - (Chris): Desert willow blossoms are desert iguana's favorite food, or among them anyway. He seemed a little bit less suspicious of me, though still generally and wisely mistrustful of my motives. And he was out later than any other animal I saw in the yard. Other than the omnipresent ants. The temperature crested 98 Fahrenheit. Only those birds who were lucky enough to have found a place underneath the mesquite in the deep shade showed any evidence of being alive at all.

0:03:56 - (Chris): And this is early in the season. I record this in mid-June, the midpoint of June. We haven't even yet started summer, haven't even yet reached the summer solstice. Last year the triple digit temperatures lasted until November, and so we have a lot of baking in store for us this year most likely as well. And what happens when you take an entire region of the planet and heat it up above the ambient temperature that surrounds it?

0:04:23 - (Chris): You get a mass of warm air that wants to rise. The entire desert is a giant updraft. And as nature, like my dog, abhors a vacuum, that rising air has to be replaced by air coming in from the bottom around the sides. In this part of the desert, some of that wind that will come in to replace the air being lost in that updraft blows over large bodies of water, the Gulf of California being the closest one.

0:04:52 - (Chris): A morning's drive away from where I sit right now, the Gulf of Mexico is another couple of days away, a little bit farther away, but much larger. And as the warm air blows over those bodies of water, it absorbs some of that moisture from the sea, rushes into the desert. That moist air reaches the desert in the form of monsoons. It's perhaps a hyperbolic description when it was first applied to the southwestern desert summer storms.

0:05:21 - (Chris): After all, the monsoons in southern Asia last for months at a time, drench entire continents. Our monsoon storms are much smaller, much more precisely targeted, if somewhat randomly. One summer afternoon about eight years ago, I walked outside my house, saw a perfect little cloud like a child's drawing, dumping water directly over the town of Joshua Tree. I whooped in exultation and I ran to get my phone and I took a photo.

0:05:50 - (Chris): And then I drove into town to go to a birthday party. And my friend had sat through the entire storm not noticing the flash flood that went down his street, a testament to the fine herbal products of coastal northwestern California. And some of the joy in that storm went out of me when I learned that the storm had a body count. This happens. The writer Craig Childs has said that the two easiest ways to die in the desert are by way of thirst and drowning.

0:06:22 - (Chris): And that's what he meant. Death in flash floods is of course, tragic. We of course mourn the loss of the people that succumb to flash floods through accident or fluke, or heroism or bad judgment, or just sheer coincidence. And all of this has been the way the desert has been for centuries, for millennia. As random and unpredictable as these monsoons are, we count on them to bring life to the desert.

0:06:51 - (Chris): Native farmers throughout the desert have learned to plant several fields in the outwash of small canyons that have played host to monsoonal floods. Plant those beans far enough away for from the canyon mouth that they don't just get torn out by the first flood to come along, but close enough that they get some of the seepage and groundwater, maybe even a little surface flow. Monsoonal floods may fill a canyon Only once every 75 years or so, but they will reliably fill a canyon somewhere nearby every year, or at least they used to.

0:07:29 - (Chris): We don't know what's going to happen with a monsoon. The climate scientists best guess is that there will be less water overall. Some say that there may be more in an individual storm. Storms may be stronger, they may be more destructive, they may be less amenable to harnessing from native agriculture. We just really don't know what's going to happen. What we do know is climate change has been happening in the desert for a while.

0:07:56 - (Chris): The horrendous heat waves and firestorms, floods and other catastrophes that are being experienced by the rest of the world. The desert has been seeing its equivalent of those disasters for some years now. Climate change is here. The traditional monsoon, predictable in its unpredictability, reliable in its randomness, may well be dead. Those of us in the desert can only wait and watch and see what could comes next and do our best to prepare to live with a new reality.

0:08:30 - (Alicia): So it's pretty much official now. Climate change has happened. It is happening, and it's going to get worse. The sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as IPCC 6 basically said that we've already locked in enough warming to make things like the hurricanes, wildfires and droughts we've experienced the last few years even worse every year until the middle of this century, no matter what we do.

0:09:00 - (Chris): IPCC 6 actually held out a glimmer of hope, though. If we get our act together in a hurry and essentially become carbon neutral by 2050, in other words, we stop adding new greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The scientists say climate disasters might not keep getting even more worse after 2050 Or so if we get Iraq together. Yep, and that's a big if.

