S1E17: Mylar Balloons: threat or menace? plus Joshua Tree NP AMA

Uncorrected Transcript

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 90milesfromneedles.com/patreon.

Chris: Oh, look at that.

Alicia: Mylar. We are by all accounts of what the middle of nowhere means. This is it.

Chris: Sheep Hole Valley Wilderness.

Alicia: Mylar's everywhere. And desert tortoise confuse it for flowers and they eat it. Then it gets stuck in their digestive tract and they slowly die of starvation.

Chris: Well, thanks for picking it up and putting that in your quick release trash bag.

Alicia: Yeah, well, at least we had an adventure. Yes, we may not have got all of our hiking chatter recorded, but we got that mylar. Look at that right there. Just boom. Now, I'm willing to bet we're going to find another one.

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 Clark and Alicia Pike.

Alicia: Hey, it's Alicia. On today's episode, little things that are big things. There's nothing quite like walking through a desert wash, listening to the phainopeplas chirping back and forth to one another, singing their songs. The crunch of the sand beneath your feet, the smell of the trees aspirating in the air. And if it's after a good storm, there's nothing quite like it. But one thing you don't expect to find when you're in the midst of this awe and glory is a mylar balloon stuck in a bush or tree. It's a boy, it says. I can only imagine where the rest of these balloons ended up if this one managed to find me in a crevice in the wonderland of rocks. It's time to dive in and take a peek at all the ins and outs of mylar.

Caller: Hello, my friends from 90 miles from Needles. My name is Michael Vamstad, and I'm a resident of 29 Palms, California, and I have been here for about 18 years. I've spent many hours, both recreationally and leisurely, as well as work wise, walking around the back country of the Mojave Desert, and by far not even close. The largest litter item I find away from any kind of developed road or bathroom campground or anything like that. Our balloons. So it's really depressing when in the far back country, four or 5 miles away from any kind of road, up in the mountains watching big horn sheep that tortoise walking around. And lo and behold, multiple times in a day, you'll find shiny mylar balloons, usually with the streams still attached to them in shrubs. Even though I picked these balloons up, fill up my pockets almost every day, really feel useless on what we can actually do about it other than pick them up.

Alicia: Mylar a very specific non biodegradable material. Mylar is made of synthetic nylon with a metallic coating and completely 100%. Non biodegradable pollution is a real issue. As plastics break down, they become microscopic and therefore very difficult to remove from the ocean and beaches. In the desert where we try and clean up, we can't clean it all up. It's just impossible. General consensus is 450 years for plastic to degrade in ideal conditions like water or tropical areas. Bacteria that AIDS in the decomposition process cannot eat a lot of synthetic plastics, rendering them a permanent addition to our environment and our bodies. Micro plastics are readily detected in humans and other living organisms on this planet. In humans, the scientifically studied types of harm documented include cell death and allergic response, and we currently do not understand the longterm effects. Animals easily mistake deflated balloons as food, causing airway and stomach blockages, leading to a slow death by asphyxiation or starvation. Not exactly what you intended with the balloon release, eh? This colorful, festive litter has been harmful to the wildlife, including desert tortoises.

news subject interview: Potentially you get ingested by animals and just in general, litter of the landscape. And these ribbons, same thing. It can get tangled up in animals feet and paws and also their throats, and then they can't eat anymore.

newscaster: The light nature of helium gas allows this environmental hazard to be picked up by our prevailing westerly winds, and eventually it deflates in the desert. 
Alicia: All right. Hello. Can you hear us?

Christian Daniels: Yes, I can.

Alicia: It's really great that you're here with us today. Thank you.

Christian Daniels: You're welcome.

Alicia: Can you tell the audience your name and your organization?

Christian Daniels: My name is Christian Daniels. I started the Desert Balloon Project, which is where I go out in the desert where no one else hikes. So as we go hiking, we'll see wild flowers and then we'll see balloons. And on my Facebook page, there are a few posts of comparisons of balloons to the natural flowers. We start picking them up in heavy tortoise areas so the tortoises don't eat the balloons because the tortoises mistake the myelar balloons for flowers and other food sources. Usually it'll get inside their intestines and tangle inside their intestines, and then it's like poison for us. I'd say it's the desert tortoises poison. I have seen it like every time we'll go hiking. And we'll be in heavy tortoise habitat, and me and dad will see the balloons inside the boroughs. So we know the tortoises will drag the mileage balloons into the boroughs.

Alicia: So tell us what the goals of your project are.

Christian Daniels: The goals of my project are to bring awareness of why releasing mylar balloons is dangerous for tortoises. So I thought that if I started the organization, I could bring awareness and hopefully we can stop the mono balloon releases.

Alicia: I read that you're involved in getting some legislation passed to ban balloon releases. Can you tell us a little bit about that.

Christian Daniels: Mass release of mileage balloons? We all know that not everyone's going to stop releasing balloons, but if we can get that legislation passed, it'll definitely decrease the amount of balloons that end up in the desert and potentially save the desert tortoises life.

Alicia: Are you going for city or statewide with that? Because I know Chris has heard me talk about wanting to go for the whole country. Forget about the states. Let's just ban them completely. Are you going for state or city or what?

Christian Daniels: Right now we're going to just do it in Vegas. We can start small and then we can expand. And then over time, we'll try to see if Henderson won't stop releasing balloons, and then we'll just take it one city at a time. That's what I kind of started off because with graduation parties and stuff, people will release them and they'll either go in the desert or they'll go in oceans. Since I live in the desert, I can only take care of the desert.

Alicia: Can you tell us about when you first started to do this project when you were out hiking, the feelings that you had seeing all these balloons in disparate parts of the desert?

Christian Daniels: When I started, I was overwhelmed. When you go on the desert, you don't expect to find this many balloons or other garbage out there. And there's a lot out there. We've hiked roughly 800 miles and we've picked up 3000 or more balloons. I've lived in Vegas my entire life. We'll just pick a spot on the map and this seems like a good place to see if there's any balloons. And so we'll just drive there and then we'll go hike straight out in the middle of the desert.

Alicia: So you came up with a hashtag tied and inside. Can you tell us about that?

Christian Daniels: The hashtag tied inside is like to keep balloons inside houses or inside garbage cans, because when you release them, they'll end up in the desert and they'll end up in the desert trees and Joshua trees, sage bushes and power lines, too.

Alicia: Do you have any upcoming events for the Desert Balloon Project?

Christian Daniels: We've planned on starting group hikes and in the past I have been a part of the Truly Springs National Monument. We went there and I set up a tent and I just told people about why releasing my luggle and is bad for Tortoises. In the beginning, we started just to throw them away in our garbage can. Now I have a box in my garage that's just filled with all the balloons we have found over many times we've been hiking, and it's filled to the top now. So I think we're going to have to get a new box. Everyone's pretty supportive. Out of all the hundreds of followers I have gone over the past two years, I think I have 400 followers on Facebook now.

Alicia: Well, I hope we can encourage your Instagram trends to continue. Users are free to share photos of themselves with a Mylar balloon or more that they've picked up on trail and hashtag themselves tied and inside.

Christian Daniels: My Facebook page is called Desert balloon Project, so they can just type in Desert Balloon projects, and it should bring them straight to my Facebook page 
Alicia: through Facebook or Instagram. Go get your photos now with mylar balloons. Let's get them off the trail and in the trash, hashtag tied and inside. Thank you so much, Christian.

Christian Daniels: Thank you for having me.

Alicia: Pretty much every time I leave my house, I see my lard balloons and just driving the dirt road to the main road from my house. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was literally one floating down the road directly beneath our power lines, I might add, and had to hop back in the car, put it in reverse, and drive rather quickly to get ahead of it and then jump out and catch it. Every time I walk the dogs, I find trash and mylar that's at least once or twice a week. I'm finding one in a bush. It's the most devastating thing, whether it's in my neighborhood or whether it's out in the wilderness, is to find a highly degraded mylar balloon. You touch it and it shatters, and it's impossible to get every last bit. I remember on a hike with Chris, I found an extremely degraded Mylar balloon in a pack rat nest just covered in the mouse poops, and I was not prepared for that. Do not carry latex gloves on trail. Maybe I should, but yeah, you just can't remove it all. And for me, that's why it's got my attention so much, because it's everywhere I go, whether I'm in the city or the country or the wilderness. National Park. Bureau of Land Management. Land. It doesn't matter. They're everywhere. And just driving the other day, I saw a mylar balloon stuck in the power line, just hanging out there. For me, it's a daily occurrence and something needs to be done. We have to choose our battles. But something that seems so minor, I think is actually quite important. It's killing animals. It's given us power outages and it's ugly. Part of the definition of wilderness is untrammeled. So to find a balloon out there for me, it's a bummer, man. I didn't go out there to see your little Homer Simpson drawing in the sand. Just leave that shit at home. Now, let's talk about some solutions. There is legislation in the works across the country. 
Various announcers: There will not be any more helium balloon releases in Cleveland. That's right. Last night, city council passed legislation to ban the release of ten or more balloons at a time. Violators will get a citation and a $150 fine. And the same goes for a lot of the different balloon releases and balloon related activities throughout South Florida. In 2012, the state law was passed making it illegal to release more than ten balloons in a 24 hours span. The penalty ranging anywhere from two hundred and fifty dollars to one thousand dollars. But is that enough? We've been asking state lawmakers to update our state law and to make sure that we are not allowing any intentional balloon releases. So let's go ahead and vote. Motion carries unanimously. With that, Ensenada becomes the first city in the county to ban the sale of helium balloons. State Representative Sam Yingling is a member of the House Energy and Environment Committee. He's sponsoring legislation banning the release of 50 or more balloons. Do it once, get a warning, do it again. A $500 fine for every 50 balloons. You will get a fine if you violate this bill. Montgomery and Queensland counties, along with Ocean City, already have bans on balloon releases in place. The Battle over Balloons in New Jersey. All right on one side, and Atlantic County state senator who wants to ban balloon releases on the other. A Trentonbased lobbying group called the Balloon Council saying a ban would create a negative narrative about balloons. The bill would impose a $500 fine on any violations. There's a group called the Coalition Against Releasing Balloons in Ohio who wants this practice to end because it's dangerous for the environment. St. Johns county is the first Florida county to ban the release of balloons and sky lanterns. I'm just so proud of our county and of our commissioners for passing this. This is a really big day for the environment and for wildlife. I welcome your co sponsorship on a bill that would prohibit the release of balloons. While there's all kinds of litter that can be found on Rhode Island beaches, balloons are potentially the most dangerous. For the second year in a row, state Representative Susan Donovan of Bristol and Portsmouth has introduced legislation which would ban balloon releases.

Alicia: In 1990, California wrote into law a balloon law that was very well crafted. They thought about who is producing the balloons, the manufacturers, and required them to address a warning symbol on the balloons and a link so you know who the manufacturer was. It goes after retailers and the rules that they have to abide by in order to sell mylar balloons to the public. In an effort to prevent power outages, they have to fix weights to any helium filled balloons. They cannot have metallic streamers in conjunction with a mylar balloon that is filled with a lighter than air material like helium. And it requires that all ribbons be individually tied with a single knot to that weight so that it's harder to just let them all go. And then it also goes after the consumers, making a simple act of a balloon release a misdemeanor under California law. There's a lot of room in that bill to put stricter guidelines if that's what we need to do, if we can't control ourselves, maybe the consumer end needs to be looked at. Who knows? One attempt to amend the law was an outright ban. Just banned balloons 100% in California, and that did not go down. The florist industry special event planners, small businesses, they all banded together and made sure that it was known that they did not want that to pass. Governor Schwarzenegger ended up vetoing that. So that ultimately never came to fruition. And in 2018, California required that metallic balloons not only include the manufacturer's information, but also a warning that specifically describes to consumers the dangers of allowing a balloon to come in contact with power lines. Compared with some of the aforementioned grim facts, power outages don't seem as big a deal as a negative side effect of balloon releases. But when mylar hits a power line, it creates a short circuit and can cause not only a power outage, but serious fires that span thousands of acres. Power outages in the desert can be a life or death situation. We personally have lost power on days that are 118 deg, and it is, at the very least, scary. You have no air conditioning. You have no swamp cooler. You do not want to open that refrigerator too many times because the food is getting warmer every time. And when it's 118 degrees out, your food is going to spoil faster. So you go into absolute conservation mode. But what about people who can't survive without power? It can be a death sentence for elderly or other compromised individuals who require cooler temps or have machines that help them breathe. If you happen to be discussing a party and you hear about they happen to have balloons there, or do a balloon release, that's an opportunity for you to kindly and friendly educate and redirect and potentially send that message down the line, because their kids will see that, other people will see that. And if you've come up with a more creative idea that is eye catching, people are going to catch on to that. It really does boil down to taking the onus of responsibility to have those tough conversations, sometimes tough, sometimes easy. But it's up to us individually, literally, on a oneonone basis, to make a revolution come about. I find myself wondering, what is it about ritual and tradition that bonds us so deeply to carrying out specific acts? A lot of these things are tradition that are passed down from generation to generation. We have to ask ourselves if these rituals we've become accustomed to still serve a sensible purpose, or if the ritual itself has become environmentally dangerous. Could my ritual act pollute the earth? Could it start a fire? Could it kill something? These aren't questions that you typically ask yourself. You're not even thinking about this stuff because you're engrossed in the death of your loved one. But with modern rituals like balloon release, we do have to ask ourselves these questions. Just like we practice leave no trace principles. When we go backpacking, overnight camping, or for a long hike in a national park, we don't just say to ourselves, I want to go on a hike. I'm just going to go on a hike, we have to take preparatory measures. So if the answer is yes to any of those questions, you probably shouldn't do it. We haven't been doing balloon releases for all that long, but the consequences have always been the same. And if anything, they're more evident. Now. At the bottom line, it is littering. And worse, it can cause slow death, power outages, and fires. We cover a lot of topics that are hard and heavy and require a large group effort and a big fight to protect, to save, to steward. But this is something that we can address on a day to day basis. No matter where you live, inspiring change in yourself starts with just the smallest action. And collecting mylar balloons that you find that are littered is one small way that we can give back and steward this earth. This is something we can incorporate in our lives. We can have conversations with people to educate them, and we can also have conversations with our local lawmakers to encourage and to be the change we want to see in the world. I would love to see a world without my law.

Bouse Parker: Coming up next, Joshua Tree National Park superintendent David Smith answers your questions.

Petey Mesquitey: Hello. I'm Petey Mesquite, host of Growing Native from KXCI, Tucson. Each week since 1992, I've been sharing stories, poems, and songs about flora, fauna, family, and the glory of living in the borderlands of southern Arizona. Recent episodes of Growing Native are available at kxci.org apple podcast and PRX. The desert is beautiful, my friends. Yeah, it is.

Bouse Parker: You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. The most dangerous sound in the desert. Is your friend saying, hold my beer.

Alicia: All right, now it's time to go to the redditors.

David Smith: Oh, gosh.

Alicia: I let them know. We are interviewing the superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park. If you could ask David Smith anything, what would it be? I will be sharing these questions with him. Bring it on. So here we go. Question number one what are his thoughts on how to manage the big increase in visitors to the park? On the one hand, it is great that so many people want to come to JTNP because it is such an amazing environment. But with all of the traffic and visitors, I can imagine it poses a lot of challenges for the natural environment as well as the staff.

David Smith: That is an awesome question. That is just well stated, because your writer encompassed everything right there. We have watched the increase since 2013. It was about 1.3 million. We're about 3.1 million or so this year. So we've watched that growth of about 1.8 million over the last eight years. And at first, we didn't really recognize what was happening because we're bureaucratic slow thinking, not always terribly bright. But after about two years, like, something has changed here. People really want to be out in the desert, and we came up with strategies to communicate messages to disperse people to start their visit down at Cottonwood to come on Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. We did things to allow traffic to flow better. We've increased the parking at some of our more hardened nature trails, like Barker Dam, for instance. We've increased parking out there at a place where there is no expectation of having a wilderness experience there, but it was an appropriate place to get folks to go to those locations. So those are some basic changes we've made in order to make it work. I think 3 million is probably a new reality for Joshua Tree. We're not seeing the exponential growth that we saw in previous years. Now it seems to be tapering off for a while. I think the excitement of instagramming yourself in front of a Joshua Tree is dying off as well. But I think 3 million is the new reality, and so the infrastructure that we have inside the park has to reflect that new reality. And that means probably in well loved spots, probably more parking, it means really encouraging people to change their use patterns based on parking. And when parking is full at a location, you can't pull off over the curb and drive into the desert, you can't block traffic.

Alicia: People do.

David Smith: I know, but they can't. And that means we have to enforce it. And it means ticketing or towing vehicles in those situations. And it's amazing what a little bit of red curbing can do and what signs that say $180 ticket can do. I've seen a change in behavior based on that. I think what we're going to try to do right now is accept this as a new reality, see if these infrastructure changes that we've made are working so you can still have a good experience. The last thing I want you to do is come to the park and say, oh, my God, this is like Disneyland on a really bad day.

Alicia: I waited in line two and a Half hours to get on this ride, 
David Smith: and I'm just so frustrated. West entrance. The construction there will begin in, hopefully, October is what we're looking at right now. As soon as that bid goes out. And if that happens. Instead of waiting in about an hour of line and then every now and then getting flooded into the park because we block so much traffic that no one can get out of their house. You're going to have an entrance station that's going to have four windows operating. And you're not going to have a big flood. You're not going to have a long line. And hopefully the quality for people that are coming to the park will be a little bit better.