0:09:24 - (Chris): Of course, IPCC 6 didn't have too many surprises in store for the desert. Climate scientists have been suggesting for a while now that the deserts of the Southwest aren't just getting hotter, they're going to get a lot drier too. And in fact, we've been in what the scientists are starting to call a megadrought. The worst drought in at least 500 years.

0:09:44 - (Alicia): And what rain we do get will come more like all at once.

0:09:49 - (Chris): Yep, less rain total. More rain per storm. That means more destructive storms, more flooding, more runoff, less water staying in the soil for desert plants.

0:10:02 - (Alicia): That's what some of us are seeing already in the desert. Those who are paying attention and are exposed to the desert climate are very aware of how rapidly the climate is changing. And there are few people who pay closer attention to that than Jan Emming. For 22 years he's tracked temperature, precipitation and other aspects of the climate at his Desert Sense nursery in Yucca, Arizona. We first went to Visit Jan in 2021. His place is amazing.

0:10:34 - (Alicia): It's in a part of Arizona where both Joshua trees and saguaros grow wild. His Property is about 20 miles off the pavement across some of the most beautiful lush desert around, surrounded by mountains of varnished boulders. So yah, tell us about how you ended up here in Yucca, Arizona.

0:10:54 - (Jan Emming): I've had a lifelong love affair with deserts. For some reason I always had an affinity for cacti, succulents and just dry land plants. I had this notion that it would be really cool to create a big desert garden and maybe open it to the public in the long run. By the time I was about 26, 27 years old, I was thinking, if you are going to make a run at this desert garden thing, then maybe you should be doing that in your 30s and 40s and not waiting until you retire.

0:11:28 - (Jan Emming): It took me about two years to find this property where saguaros were growing together with Joshua trees. I was just absolutely Mesmerized because I did not know that could happen, that there was a zone in Arizona where those two species grew together. This is a Sonoran and Mojave Desert transitional zone where the two deserts come together. The flagship species of the Mojave is the Joshua tree. The saguaro cactus is emblematic of the Sonoran Desert.

0:12:01 - (Jan Emming): And I said, oh, this is awesome. I love this. These Joshua trees were just magnificent. They were enormous. They were like 2-foot-thick trunks, 30ft tall with 200 heads. Just some of the best Joshua trees I'd ever seen. And then there were saguaros growing on the rock outcrops and the mountains nearby. There are ocotillos, there's barrel cactus, there's a whole bunch of different succulent species.

0:12:32 - (Alicia): Can you speak to over your time here in 21 years how you've noticed the patterns changing?

0:12:38 - (Jan Emming): I've been measuring my own rainfall since I moved here in 1999 and I've gotten a long term average now of around 9 inches a year. Some years have been a lot wetter than that. 2004, 2005, I got 21 inches over that winter. And then the driest year was 2020 and 2021 where I got two and a half inches of rain in 17 months. And that is far below normal. And it was killing stuff. I have noticed a change in the summers offering less rainfall than they used to.

0:13:20 - (Jan Emming): The first eight to 10 years I had what would be expected to be a normal summer monsoon offering 3 and 4 inches of rain. In the 70s and 80s and even the early 90s, it was very common for the monsoon to pop up almost daily, maybe every other day, and the rains would be anywhere between a tenth of an inch and a quarter of an inch almost daily. And now there are long dry spells and when it does rain, it is more likely to rain very heavily, but then not rain again for weeks on end.

0:13:55 - (Jan Emming): And I've noticed exactly that pattern happening here. The rainfall is being concentrated in a few storms rather than more frequent storms with lower amounts. It is actually more useful to the plants if you get four 1 inch storms rather than one 4 inch storm. This year we were bone dry with the exception of that January snowstorm up until July. And then the monsoon started coming in and the pattern set in and it didn't move.

0:14:27 - (Jan Emming): And much of southeastern Arizona has received the wettest monsoon it has ever had.

0:14:33 - (Chris): In fact. In fact, when that monsoon hit in July, Jan posted some exultant video to social media. You can really tell just how relieved he was to get the first real rain in over a year.

0:14:46 - (Jan Emming): Well, looks like we have a thunderstorm. I think I better go inside. Look at all this water. It is amazing. This is awesome. This is really helping with the drought around here. This is crazy. How much rain is pouring off the roof? Can you hear it?