Alicia: There's a part two to that that says Yosemite has instituted a reservation system in order to try and manage the crowds. Is Joshua Tree thinking about doing anything to help manage the amount of visitors at any one time?

David Smith: So reservations are definitely on the tool belt as something we can use. I'm trying to figure out if that is an appropriate tool. Right now with 3 million visitors, maybe.

Alicia: We need to get up to the 4 million.

David Smith: Let's see what happens. When you implement a reservation system, you definitely impact a lot of people. It changes the whole culture of how you visit a national park and there's good things and bad things. I've talked to a lot of park staff at Yosemite that just love the reservation system because their perception is there's less people inside the park. I've talked to some visitors, long time visitors, yosemite that love it. I've also talked to visitors that say this is unbelievable. I can't believe I can't get a chance to visit this park. It's my only time in the country. I've talked to staff that work the gates where they have confrontations with visitors that are so upset and they didn't see the signs and to turn them around is so difficult. I'd like to avoid all that as well. So I don't think we're quite to reservation yet. We've also got these three entrances into the park. We've got four other entrances that are dirt roads. It's going to take a lot of human power and gates and building turnaround areas that we just don't have the money to deal with right now.

Alicia: Yeah, okay, excellent. Thank you. What is the most dangerous portion of the park?

David Smith: I would say hiking in the summer. It can be just really dangerous if you don't plan well. We had these three wonderful young guys come out from San Diego. They were college students two summers ago and they started hiking early in July at about 01:00 in the afternoon, starting off at Turkey Flats towards Pino Mountain. And they got about halfway there before they realized they were going to die. And one guy did. One guy came pretty close to dying. One guy was able to go out and get help. So I think lower elevations in the park during really hot spells are dangerous times to visit the park and that includes 49 palms up here. I mentioned earlier, I've done a number of rescues there with people hiking in the summer. But what we've done is we have this preventative search and rescue program. Right now. I've got a full time ranger, she has about 20 volunteers and they hang out at these areas where we're having people that are having heat related illnesses and warning them and having water there for them and encouraging them to go up to Keys View right now where it's 5000ft and cooler as opposed to here and it's paying off. So that's one way that we're remedying some of the dangerous places inside the park. For people who say, oh, climbing is so dangerous, people shouldn't climb in the park now that's crazy. Climbers are some of the safest people I know because their life depends on it. They've got their whole system set up so they're protected. So I don't see climbing as being the place that I'm most concerned about. It tends to be those heat related places.

Alicia: How do I get a job at Joshua tree national park?

David Smith: Well, you could do what I did and volunteer for a while down at Cottonwood and get your foot in the door. That way you can go to the job fair over at copper mountain college. We have a whole bunch of jobs that are available and special hiring authorities for people to apply for them.

Alicia: Even my ears are like, I know.

David Smith: We’re hiring fee rangers. We're hiring campground maintenance folks. We're hiring gosh. There's four or five different job categories, and we will help you get through the USA jobs process, which can be daunting to go through. Scary. But the jobs are there right now. Firefighters. Oh, my gosh. Firefighting would be a great way to get your start in the park service. We had the hardest time recruiting people this summer, and there's going to be a job fair one over in Santa Clarita and in November as well to hire firefighters throughout the southland.

Alicia: Excellent. We'll be letting them all know.

David Smith: Let them all know.

Alicia: All right. I know I've got a heavy hitting one coming.

David Smith: Okay, I promise not to cry.

Alicia: With so many problems facing humanity climate change, water scarcity, the threat of nuclear war, mass starvation, why is preserving the desert important?

David Smith: Wow.

Alicia: That one came from my husband.

David Smith: Yeah.

Alicia: We feel very strongly about it.

David Smith: So let me tell you, when San Francisco had the earthquake and the fire, and they had to rebuild the entire city, and so it was an apocalypse in San Francisco. City planner said, let's use the redwoods that we have over at near woods. It's the only stand we have nearby. And the people of San Francisco and the federal government said, no, it's not worth it. We need to believe in something right now. And this beautiful place that was set aside to protect this one last remaining grove of redwoods in our area, let's protect that. And similarly, during world war II, when we were looking at building aircraft, light aircraft, and we needed light type of spruce that grows up in some of our northern Washington parks, congress made the suggestion that we need to start harvesting all that timber there. And the secretary of the interior and the president said, no, we need to have these magnificent places so that when the war is over, our people have a place to recreate in and be in. So I would say these are our little treasures that we have to preserve, because when times are hard, we need those places to recharge. So that would be my answer.

Alicia: Excellent answer. Why don't they enforce the no dog rules?

David Smith: Why don't they enforce the no dog rules? We work so hard on the no dog rules. At any given time, we may have two or. Three rangers working inside the park. And it's very difficult when you're dealing with jumpstarting someone's car or dealing with a DUI to go out to Barker Dam or to Rattlesnake Canyon and find the person that has the dog. Usually by the time you get there, they're done. But what we've done to deal with dog issues is we've assigned certain of our interpretive staff and our general staff to go to key areas like Rattlesnake and during prime time when we know dogs are there to hang out and just to do friendly education like, hey, how are you doing? You probably didn't know this big horn sheep up here. Dogs aren't allowed entrees inside of national parks. Would you mind taking your dog and maybe going exploring some public land outside the park boundary? And so that's helped out a lot. We put up a whole series of signs that have been super effective communicating the message about protecting bighorn sheep, and so that has been an effective tool. Yet dogs make me angry, and I'm a dog owner. I've been a dog owner my whole life. Although our dog just died this week, we are dog free for the first time in 22 years. But, yeah, I was frustrated. I cannot recreate inside of a park with my dog like I'd like to. But I also understand that there's a causal effect of dogs in these areas, and we have a responsibility because of the law and also protect these resources to go after dogs and dog owners in these areas. I would encourage you, if you see dogs inside the park and you're able to get out on a cell, reach out to our dispatch and say, hey, dispatch, I want to let you know there are a guy with four dogs walking up this canyon right now. And if we do have a range in the area, she's going to show up here and she's going to have a great opportunity to educate that visitor, whether it's through conversation or through a visit to the magistrate.

Alicia: Good to know that there's a resource number that someone can call. This one's really shitty, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I'd love to know why it's acceptable to ask the public who pay an entrance fee to volunteer to clean bathrooms and trash bins in the park on holidays because there's not enough funding for staff that deserves to be well paid for their hard work and dedication.

David Smith: Wow, that's a really good question, because you own this national park, and as a US. Citizen, you have a responsibility for taking care of it. So we pay taxes, we pay user fees. Just like with your house, you pay your taxes, you pay your mortgage for that house, but you also have a responsibility to take care of your house. Congress and the President will distribute the funds that we have in our tax base to be able to get all the things that we need our roads, our education, our defense, our parks. There's just not enough right now to go around, and that's why visitors are there. I don't like asking people to pick up things, but when I brought my children up, they knew that we pick up three pieces of litter a day. Each one of us does it regardless of where we are. It's part of our philosophy in life, and we volunteer whenever we have time to help people in our community. The same is true for your national park and our ranger staff. They work really hard. I'm super proud of them. I think our wages are competitive with most other industries that are out there right now. Yes, folks would always like to have more income, but we're doing a really good job of taking care of our folks.

Alicia: Nice. What can be done to help save the Joshua trees in the park?

David Smith: The very first thing you can do is trying to reduce your carbon footprint as much as possible. And if that means carpooling with someone, if it means not running your air conditioning all day, those are all little steps we can do in our lives. We can go even further. We can really start looking into photovoltaics for a house and solar and electric cars, or just using your bike all the time, which is tough in the desert. I know it's very tough to do those things, but we are part of the reason Joshua trees are disappearing. All of us have a stake, especially in a country like the United States, where we have a very high standard of living, and we also have a huge demand on the carbon footprint. It impacts the Joshua trees. That's one of the things we can do. In the coming years, the time will come where we're going to have to look at Revegetating Josh trees at higher elevations inside the park where they used to exist, but they got burned out. That is places where we're going to look for volunteers to help out as much as possible. But honestly, it is finding a way to reduce or eliminate our carbon footprint on this planet.

Alicia: Right. Excellent answer. I didn't see that one coming. Had my ideas. Top five weirdest experiences, please. Peculiar noises, odd sensations, feeling watched or stalked, trees inexplicably damaged, that sort as of yet. Any ideas about missing visitors?

David Smith: I have to say, walking down a nature trail, coming across a group of nudists is always top of my list of surreal kind of experiences here at Joshua Tree.

Alicia: So I definitely didn't see that one.

David Smith: I did not see that at all. This was just a traumatic experience for me. But I was working on a cottonwood and a visitor crashes his car into the side of a hill and it catches on fire, and I'm the only one there to deal with it. So that was just a really traumatic fatality that I will live with for the rest of my life.

Alicia: Wow.

David Smith: This is a good one. A German visitor had broken his leg. He'd fallen down and Lost Palm's Oasis, and I spent the night with him because we couldn't carry him out. It was the middle of the summer. It was hotter than hell. And in the morning, Riverside County sent their helicopter out. And dropping from the helicopter was this paramedic, and he took off his helmet and it was our magistrate, it was our judge. He goes, hey, David, how are you doing? Like, what are you doing here? He goes. Oh, I volunteer on the weekends with the Riverside County Search and rescue. I'm here to treat your patients. Well, that was a pretty special day, seeing that. I think having Mr. And Mrs. Obama show up to go hiking on their anniversary and they chose Joshua Tree as the place that they wanted to reconnect with each other was a pretty special time.

Alicia: Wow.

David Smith: I know you're looking for space aliens coming down and, like, sonic booms and things like that inside the park and what's the last part of that question?

Alicia: Thoughts on missing visitors?

David Smith: Well, you know what? We find them one way or the other. Recently we've had three people that had gone missing for over a year or two.

Alicia: Ewasco was over a decade.

David Smith: Yeah, it was over a decade. Glass it's just surreal that it was so close to where people were hiking. It's insane. I've gone on so many of these searches, and you think you've covered everything. One of the miracles was two years ago. Three years ago, we had that girl from New Zealand who she's hiking down up by Lost Palm. She leans back on a dry waterfall. She falls over and gets incredibly injured. And her friends back in New Zealand to say, hey, our friend is missing. Our ranger who's down there, Myles Landry, immediately calls CHP and says, I think this is her car. They go out there. He starts hiking out there. They spot her on a side trail waving a map in the air. She'd been there for three or four days. She was this far from dying. So that was a pretty awesome find.

Alicia: I heard she's written a book.

David Smith: Oh, wonderful. I'd love to read it. Sell it in our bookstore.

Alicia: What are your thoughts about the future of climbing in Joshua Tree? Ie. Regulations, developing new routes, including climbers in the decision, safety concerns, access, et cetera.

David Smith: We're just about ready to send out the draft of the climbing management plan, which will give us a blueprint for how to manage climbing into the future. Some of the issues that have been coming up have been social trails and their impact on the landscape and everything in the plant communities. It has been the use of wilderness and the proliferation of bolts in wilderness, which those are installations. And wilderness is a'process for allowing permanent installations in wilderness. But we haven't followed it as a result there are thousands of bolts there. Now the use of power drills and wilderness as well is a big issue that we're considering and then there's just kind of new types of recreation that we hadn't thought about before. So highlighting and flatlining bouldering to some degree has really exploded. I don't know if you've seen everyone with their mattresses on their back as they go to these different locations and if they do it en masse it has an impact. There's a lot of reasons why we're doing the climbing management plan right now. I would envision the public will have a lot of say and input on how this is actually going to be finalized but there's going to have to be probably some additional controls in wilderness I would see a mandatory permit process for the installation or the reinstallation or the removal of bolts in wilderness maybe throughout the entire park as well. We have been climbed heavily for about 50, 60 years now and 95% of the routes are probably that are decent are in place right now. I'm sitting here talking to you guys and I could see these bolts on ridiculous rocks. Like why would anyone put a bolt there? It doesn't make any sense. But someone came up and said I want to create my own little special route right here.

Alicia: There's some bolts inside the slot of rattlesnake that big bath lift and it always really the wrong way. This is an area that humans aren't supposed to be able to get in. Leave it alone, will you?

David Smith: I do expect to see more controls on that. I don't expect to see controls for who's going to climb. It's not going to be like you have to get a permit to go climbing in certain areas. There's 80 documented climbs inside the park. I think we can spread it out enough so I don't see that as being part of it. I see a well established trail plan and when people deviate from it, we may even consider adding to the compendium. You have to stay on trails in certain areas in the park so that we don't get these spider webs of social trails all over the place happening. But climbing is a legitimate and recognized usage tree. 20% of our visitors come here specifically for rock recreation. It's very meaningful to 6000 people a year that come to this park and I would say half of the other people really enjoy watching them climb. When I'm walking on the trails, people are like, oh my gosh, did you see that guy? And there's a whole bunch of people watching someone climb and that is a legitimate recreational thing to do inside of a national park.

Alicia: I saw something about the climbers outreach in the news, some sort of a press release. Is there a link we can share with you?

David Smith: Yeah, so if you go to the park services website so www dot MPs gov j OTR and you go to the it's like a climbing link.

Alicia: Okay.

David Smith: You'll get to that page, you can get an automatic newsletter sent to you and all the information is there. But we also, about every two months or so, issue a news release. We call them newsletter. And the newsletter talks about the climbing management plan about a backcountry permit system. Since the parks of visitation has exploded, we're probably going to start doing reservations in some of our backcountry areas inside the park. Specifically. I'm looking at it right now over at Indian Cove with the Boy Scout trail. I've gone in there before on runs in the weekend and come across groups of 60 people camping together. How is this possible? How did you miss this? So we're looking at a registration system in the back country. That's another thing that's coming up right now.

Alicia: Nice. Oh, this is a good one. I've heard the rumor of a road and multiple large campsites planned to be built near the wilderness zone of Boy Scout Trail and the entrance to Willow Hall due to the extreme influx of visitors over the past decade. What if true, do you think increased foot traffic, noise pollution to this area of the park will bring negative consequences to the Wonderland?

David Smith: Yes. There is no truth to that statement whatsoever.

Alicia: What about the one to the south by Sheet Path? Yeah, there was a rumor of one.

David Smith: So we're looking at a residential learning center there for kids.

Alicia: There's an old property that you guys are going to use right now.

David Smith: Yeah, it did not work out really well, but we're looking at Sheep Pass. There's a non profit called Jtree that we work with that does outdoor education, and they are in the process of raising funds to create a learning bridge type campus that focuses on children going into the park and having young giving them that residential experience of being able to camp out and see the stars and then hike up to Ryan Mountain the next day. Relatively well used portion of the park. I would never develop a wilderness area of the park. It's contrary to policy and law, and it just would make my stomach hurt.

Alicia: Yeah, I'm glad that's just a rumor. Most memorable meteor shower and year. Also in a UFO sighting. Haha.

David Smith: Yeah. You know what? It wasn't at Joshua Tree, I'm sorry to say. I was hiking out of Horseshoe Canyon at Canyonlands National Park. It was at 300 in the afternoon, and I look up and I see this incredibly bright thing with a long trail coming through it. And then all of a sudden it explodes in the sky. And I see three other light things going out out towards Hanksville. I was like, what was that? Was it a missile? What's going on? And I was all freaking out. And then the Salt Lake City Tribune did a story about an earthquake in that area that time at that point, it was a meteorite crashing down into the desert of Utah, and it triggered seismic activity that they thought it was an earthquake. It was pretty cool.

Alicia: That's amazing to get to witness.

David Smith: That was really cool. I had a great time. I have done meteor shower parties with visitors before at Grand Canyon, and, man, they are cold, miserable times.

Alicia: That's why meteor showers out here in.

David Smith: The desert are way better. Oh, my gosh. Going up to, like, jumbo rocks at night, just watching it would be great.

Alicia: Yeah.

David Smith: But now that I'm, like, 55, I just fall asleep. I can't stay up to sleep.

Alicia: Yeah. All right, that's all for this time. Please do check out our website@ninetymilesfrombeetles.com where you'll find show notes, photos, videos and all sorts of other little goodies. I'm Alicia Pike signing off.

Bouse Parker: This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia Pike, editing by Chris Clark podcast. Artwork by the estimable Martin Mancha. Theme music Is by Bright Side Studio other Music by Slipstream Follow us on Twitter on Instagram at 90 mi from Needles and on Facebook@facebook.com. ninetymiles from Needles. Listen to us at 90 Miles from Needles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you to David Smith and Christian Daniels for the interviews and to Wk Channel Three, W, JZ, Fox Five, San Diego, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMahon, KPBS and CBS Eight, San Diego for their contributions to our fair use sampling. Thanks to our newest Patreon supporters. Leland Means. Coral Clark, David McMullen and Michael E. Gordon support this podcast by visiting us at nine 0 mile from Needles.com Patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as $5. Or visit Nine 0 Mile from Needles.com Kofi to make a one time contribution. Our supporters enjoy privileges, including early access to this episode. Crucial support for this podcast came from Ted Kaufman and Laura Rosell. All characters on this podcast experience a wide range of temperatures and weather conditions and can be classified into four types hot, semiarid, coastal and cold. Mrs. Bows Parker reminding you that littering the desert with toxic crap is a lousy way to celebrate or commemorate anything. See you next time.