0:15:21 - (Chris): And we'll be back after the break.

0:16:10 - (Bouse Parker): You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. Friends don't let friends release mylar balloons.

0:16:29 - (Chris): Since we spoke with Jan, it really has just gotten to be more of the same. We are sitting here right now almost mid June 2022, and I just checked the rainfall totals for 29 palms, where we both live. And at least the weather station nearest my house has had a drop less than 1 1/5 inches of rain in the last year since the beginning of June 2021. That's just above 1/6 of the average, which is already pretty sparse. Six inches of rain a year is, I'd say about a seventh of the typical average rain within the US and it's also interesting to look at the number of rainy days that we had in the last year.

0:17:23 - (Chris): And really the number of rainy days is zero because there was no day that was really raining. But the number of days on which it rained at all was 6 in this last year. In this part Of Twentynine Palms, 29 palms is a big place. There's some microclimates, there's a little bit of variation. But here on the east side of Twentynine Palms, there were six days where there was precipitation at all, and the historic average is 21 or 22.

0:17:52 - (Chris): It's been two and a half years since Lara and I moved into this house, and we have had some of the driest years in history here. I don't think it's our fault for moving in here. Most of the rain that we have gotten since we moved here, we got in the first month. There's a really big winter storm that just unloaded on Us, and since then, we've seen monsoons to the west of us and to the south of us. There are places that have gotten more rain in one storm than we have had in the last year and a half.

0:18:30 - (Chris): But those storms cover a small area and maybe you get some downhill flash flooding. I know that there's been snow in the park, in Joshua Tree national park.

0:18:40 - (Alicia): Which I saw, I went and visited the last snowfall. Was that about maybe four months ago, something like that? Yeah.

0:18:47 - (Chris): And it's been so dry here that a lot of that snow very likely sublimated into the air rather than melting and sinking into the soil. When you look at other desert cities, depending on where they are in the desert, some of them get more monsoon rain than others. But we're pretty reliably around a third or a quarter of the rain that we're supposed to have for the last year. And that's concerning. The desert is going to get drier.

0:19:17 - (Chris): And in fact, when we reached out to Jan to see how things have been at his nursery out in Yucca since we interviewed him last year, he told us that 2022 has been almost completely dry so far. And what the monsoon will bring remains a mystery for now. And it's kind of tough imagining what that really means for the living things in the desert.

0:19:42 - (Chris): We're beginning to wonder if it's ever going to rain again because it's just. It's been so dry and it's just so difficult living with no water.

0:19:52 - (Chris): Baghdad, California, which is almost due north of here, probably about 30 miles, that is remembered pretty much only because there was a period in a little bit more than a century ago where there was no precipitation measured for a little bit over two years. And I think we're gonna break that record.

0:20:12 - (Alicia): Yeah. It's funny how in the community groups across the Morongo Basin, there's always this back and forth when a storm is coming. People are asking, is it raining where you are? Is it raining where you are? And everybody I do, I hop right on Facebook and see where the rain is happening. And without fail, there is always comments. Can you please send it over here? Because we want it so bad. But there are areas in the Morongo Basin that reliably get it. Like when you come up the last grade and you're coming into Morongo Valley and Yucca Valley, especially Yucca Valley, that's like a weather tunnel. The people who live right at the top of that grade, they get snow, they get wind, they get rain. Everything dumps down over there. And then as it moves east, it's just tapers off and disappears.

0:21:03 - (Alicia): And we live in that eastern area. And our running joke about where we live is our little valley is where all the storms go to die or go around. We've watched thunderstorms. It's blue sky straight up ahead. And there's storms everywhere else but us. And it's just the strangest thing watching the Morongo Basin with its little micro climates.

0:21:25 - (Chris): Mid 2021, it was monsoon season. And I'd been watching the Doppler radar and there's a storm cell coming towards us from the northeast from the general vicinity of the Grand Canyon. And I was watching it on the Doppler and it got to the Old Woman Mountains, which are not far from here. It's a fairly tall mountain range. And it got hung up on the Old Woman's and broke the storm in half. There's a section that went northward around the north end of the mountains and another section that went around the south end of the mountains.

0:22:01 - (Chris): And then they got around the mountains and they kept going southwest. And we were in between those two storms. One of them went, well to the north of us, the other went to the south of us.