Chris: Sit, Heart. Sit. Good dog.

Uncorrected Transcript
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 90milesfromneedles.com/patreon.

Chris: Oh, look at that.

Alicia: Mylar. We are by all accounts of what the middle of nowhere means. This is it.

Chris: Sheep Hole Valley Wilderness.

Alicia: Mylars everywhere. And desert tortoise confuse it for flowers and they eat it. Then it gets stuck in their digestive tract and they slowly die of starvation.

Chris: Well, thanks for picking it up and putting that in your quick release trash bag.

Alicia: Yeah, well, at least we had an adventure. Yes, we may not have got all of our hiking chatter recorded, but we got that mylar. Look at that right there. Just boom. Now, I'm willing to bet we're going to find another one.

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 Clark and Alicia Pike.

Alicia: Hey, it's Alicia. On today's episode, little things that are big things. There's nothing quite like walking through a desert wash, listening to the phainopeplas chirping back and forth to one another, singing their songs. The crunch of the sand beneath your feet, the smell of the trees aspirating in the air. And if it's after a good storm, there's nothing quite like it. But one thing you don't expect to find when you're in the midst of this awe and glory is a mylar balloon stuck in a bush or tree. It's a boy, it says. I can only imagine where the rest of these balloons ended up if this one managed to find me in a crevice in the wonderland of rocks. It's time to dive in and take a peek at all the ins and outs of mylar.

Caller: Hello, my friends from 90 miles from Needles. My name is Michael Vamstad, and I'm a resident of 29 Palms, California, and I have been here for about 18 years. I've spent many hours, both recreationally and leisurely, as well as work wise, walking around the back country of the Mojave Desert, and by far not even close. The largest litter item I find away from any kind of developed road or bathroom campground or anything like that. Our balloons. So it's really depressing when in the far back country, four or 5 miles away from any kind of road, up in the mountains watching big horn sheep that tortoise walking around. And lo and behold, multiple times in a day, you'll find shiny mylar balloons, usually with the streams still attached to them in shrubs. Even though I picked these balloons up, fill up my pockets almost every day, really feel useless on what we can actually do about it other than pick them up.

Alicia: Mylar a very specific non biodegradable material. Mylar is made of synthetic nylon with a metallic coating and completely 100%. Non biodegradable pollution is a real issue. As plastics break down, they become microscopic and therefore very difficult to remove from the ocean and beaches. In the desert where we try and clean up, we can't clean it all up. It's just impossible. General consensus is 450 years for plastic to degrade in ideal conditions like water or tropical areas. Bacteria that AIDS in the decomposition process cannot eat a lot of synthetic plastics, rendering them a permanent addition to our environment and our bodies. Micro plastics are readily detected in humans and other living organisms on this planet. In humans, the scientifically studied types of harm documented include cell death and allergic response, and we currently do not understand the longterm effects. Animals easily mistake deflated balloons as food, causing airway and stomach blockages, leading to a slow death by asphyxiation or starvation. Not exactly what you intended with the balloon release, eh? This colorful, festive litter has been harmful to the wildlife, including desert tortoises.

news subject interview: Potentially you get ingested by animals and just in general, litter of the landscape. And these ribbons, same thing. It can get tangled up in animals feet and paws and also their throats, and then they can't eat anymore.

newscaster: The light nature of helium gas allows this environmental hazard to be picked up by our prevailing westerly winds, and eventually it deflates in the desert. 
Alicia: All right. Hello. Can you hear us?

Christian Daniels: Yes, I can.

Alicia: It's really great that you're here with us today. Thank you.

Christian Daniels: You're welcome.

Alicia: Can you tell the audience your name and your organization?

Christian Daniels: My name is Christian Daniels. I started the Desert Balloon Project, which is where I go out in the desert where no one else hikes. So as we go hiking, we'll see wild flowers and then we'll see balloons. And on my Facebook page, there are a few posts of comparisons of balloons to the natural flowers. We start picking them up in heavy tortoise areas so the tortoises don't eat the balloons because the tortoises mistake the myelar balloons for flowers and other food sources. Usually it'll get inside their intestines and tangle inside their intestines, and then it's like poison for us. I'd say it's the desert tortoises poison. I have seen it like every time we'll go hiking. And we'll be in heavy tortoise habitat, and me and dad will see the balloons inside the boroughs. So we know the tortoises will drag the mileage balloons into the boroughs.

Alicia: So tell us what the goals of your project are.

Christian Daniels: The goals of my project are to bring awareness of why releasing mylar balloons is dangerous for tortoises. So I thought that if I started the organization, I could bring awareness and hopefully we can stop the mono balloon releases.

Alicia: I read that you're involved in getting some legislation passed to ban balloon releases. Can you tell us a little bit about that.

Christian Daniels: Mass release of mileage balloons? We all know that not everyone's going to stop releasing balloons, but if we can get that legislation passed, it'll definitely decrease the amount of balloons that end up in the desert and potentially save the desert tortoises life.

Alicia: Are you going for city or statewide with that? Because I know Chris has heard me talk about wanting to go for the whole country. Forget about the states. Let's just ban them completely. Are you going for state or city or what?

Christian Daniels: Right now we're going to just do it in Vegas. We can start small and then we can expand. And then over time, we'll try to see if Henderson won't stop releasing balloons, and then we'll just take it one city at a time. That's what I kind of started off because with graduation parties and stuff, people will release them and they'll either go in the desert or they'll go in oceans. Since I live in the desert, I can only take care of the desert.

Alicia: Can you tell us about when you first started to do this project when you were out hiking, the feelings that you had seeing all these balloons in disparate parts of the desert?

Christian Daniels: When I started, I was overwhelmed. When you go on the desert, you don't expect to find this many balloons or other garbage out there. And there's a lot out there. We've hiked roughly 800 miles and we've picked up 3000 or more balloons. I've lived in Vegas my entire life. We'll just pick a spot on the map and this seems like a good place to see if there's any balloons. And so we'll just drive there and then we'll go hike straight out in the middle of the desert.

Alicia: So you came up with a hashtag tied and inside. Can you tell us about that?

Christian Daniels: The hashtag tied inside is like to keep balloons inside houses or inside garbage cans, because when you release them, they'll end up in the desert and they'll end up in the desert trees and Joshua trees, sage bushes and power lines, too.

Alicia: Do you have any upcoming events for the Desert Balloon Project?

Christian Daniels: We've planned on starting group hikes and in the past I have been a part of the Truly Springs National Monument. We went there and I set up a tent and I just told people about why releasing my luggle and is bad for Tortoises. In the beginning, we started just to throw them away in our garbage can. Now I have a box in my garage that's just filled with all the balloons we have found over many times we've been hiking, and it's filled to the top now. So I think we're going to have to get a new box. Everyone's pretty supportive. Out of all the hundreds of followers I have gone over the past two years, I think I have 400 followers on Facebook now.

Alicia: Well, I hope we can encourage your Instagram trends to continue. Users are free to share photos of themselves with a Mylar balloon or more that they've picked up on trail and hashtag themselves tied and inside.

Christian Daniels: My Facebook page is called Desert balloon Project, so they can just type in Desert Balloon projects, and it should bring them straight to my Facebook page 
Alicia: through Facebook or Instagram. Go get your photos now with mylar balloons. Let's get them off the trail and in the trash, hashtag tied and inside. Thank you so much, Christian.

Christian Daniels: Thank you for having me.

Alicia: Pretty much every time I leave my house, I see my lard balloons and just driving the dirt road to the main road from my house. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was literally one floating down the road directly beneath our power lines, I might add, and had to hop back in the car, put it in reverse, and drive rather quickly to get ahead of it and then jump out and catch it. Every time I walk the dogs, I find trash and mylar that's at least once or twice a week. I'm finding one in a bush. It's the most devastating thing, whether it's in my neighborhood or whether it's out in the wilderness, is to find a highly degraded mylar balloon. You touch it and it shatters, and it's impossible to get every last bit. I remember on a hike with Chris, I found an extremely degraded Mylar balloon in a pack rat nest just covered in the mouse poops, and I was not prepared for that. Do not carry latex gloves on trail. Maybe I should, but yeah, you just can't remove it all. And for me, that's why it's got my attention so much, because it's everywhere I go, whether I'm in the city or the country or the wilderness. National Park. Bureau of Land Management. Land. It doesn't matter. They're everywhere. And just driving the other day, I saw a mylar balloon stuck in the power line, just hanging out there. For me, it's a daily occurrence and something needs to be done. We have to choose our battles. But something that seems so minor, I think is actually quite important. It's killing animals. It's given us power outages and it's ugly. Part of the definition of wilderness is untrammeled. So to find a balloon out there for me, it's a bummer, man. I didn't go out there to see your little Homer Simpson drawing in the sand. Just leave that shit at home. Now, let's talk about some solutions. There is legislation in the works across the country. 

Various announcers: There will not be any more helium balloon releases in Cleveland. That's right. Last night, city council passed legislation to ban the release of ten or more balloons at a time. Violators will get a citation and a $150 fine. And the same goes for a lot of the different balloon releases and balloon related activities throughout South Florida. In 2012, the state law was passed making it illegal to release more than ten balloons in a 24 hours span. The penalty ranging anywhere from two hundred and fifty dollars to one thousand dollars. But is that enough? We've been asking state lawmakers to update our state law and to make sure that we are not allowing any intentional balloon releases. So let's go ahead and vote. Motion carries unanimously. With that, Ensenada becomes the first city in the county to ban the sale of helium balloons. State Representative Sam Yingling is a member of the House Energy and Environment Committee. He's sponsoring legislation banning the release of 50 or more balloons. Do it once, get a warning, do it again. A $500 fine for every 50 balloons. You will get a fine if you violate this bill. Montgomery and Queensland counties, along with Ocean City, already have bans on balloon releases in place. The Battle over Balloons in New Jersey. All right on one side, and Atlantic County state senator who wants to ban balloon releases on the other. A Trentonbased lobbying group called the Balloon Council saying a ban would create a negative narrative about balloons. The bill would impose a $500 fine on any violations. There's a group called the Coalition Against Releasing Balloons in Ohio who wants this practice to end because it's dangerous for the environment. St. Johns county is the first Florida county to ban the release of balloons and sky lanterns. I'm just so proud of our county and of our commissioners for passing this. This is a really big day for the environment and for wildlife. I welcome your co sponsorship on a bill that would prohibit the release of balloons. While there's all kinds of litter that can be found on Rhode Island beaches, balloons are potentially the most dangerous. For the second year in a row, state Representative Susan Donovan of Bristol and Portsmouth has introduced legislation which would ban balloon releases.

Alicia: In 1990, California wrote into law a balloon law that was very well crafted. They thought about who is producing the balloons, the manufacturers, and required them to address a warning symbol on the balloons and a link so you know who the manufacturer was. It goes after retailers and the rules that they have to abide by in order to sell mylar balloons to the public. In an effort to prevent power outages, they have to fix weights to any helium filled balloons. They cannot have metallic streamers in conjunction with a mylar balloon that is filled with a lighter than air material like helium. And it requires that all ribbons be individually tied with a single knot to that weight so that it's harder to just let them all go. And then it also goes after the consumers, making a simple act of a balloon release a misdemeanor under California law. There's a lot of room in that bill to put stricter guidelines if that's what we need to do, if we can't control ourselves, maybe the consumer end needs to be looked at. Who knows? One attempt to amend the law was an outright ban. Just banned balloons 100% in California, and that did not go down. The florist industry special event planners, small businesses, they all banded together and made sure that it was known that they did not want that to pass. Governor Schwarzenegger ended up vetoing that. So that ultimately never came to fruition. And in 2018, California required that metallic balloons not only include the manufacturer's information, but also a warning that specifically describes to consumers the dangers of allowing a balloon to come in contact with power lines. Compared with some of the aforementioned grim facts, power outages don't seem as big a deal as a negative side effect of balloon releases. But when mylar hits a power line, it creates a short circuit and can cause not only a power outage, but serious fires that span thousands of acres. Power outages in the desert can be a life or death situation. We personally have lost power on days that are 118 deg, and it is, at the very least, scary. You have no air conditioning. You have no swamp cooler. You do not want to open that refrigerator too many times because the food is getting warmer every time. And when it's 118 degrees out, your food is going to spoil faster. So you go into absolute conservation mode. But what about people who can't survive without power? It can be a death sentence for elderly or other compromised individuals who require cooler temps or have machines that help them breathe. If you happen to be discussing a party and you hear about they happen to have balloons there, or do a balloon release, that's an opportunity for you to kindly and friendly educate and redirect and potentially send that message down the line, because their kids will see that, other people will see that. And if you've come up with a more creative idea that is eye catching, people are going to catch on to that. It really does boil down to taking the onus of responsibility to have those tough conversations, sometimes tough, sometimes easy. But it's up to us individually, literally, on a oneonone basis, to make a revolution come about. I find myself wondering, what is it about ritual and tradition that bonds us so deeply to carrying out specific acts? A lot of these things are tradition that are passed down from generation to generation. We have to ask ourselves if these rituals we've become accustomed to still serve a sensible purpose, or if the ritual itself has become environmentally dangerous. Could my ritual act pollute the earth? Could it start a fire? Could it kill something? These aren't questions that you typically ask yourself. You're not even thinking about this stuff because you're engrossed in the death of your loved one. But with modern rituals like balloon release, we do have to ask ourselves these questions. Just like we practice leave no trace principles. When we go backpacking, overnight camping, or for a long hike in a national park, we don't just say to ourselves, I want to go on a hike. I'm just going to go on a hike, we have to take preparatory measures. So if the answer is yes to any of those questions, you probably shouldn't do it. We haven't been doing balloon releases for all that long, but the consequences have always been the same. And if anything, they're more evident. Now. At the bottom line, it is littering. And worse, it can cause slow death, power outages, and fires. We cover a lot of topics that are hard and heavy and require a large group effort and a big fight to protect, to save, to steward. But this is something that we can address on a day to day basis. No matter where you live, inspiring change in yourself starts with just the smallest action. And collecting mylar balloons that you find that are littered is one small way that we can give back and steward this earth. This is something we can incorporate in our lives. We can have conversations with people to educate them, and we can also have conversations with our local lawmakers to encourage and to be the change we want to see in the world. I would love to see a world without my law.

Bouse Parker: Coming up next, Joshua Tree National Park superintendent David Smith answers your questions.

Petey Mesquitey: Hello. I'm Petey Mesquite, host of Growing Native from KXCI, Tucson. Each week since 1992, I've been sharing stories, poems, and songs about flora, fauna, family, and the glory of living in the borderlands of southern Arizona. Recent episodes of Growing Native are available at kxci.org apple podcast and PRX. The desert is beautiful, my friends. Yeah, it is.

Bouse Parker: You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. The most dangerous sound in the desert. Is your friend saying, hold my beer.

Alicia: All right, now it's time to go to the redditors.

David Smith: Oh, gosh.

Alicia: I let them know. We are interviewing the superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park. If you could ask David Smith anything, what would it be? I will be sharing these questions with him. Bring it on. So here we go. Question number one what are his thoughts on how to manage the big increase in visitors to the park? On the one hand, it is great that so many people want to come to JTNP because it is such an amazing environment. But with all of the traffic and visitors, I can imagine it poses a lot of challenges for the natural environment as well as the staff.

David Smith: That is an awesome question. That is just well stated, because your writer encompassed everything right there. We have watched the increase since 2013. It was about 1.3 million. We're about 3.1 million or so this year. So we've watched that growth of about 1.8 million over the last eight years. And at first, we didn't really recognize what was happening because we're bureaucratic slow thinking, not always terribly bright. But after about two years, like, something has changed here. People really want to be out in the desert, and we came up with strategies to communicate messages to disperse people to start their visit down at Cottonwood to come on Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. We did things to allow traffic to flow better. We've increased the parking at some of our more hardened nature trails, like Barker Dam, for instance. We've increased parking out there at a place where there is no expectation of having a wilderness experience there, but it was an appropriate place to get folks to go to those locations. So those are some basic changes we've made in order to make it work. I think 3 million is probably a new reality for Joshua Tree. We're not seeing the exponential growth that we saw in previous years. Now it seems to be tapering off for a while. I think the excitement of instagramming yourself in front of a Joshua Tree is dying off as well. But I think 3 million is the new reality, and so the infrastructure that we have inside the park has to reflect that new reality. And that means probably in well loved spots, probably more parking, it means really encouraging people to change their use patterns based on parking. And when parking is full at a location, you can't pull off over the curb and drive into the desert, you can't block traffic.

Alicia: People do.

David Smith: I know, but they can't. And that means we have to enforce it. And it means ticketing or towing vehicles in those situations. And it's amazing what a little bit of red curbing can do and what signs that say $180 ticket can do. I've seen a change in behavior based on that. I think what we're going to try to do right now is accept this as a new reality, see if these infrastructure changes that we've made are working so you can still have a good experience. The last thing I want you to do is come to the park and say, oh, my God, this is like Disneyland on a really bad day.

Alicia: I waited in line two and a Half hours to get on this ride, 
David Smith: and I'm just so frustrated. West entrance. The construction there will begin in, hopefully, October is what we're looking at right now. As soon as that bid goes out. And if that happens. Instead of waiting in about an hour of line and then every now and then getting flooded into the park because we block so much traffic that no one can get out of their house. You're going to have an entrance station that's going to have four windows operating. And you're not going to have a big flood. You're not going to have a long line. And hopefully the quality for people that are coming to the park will be a little bit better.