0:22:12 - (Chris): And it was just. I have never really resented a mountain range before. And it's a wonderful mountain range. I'm really glad it's there. But it's just. And even in a place where there is rain predicted throughout the desert, you can have a lot of places in the desert that have no rain whatsoever.

0:22:31 - (Alicia): Can't tell you how many times we've sat there in our valley and watched. And then sometimes the storm comes right for you, which is great. Those are living out here in the desert. I try to explain to people it's like the opposite of winter. Summer is our deadly season. You just stay inside more. Instead of going to turn on your car to warm it up, you turn it on to cool it down 10 minutes before you leave. And the rain, it's just. You take a rain day when you get a serious monsoon. In some cases, our road floods about once a year. That's been the average for the last few years that the water is up to my knees, so I literally can't leave if I wanted to. Rain day ship. That's something to celebrate in the desert.

0:23:16 - (Chris): One of the days on which we got rain last year here was. It was about a third of an inch one day in September. And it was glorious. It's amazing how much a third of an inch can seem like if you haven't had more than a tenth of an inch of rain for a couple years. And we actually had little floods running off the roofs of the house in the garage. And I was out there digging channels to guide the runoff from the roofs toward the fig tree. And I had these grandiose plans when we moved in here that it's going to channel all the runoff. We're going to install eaves, troughs, and rain barrels and get that 6 inches of rain a year.

0:23:53 - (Chris): We've got an acre. That's half an acre foot falling on our yard every year. And nope, not happening. I have swales that I've dug and berms to keep the rain from running into my neighbor's yard. And the thing is, if it is the case that we are only going to get bigger storms and they're going to be farther apart, we need to think about how to adapt to that. And there's a lot of techniques that can come in really handy to contend with the unpredictable rainfall patterns that I kind of adapted for here without knowing what I was doing. And they seem to work when it rains, slowing the water down, getting it to percolate into the ground instead of running off into the street and.

0:24:36 - (Chris): But I'd really like to have it put to the test more.

0:24:40 - (Alicia): You just reminded me of when we get one of those crazy big storms, all of the swales. And none of that matters anymore. Because the county built the road up higher. And so now the water can't flow, which is great because it's trapped and percolating on our five acres and the five acres next door. But all of the earthworks that I've put in, they just. They literally drowned. And there's no. You can try in our yard. You can try and guide the water to the plants.

0:25:13 - (Alicia): But when you start watching the water come up the driveway from the road. And everything around you is flooding into your yard. And then before you know it, everything is underwater. It's pretty disheartening. There's no way to control it. And it's all coming very quickly and very hard. And then it's gone. And all of the thought and effort put into trying to terrascape in our yard. I know that it's different in other yards. Cause there's different microclimates. But. And especially if you live on slopes anywhere, you've got the water running off much easier. But we are at the bottom of an old, ancient lake bed. So we just bask in our lakefront.

0:25:54 - (Chris): Property, build a dock.

0:25:57 - (Alicia): We've had plenty of conversations about how we're going to transform our property into the lakefront oasis. It's no joke. I have kayaked in my yard and down my driveway on more than one occasion. Photos to prove it. I remember the UPS driver driving by on the one road that wasn't flooded. And I'm in my kayak just paddling around and he stopped and the rubberneck like he turned. Is that a person in a kayak?

0:26:23 - (Chris): Yes.

0:26:24 - (Chris): In January 2005, it had been a really wet year and there had been some torrential rainstorms in Death Valley in particular. But throughout the desert it was a really good wildflower year in spring of 05 and then a really bad fire year in the summer and fall of 05. In August 2004, there had been a rainstorm that actually moved a 2 ton outhouse at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley and washed out a bunch of roads. And I was at Badwater again.

0:26:55 - (Chris): My, my favorite place in Badwater. There was a very large lake at the bottom of Death Valley. And I stood there and I thought, I have a kayak at home. Yeah, I could have kayaked in Death Valley.

0:27:10 - (Chris): Yeah.

0:27:11 - (Chris): I am not going to miss the opportunity to do that if it ever comes up again. I have two goals in my life. One is to be there when the old temperature record is broken and two is to kayak at Badwater.

0:27:24 - (Alicia): Oh, you're gonna have to let me know about that because I'm gonna want to go too.