Alicia: There's a part two to that that says Yosemite has instituted a reservation system in order to try and manage the crowds. Is Joshua Tree thinking about doing anything to help manage the amount of visitors at any one time?

David Smith: So reservations are definitely on the tool belt as something we can use. I'm trying to figure out if that is an appropriate tool. Right now with 3 million visitors, maybe.

Alicia: We need to get up to the 4 million.

David Smith: Let's see what happens. When you implement a reservation system, you definitely impact a lot of people. It changes the whole culture of how you visit a national park and there's good things and bad things. I've talked to a lot of park staff at Yosemite that just love the reservation system because their perception is there's less people inside the park. I've talked to some visitors, long time visitors, yosemite that love it. I've also talked to visitors that say this is unbelievable. I can't believe I can't get a chance to visit this park. It's my only time in the country. I've talked to staff that work the gates where they have confrontations with visitors that are so upset and they didn't see the signs and to turn them around is so difficult. I'd like to avoid all that as well. So I don't think we're quite to reservation yet. We've also got these three entrances into the park. We've got four other entrances that are dirt roads. It's going to take a lot of human power and gates and building turnaround areas that we just don't have the money to deal with right now.

Alicia: Yeah, okay, excellent. Thank you. What is the most dangerous portion of the park?

David Smith: I would say hiking in the summer. It can be just really dangerous if you don't plan well. We had these three wonderful young guys come out from San Diego. They were college students two summers ago and they started hiking early in July at about 01:00 in the afternoon, starting off at Turkey Flats towards Pino Mountain. And they got about halfway there before they realized they were going to die. And one guy did. One guy came pretty close to dying. One guy was able to go out and get help. So I think lower elevations in the park during really hot spells are dangerous times to visit the park and that includes 49 palms up here. I mentioned earlier, I've done a number of rescues there with people hiking in the summer. But what we've done is we have this preventative search and rescue program. Right now. I've got a full time ranger, she has about 20 volunteers and they hang out at these areas where we're having people that are having heat related illnesses and warning them and having water there for them and encouraging them to go up to Keys View right now where it's 5000ft and cooler as opposed to here and it's paying off. So that's one way that we're remedying some of the dangerous places inside the park. For people who say, oh, climbing is so dangerous, people shouldn't climb in the park now that's crazy. Climbers are some of the safest people I know because their life depends on it. They've got their whole system set up so they're protected. So I don't see climbing as being the place that I'm most concerned about. It tends to be those heat related places.

Alicia: How do I get a job at Joshua tree national park?

David Smith: Well, you could do what I did and volunteer for a while down at Cottonwood and get your foot in the door. That way you can go to the job fair over at copper mountain college. We have a whole bunch of jobs that are available and special hiring authorities for people to apply for them.

Alicia: Even my ears are like, I know.

David Smith: We’re hiring fee rangers. We're hiring campground maintenance folks. We're hiring gosh. There's four or five different job categories, and we will help you get through the USA jobs process, which can be daunting to go through. Scary. But the jobs are there right now. Firefighters. Oh, my gosh. Firefighting would be a great way to get your start in the park service. We had the hardest time recruiting people this summer, and there's going to be a job fair one over in Santa Clarita and in November as well to hire firefighters throughout the southland.

Alicia: Excellent. We'll be letting them all know.

David Smith: Let them all know.

Alicia: All right. I know I've got a heavy hitting one coming.

David Smith: Okay, I promise not to cry.

Alicia: With so many problems facing humanity climate change, water scarcity, the threat of nuclear war, mass starvation, why is preserving the desert important?

David Smith: Wow.

Alicia: That one came from my husband.

David Smith: Yeah.

Alicia: We feel very strongly about it.

David Smith: So let me tell you, when San Francisco had the earthquake and the fire, and they had to rebuild the entire city, and so it was an apocalypse in San Francisco. City planner said, let's use the redwoods that we have over at near woods. It's the only stand we have nearby. And the people of San Francisco and the federal government said, no, it's not worth it. We need to believe in something right now. And this beautiful place that was set aside to protect this one last remaining grove of redwoods in our area, let's protect that. And similarly, during world war II, when we were looking at building aircraft, light aircraft, and we needed light type of spruce that grows up in some of our northern Washington parks, congress made the suggestion that we need to start harvesting all that timber there. And the secretary of the interior and the president said, no, we need to have these magnificent places so that when the war is over, our people have a place to recreate in and be in. So I would say these are our little treasures that we have to preserve, because when times are hard, we need those places to recharge. So that would be my answer.

Alicia: Excellent answer. Why don't they enforce the no dog rules?

David Smith: Why don't they enforce the no dog rules? We work so hard on the no dog rules. At any given time, we may have two or. Three rangers working inside the park. And it's very difficult when you're dealing with jumpstarting someone's car or dealing with a DUI to go out to Barker Dam or to Rattlesnake Canyon and find the person that has the dog. Usually by the time you get there, they're done. But what we've done to deal with dog issues is we've assigned certain of our interpretive staff and our general staff to go to key areas like Rattlesnake and during prime time when we know dogs are there to hang out and just to do friendly education like, hey, how are you doing? You probably didn't know this big horn sheep up here. Dogs aren't allowed entrees inside of national parks. Would you mind taking your dog and maybe going exploring some public land outside the park boundary? And so that's helped out a lot. We put up a whole series of signs that have been super effective communicating the message about protecting bighorn sheep, and so that has been an effective tool. Yet dogs make me angry, and I'm a dog owner. I've been a dog owner my whole life. Although our dog just died this week, we are dog free for the first time in 22 years. But, yeah, I was frustrated. I cannot recreate inside of a park with my dog like I'd like to. But I also understand that there's a causal effect of dogs in these areas, and we have a responsibility because of the law and also protect these resources to go after dogs and dog owners in these areas. I would encourage you, if you see dogs inside the park and you're able to get out on a cell, reach out to our dispatch and say, hey, dispatch, I want to let you know there are a guy with four dogs walking up this canyon right now. And if we do have a range in the area, she's going to show up here and she's going to have a great opportunity to educate that visitor, whether it's through conversation or through a visit to the magistrate.

Alicia: Good to know that there's a resource number that someone can call. This one's really shitty, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I'd love to know why it's acceptable to ask the public who pay an entrance fee to volunteer to clean bathrooms and trash bins in the park on holidays because there's not enough funding for staff that deserves to be well paid for their hard work and dedication.

David Smith: Wow, that's a really good question, because you own this national park, and as a US. Citizen, you have a responsibility for taking care of it. So we pay taxes, we pay user fees. Just like with your house, you pay your taxes, you pay your mortgage for that house, but you also have a responsibility to take care of your house. Congress and the President will distribute the funds that we have in our tax base to be able to get all the things that we need our roads, our education, our defense, our parks. There's just not enough right now to go around, and that's why visitors are there. I don't like asking people to pick up things, but when I brought my children up, they knew that we pick up three pieces of litter a day. Each one of us does it regardless of where we are. It's part of our philosophy in life, and we volunteer whenever we have time to help people in our community. The same is true for your national park and our ranger staff. They work really hard. I'm super proud of them. I think our wages are competitive with most other industries that are out there right now. Yes, folks would always like to have more income, but we're doing a really good job of taking care of our folks.

Alicia: Nice. What can be done to help save the Joshua trees in the park?

David Smith: The very first thing you can do is trying to reduce your carbon footprint as much as possible. And if that means carpooling with someone, if it means not running your air conditioning all day, those are all little steps we can do in our lives. We can go even further. We can really start looking into photovoltaics for a house and solar and electric cars, or just using your bike all the time, which is tough in the desert. I know it's very tough to do those things, but we are part of the reason Joshua trees are disappearing. All of us have a stake, especially in a country like the United States, where we have a very high standard of living, and we also have a huge demand on the carbon footprint. It impacts the Joshua trees. That's one of the things we can do. In the coming years, the time will come where we're going to have to look at Revegetating Josh trees at higher elevations inside the park where they used to exist, but they got burned out. That is places where we're going to look for volunteers to help out as much as possible. But honestly, it is finding a way to reduce or eliminate our carbon footprint on this planet.

Alicia: Right. Excellent answer. I didn't see that one coming. Had my ideas. Top five weirdest experiences, please. Peculiar noises, odd sensations, feeling watched or stalked, trees inexplicably damaged, that sort as of yet. Any ideas about missing visitors?

David Smith: I have to say, walking down a nature trail, coming across a group of nudists is always top of my list of surreal kind of experiences here at Joshua Tree.

Alicia: So I definitely didn't see that one.

David Smith: I did not see that at all. This was just a traumatic experience for me. But I was working on a cottonwood and a visitor crashes his car into the side of a hill and it catches on fire, and I'm the only one there to deal with it. So that was just a really traumatic fatality that I will live with for the rest of my life.