0:27:28 - (Chris): All right. We'll shoot some video.

0:27:29 - (Chris): Yeah. We're sitting here talking about being inundated by water, but that is just really not. That's the cause of celebration. But the day to day life out here with no water is. It's practically unbearable. Practically speaking, it is bearable. We do deal with it.

0:27:47 - (Alicia): It's an interesting thing too, because the first eight hours of rain is glorious. And then after that we start worrying.

0:27:58 - (Alicia): Oh, at our place, it's really only two to three hours. It rains two hours straight, flooding three hours straight. And we've come within a quarter of an inch of the water in the valley coming up to our doorstep to the threshold. And I remember saying to Tad, it has been all fun and games until now because now I'm scared that everything we own is going to get damaged by floodwater. And that's not fun at all.

0:28:25 - (Alicia): When all your life's possessions and everything your home is at risk. It's not fun anymore.

0:28:33 - (Chris): We will be right back after the break.

0:28:37 - (Bouse Parker): Coming soon on 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast.

0:28:42 - (Chris): We are 282ft below sea level. At 7pm the temperature here at Badwater was down all the way to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, about 51 Celsius. I should have brought a sweater.

0:28:57 - (Alicia): My neighbor said, oh, really? There's mylar balloons everywhere. I don't see them. Well, now I've mentioned it to you, you're gonna start seeing them everywhere. You can't drive anywhere in this desert without seeing my large balloons. Stuck a bush.

0:29:11 - (Bouse Parker): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. In a world where everyone wants to visit Joshua Tree, one man and one woman head to, I don't know, somewhere else, maybe Trona.

0:29:24 - (Chris): Thank you for joining us. We are back.

0:29:28 - (Jan Emming): The driest monsoonal year ever in the entire state of Arizona was followed by the wettest monsoon ever in the state of Arizona. And this instability is characteristic of climate change. I'm very concerned about what that means for the fauna and flora out here because these juniper trees are hundreds of years old. These trees are very drought tolerant, but there are limits. And 2020 and 2021 very nearly pushed a lot of these juniper trees over the edge.

0:30:07 - (Jan Emming): I probably lost somewhere around 10% of the trees on my property just due to drought. And they are an important part of the ecosystem here. The berries feed the foxes and the quail and the rodents and various other birds. They provide nesting habitat. They provide just shelter and food. So they're part of the ecosystem. You don't want these trees dying out if you can help it.

0:30:41 - (Alicia): What's really striking to me is that we're discussing climate change. What if it's not climate change anymore, it's actual climate catastrophe? Is it really going to be catastrophe that's going to force us to change? Because when the power runs out, when there is no more clean water, when these things are real and ever present and the reality of every day, we won't have a choice. We'll have to change.

0:31:09 - (Alicia): And that's the sad road that I see us going down, that we're not going to change until we absolutely have to. And that's worst case scenario.

0:31:22 - (Chris): So at this point, after all of this bad news, I'm wondering if Jan is feeling like there's nothing he can do. 

0:31:29 - (Alicia): Nope. Jan is definitely an inspiration. He's got a lot to contribute out there in his nook of the world. Let's get back to the nursery. Jan leads us down a curving path past some unusual construction materials. There are bottles to be used in a bottle wall and Piles of scrap paper to be mixed with concrete for lightweight bricks. We'll look into that more in a later episode. At the end of the path are two percolation basins that could each hold a medium sized suv.

0:32:01 - (Alicia): There are a few inches of murky water in each of them and some algae growing under the algae. The last of the summer's cohort of tadpoles can be seen swimming around. So you've brought us down here to a percolation basin that you've. Have you created this?

0:32:18 - (Jan Emming): Yes.

0:32:18 - (Alicia): Okay.

0:32:18 - (Jan Emming): I started reading about water harvesting techniques From a guy in Tucson named Brad Lancaster. And he talked about using earthworks to harvest water. Basically just channeling water around the landscape to where you want it when there's a surplus of it during a heavy rainstorm. And I said, hey, I happen to just have my well shaft right to the side of one of the flood channels that fills with water every time it rains hard enough.

0:32:45 - (Jan Emming): So I created two flood basins. The larger one that that we're in right now, it's got a bigger watershed. The hard packed surface of Alamo Road collects the water and it just flows across the desert. And before I created this impoundment, it just would continue on down downstream. And then the smaller basin on the other side of the well shaft is mostly water that drains from, like the garden zone up by the house and the driveway, and they converge here.

0:33:14 - (Jan Emming): And that's why I have two different basins. Water that had accumulated here would just sink away over the course of a few days or a week into the ground and recharge the aquifer. This was just supposed to be trap the flood water. And the faster it percolates into the ground, the better, because the faster it percolates, the less I lose to evaporation. But what has happened with every single runoff event, I get more sediment in the basin, and that is retarding the water infiltration.

0:33:45 - (Jan Emming): Now the water stays above ground for a couple of weeks, and it's serving a wildlife function that it didn't before. Red spotted toads, They've been breeding in the ponds for years. This pond would have dried up about 10 days ago, but I started adding water to it with the hose. So I'm just recycling it through the system right now. Tadpoles are swimming around in there. There's only a few left. There used to be several hundred of them, but the majority of them have reached the ability to hop around on land.

0:34:17 - (Jan Emming): And they can be out in the desert from now on. I see you found a baby toad.

0:34:22 - (Alicia): I had Noticed some little gray specks the size of horseflies moving in and out of cracks in the dried mud. When I realized they were toads, I couldn't resist dropping to the ground for a closer look. I shot some video as Jan continued.

0:34:36 - (Jan Emming): You see how small they are? They're like the size of raisins. And they're fully formed little toads. They're hopping around, and they're feeding on little insects. Yeah, I've got a whole generation of toads out here, and you can see dozens of them hopping around. I've been keeping them alive so that they could complete this life cycle. Now that they've left the water, they should be okay. So even if the basin goes completely dry, we've got the whole next generation growing.

0:35:05 - (Jan Emming): And it's not only toads. Bats drink from the water. A couple weeks ago, I photographed a gray fox. I've actually seen a large feline print. It might have been a mountain lion. It looked too big to be a bobcat. And mountain lions do live here. Deer drink from it. Javelina drink. Pigeons, doves, vultures. The water's used by a lot of creatures now that it's here, so, yeah, I don't mind burning a little bit of water. On keeping the toads alive.

0:35:36 - (Chris): The readiness with which Jan shifted from a perspective where he wanted to replenish the aquifer as much as he possibly could for his own purposes to being willing to, as he put it, burn some water to keep the toads alive is really striking. I think it's the kind of approach that we're all going to need to think about in the next century or so.

0:35:57 - (Chris): I really liked how that was a natural take and then a reciprocal give, where he's thinking, okay, I need to recharge my aquifer. I'm running a nursery here, so I've got to collect water and have water for this purpose. But then he's realizing, oh, so this water is sitting here, and I'm now giving life to things that I didn't see on my property before now. And so he sacrifices water, 300 gallons a day, to put in there to keep that situation going.

0:36:30 - (Alicia): I thought that was really cool because he didn't plan on that. He didn't plan on dumping all that water in there to keep the toads alive. But it was the natural course of action to reciprocate with the environment. Okay, I'm taking water, and now I need to give back for the life that's here. I thought that was really beautiful. All right, that's all for this time. I'm Alicia Pike.

0:36:53 - (Chris): And I'm Chris Clarke.

0:36:54 - (Chris): This has been 90 Miles from Needles.

0:37:00 - (Bouse Parker): This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia pike and Chris Clark. Editing by Chris podcast artwork by our good friend Martin Mancha. Theme music is by Brightside Studio, Other music by Aliens Productions, Manriqueta, Laura Blacksmith, Victor Music, Nuclear Metal and musicdoc. Thanks to Envato. Follow us on Twitter or on 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. Thank you to Jan Emming and Desert Sense Nursery for hosting us. Follow Jan on Instagram at personofcactus. Thanks as always to our Patreon supporters.

0:37:44 - (Bouse Parker): Support this podcast by visiting us at 90 miles from needles.com patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as 5 bucks. Our Patreon supporters enjoy privileges including early access to this episode and an exclusive Joshua Tree National park campout in September 2022. Crucial support for this podcast came from Tad Coffin and Lara Rozzell. All characters on this podcast consider the Black Road how it seems white the entire length of a sunshine day. This is Bouse Parker reminding you that you are related to all living things. See you next time.

0:39:20 - (Chris): Heart. Sit. Good dog.