Alicia: Wow.

David Smith: This is a good one. A German visitor had broken his leg. He'd fallen down and Lost Palm's Oasis, and I spent the night with him because we couldn't carry him out. It was the middle of the summer. It was hotter than hell. And in the morning, Riverside County sent their helicopter out. And dropping from the helicopter was this paramedic, and he took off his helmet and it was our magistrate, it was our judge. He goes, hey, David, how are you doing? Like, what are you doing here? He goes. Oh, I volunteer on the weekends with the Riverside County Search and rescue. I'm here to treat your patients. Well, that was a pretty special day, seeing that. I think having Mr. And Mrs. Obama show up to go hiking on their anniversary and they chose Joshua Tree as the place that they wanted to reconnect with each other was a pretty special time.

Alicia: Wow.

David Smith: I know you're looking for space aliens coming down and, like, sonic booms and things like that inside the park and what's the last part of that question?

Alicia: Thoughts on missing visitors?

David Smith: Well, you know what? We find them one way or the other. Recently we've had three people that had gone missing for over a year or two.

Alicia: Ewasco was over a decade.

David Smith: Yeah, it was over a decade. Glass it's just surreal that it was so close to where people were hiking. It's insane. I've gone on so many of these searches, and you think you've covered everything. One of the miracles was two years ago. Three years ago, we had that girl from New Zealand who she's hiking down up by Lost Palm. She leans back on a dry waterfall. She falls over and gets incredibly injured. And her friends back in New Zealand to say, hey, our friend is missing. Our ranger who's down there, Myles Landry, immediately calls CHP and says, I think this is her car. They go out there. He starts hiking out there. They spot her on a side trail waving a map in the air. She'd been there for three or four days. She was this far from dying. So that was a pretty awesome find.

Alicia: I heard she's written a book.

David Smith: Oh, wonderful. I'd love to read it. Sell it in our bookstore.

Alicia: What are your thoughts about the future of climbing in Joshua Tree? Ie. Regulations, developing new routes, including climbers in the decision, safety concerns, access, et cetera.

David Smith: We're just about ready to send out the draft of the climbing management plan, which will give us a blueprint for how to manage climbing into the future. Some of the issues that have been coming up have been social trails and their impact on the landscape and everything in the plant communities. It has been the use of wilderness and the proliferation of bolts in wilderness, which those are installations. And wilderness is a'process for allowing permanent installations in wilderness. But we haven't followed it as a result there are thousands of bolts there. Now the use of power drills and wilderness as well is a big issue that we're considering and then there's just kind of new types of recreation that we hadn't thought about before. So highlighting and flatlining bouldering to some degree has really exploded. I don't know if you've seen everyone with their mattresses on their back as they go to these different locations and if they do it en masse it has an impact. There's a lot of reasons why we're doing the climbing management plan right now. I would envision the public will have a lot of say and input on how this is actually going to be finalized but there's going to have to be probably some additional controls in wilderness I would see a mandatory permit process for the installation or the reinstallation or the removal of bolts in wilderness maybe throughout the entire park as well. We have been climbed heavily for about 50, 60 years now and 95% of the routes are probably that are decent are in place right now. I'm sitting here talking to you guys and I could see these bolts on ridiculous rocks. Like why would anyone put a bolt there? It doesn't make any sense. But someone came up and said I want to create my own little special route right here.

Alicia: There's some bolts inside the slot of rattlesnake that big bath lift and it always really the wrong way. This is an area that humans aren't supposed to be able to get in. Leave it alone, will you?

David Smith: I do expect to see more controls on that. I don't expect to see controls for who's going to climb. It's not going to be like you have to get a permit to go climbing in certain areas. There's 80 documented climbs inside the park. I think we can spread it out enough so I don't see that as being part of it. I see a well established trail plan and when people deviate from it, we may even consider adding to the compendium. You have to stay on trails in certain areas in the park so that we don't get these spider webs of social trails all over the place happening. But climbing is a legitimate and recognized usage tree. 20% of our visitors come here specifically for rock recreation. It's very meaningful to 6000 people a year that come to this park and I would say half of the other people really enjoy watching them climb. When I'm walking on the trails, people are like, oh my gosh, did you see that guy? And there's a whole bunch of people watching someone climb and that is a legitimate recreational thing to do inside of a national park.

Alicia: I saw something about the climbers outreach in the news, some sort of a press release. Is there a link we can share with you?

David Smith: Yeah, so if you go to the park services website so www dot MPs gov j OTR and you go to the it's like a climbing link.

Alicia: Okay.

David Smith: You'll get to that page, you can get an automatic newsletter sent to you and all the information is there. But we also, about every two months or so, issue a news release. We call them newsletter. And the newsletter talks about the climbing management plan about a backcountry permit system. Since the parks of visitation has exploded, we're probably going to start doing reservations in some of our backcountry areas inside the park. Specifically. I'm looking at it right now over at Indian Cove with the Boy Scout trail. I've gone in there before on runs in the weekend and come across groups of 60 people camping together. How is this possible? How did you miss this? So we're looking at a registration system in the back country. That's another thing that's coming up right now.

Alicia: Nice. Oh, this is a good one. I've heard the rumor of a road and multiple large campsites planned to be built near the wilderness zone of Boy Scout Trail and the entrance to Willow Hole due to the extreme influx of visitors over the past decade. What if true, do you think increased foot traffic, noise pollution to this area of the park will bring negative consequences to the Wonderland?

David Smith: Yes. There is no truth to that statement whatsoever.

Alicia: What about the one to the south by Sheet Path? Yeah, there was a rumor of one.

David Smith: So we're looking at a residential learning center there for kids.

Alicia: There's an old property that you guys are going to use right now.

David Smith: Yeah, it did not work out really well, but we're looking at Sheep Pass. There's a non profit called Jtree that we work with that does outdoor education, and they are in the process of raising funds to create a learning bridge type campus that focuses on children going into the park and having young giving them that residential experience of being able to camp out and see the stars and then hike up to Ryan Mountain the next day. Relatively well used portion of the park. I would never develop a wilderness area of the park. It's contrary to policy and law, and it just would make my stomach hurt.

Alicia: Yeah, I'm glad that's just a rumor. Most memorable meteor shower and year. Also in a UFO sighting. Haha.

David Smith: Yeah. You know what? It wasn't at Joshua Tree, I'm sorry to say. I was hiking out of Horseshoe Canyon at Canyonlands National Park. It was at 300 in the afternoon, and I look up and I see this incredibly bright thing with a long trail coming through it. And then all of a sudden it explodes in the sky. And I see three other light things going out out towards Hanksville. I was like, what was that? Was it a missile? What's going on? And I was all freaking out. And then the Salt Lake City Tribune did a story about an earthquake in that area that time at that point, it was a meteorite crashing down into the desert of Utah, and it triggered seismic activity that they thought it was an earthquake. It was pretty cool.

Alicia: That's amazing to get to witness.

David Smith: That was really cool. I had a great time. I have done meteor shower parties with visitors before at Grand Canyon, and, man, they are cold, miserable times.

Alicia: That's why meteor showers out here in.

David Smith: The desert are way better. Oh, my gosh. Going up to, like, jumbo rocks at night, just watching it would be great.

Alicia: Yeah.

David Smith: But now that I'm, like, 55, I just fall asleep. I can't stay up to sleep.

Alicia: Yeah. All right, that's all for this time. Please do check out our website@ninetymilesfrombeetles.com where you'll find show notes, photos, videos and all sorts of other little goodies. I'm Alicia Pike signing off.

Bouse Parker: This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia Pike, editing by Chris Clarke podcast. Artwork by the estimable Martin Mancha. Theme music Is by Bright Side Studio other Music by Slipstream Follow us on Twitter on Instagram at 90 mi from Needles and on Facebook@facebook.com. ninetymiles from Needles. Listen to us at 90 Miles from Needles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you to David Smith and Christian Daniels for the interviews and to Wk Channel Three, W, JZ, Fox Five, San Diego, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMahon, KPBS and CBS Eight, San Diego for their contributions to our fair use sampling. Thanks to our newest Patreon supporters. Leland Means. Coral Clark, David McMullen and Michael E. Gordon support this podcast by visiting us at nine 0 mile from Needles.com Patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as $5. Or visit Nine 0 Mile from Needles.com Kofi to make a one time contribution. Our supporters enjoy privileges, including early access to this episode. Crucial support for this podcast came from Ted Kaufman and Laura Rosell. All characters on this podcast experience a wide range of temperatures and weather conditions and can be classified into four types hot, semiarid, coastal and cold. Mrs. Bows Parker reminding you that littering the desert with toxic crap is a lousy way to celebrate or commemorate anything. See you next time.

Chris: Sit, Heart. Sit. Good dog.