| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Habitats The Amargosa
When the California Desert Protection Act was passed six years ago, over 6.3 million acres of unprotected land were designated as parkland or national monuments. Motorcyclists and other off-road vehicle users suddenly found themselves “locked out” of huge tracts of desert open space they were accustomed to calling their own. Meanwhile, explosive population and economic growth in Las Vegas and surrounding desert bedroom communities, have amped up the recreational noise in designated playgrounds of the northeastern Mojave Desert. At Dumont Dunes, one of these playgrounds, about two thousand outdoor recreational vehicle drivers convene on a typical weekend—and up to five thousand show up on holidays. Once the recreationalists get pumped up in the dunes, it’s hard for them to resist going out on their own to explore the surrounding desert. The entire area between Baker, Pahrump, and Death Valley National Park (an area the size of Rhode Island) is patrolled by only one Bureau of Land Management ranger. So the bikers and 4x4s spill off the dunes and onto the surrounding Mojave Desert virtually at will. And bordering Dumont Dunes is the Amargosa, the last free-flowing river in the Mojave Desert. The scene would have blown the gaskets of Dad Fairbanks. Fairbanks was a legendary poker player who ran the 18-horse team that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was the Mojave town of Greenwater’s only link to the outside world. Dad and his big-hearted wife, Celesta, were as close to the land as people can get, says Susan Sorrells, the Fairbanks’ great-granddaughter. In those days, there was no other choice. A hundred years and six generations later, the Fairbanks’ family still lives here. Sorrells, her brother Charles, and their nephew Michael run the tiny town of Shoshone, a stone’s throw from the Amargosa. Susan’s cousin, Brian Brown and his wife, Bonnie, own and operate China Ranch, a date farm at the gateway to the Amargosa Canyon, where they center their tireless stewardship of the surrounding area. Together, the descendants of Dad Fairbanks have inherited thousands of acres throughout the surrounding desert hills and, like their ancestors, they are still living close to the land, and they are still in love with it. Susan Sorrells left the desert to go to Smith College and then on to UCLA, where she earned a master’s degree in anthropology. After doing fieldwork in Africa, she returned to Shoshone. “This area right here is as remarkable as any in the Mojave. But because it’s not written about or talked about much, people just assume that it is a wasteland. That couldn’t be further from the truth.” It’s easy to see what Sorrells is so passionate about: silence so profound you can hear the blood rushing through your own ears; extremes of heat and light that never let you forget that you are alive, or forget life’s precariousness. The sunsets seem to suck the breath from your lungs, and the sunrises bear each day as if it were the first on Earth. And the place abounds with archaeological sites, an obsession of Sorrells. While the rest of the world careens forward at breakneck pace, rising and falling with the nasdaq, this desert keeps its own time to a seasonal heartbeat that varies little from generation to generation, millennia to millennia. But things do speed up a little near the Amargosa, the desert’s lifeline; birds and insects dart about, hiding in the cottonwoods, willows, and tamarisks that line parts of the river’s shores. And the desert silence is broken by the startling song of rushing water. Most of the 1.7 million tourists who pass through Shoshone on their way to Death Valley each year don’t even know a river runs here. They see only a dry and uncaring surface. But this desert holds tender secrets, many of which spring from the Amargosa. Though it flows for a good 200 miles, the Amargosa peters out only about 50 miles from its hidden and inaccessible source at the Nevada Test Site near Beatty, Nevada, about a hundred miles north of Las Vegas. From there, it goes underground almost due south, crossing the California border right next to Highway 127. At Shoshone, the river resurfaces and remains above ground to its termination. Twenty miles south of Shoshone, it makes an abrupt westward U-turn and flows north again into the salt flats of Death Valley, where it disappears into the ground at Badwater. The Amargosa is a magnet for life. Birds, insects, mammals, even reptiles are drawn to its banks. Two hundred and sixty bird species have been counted here, including rarities like the endangered least Bell’s vireo, the yellow-billed cuckoo, and the Southwestern willow flycatcher. The river is home to two endemic desert fish, one of which, the Amargosa pupfish, can withstand higher temperature variations and extremes of salinity than almost any other known fish on Earth. Here, and only here, lives the tiny, mouse like Amargosa vole, an endangered species. The Native Americans who lived here for millennia camped on the river’s banks. Water and the wildlife it drew were priceless to them; the Amargosa area is the only place where the four ancient Mojave tribes overlapped. The so-called “sleeping circles,” piles of stones that served as the foundations for native huts, still lie intact near the river. Some are 10,000 years old. Trails probably just as old, were polished into the desert pavement by generations of native feet crisscrossing the valley. “There are some sites that you walk upon and it seems like the people just left an hour ago,” says Sorrells. She takes me to one of these, a pattern of loops just a few minutes out of Shoshone. Known as the Amargosa Mystery Rings, they were first discovered in 1929 by anthropologist Malcolm Rodgers, who thought they dated back as many as ten thousand years. Other anthropologists have questioned their meaning and date, but no one can deny that the strange patterns they make across the desert floor are haunting and beautiful. Each circle is about three feet across with a smaller circle in the center, lined up like punctuation marks on the landscape. We walk to the edge of an embankment where erosion cuts off the pattern. A fresh motorcycle track slashes right across two of the circles. “The rider probably never even saw what he was riding over,” Sorrells says. I turn to ask if there are more of these mystery circles elsewhere in Death Valley, but stop when I see that she is crying. “What a waste,” she says. We climb into Sorrells’ truck and drive out of town. She soon pulls over and turns up a little side road past some caves carved into the volcanic tuff hillside by miners nearly a century ago. One of the caves has a wider opening than the others and Sorrells explains that its owner, a friend of her grandfather, who stored his dynamite nearby, had found a gold vein and struck it rich. The man didn’t want to move away from his mining buddies, though, so when he bought a car, the height of luxury in the early 1930s, he just carved a garage into the side of the hill and stayed put. A little farther up the way, Sorrells points out an Indian shelter cave nestled in the hillside. It may date back five or more thousand years, she says. We pass three different camper vans and a converted school bus, all parked illegally a few meters off the road. Two have dirt bikes parked next to them. “Those people could easily be camping and tramping right over archaeological sites,” says Sorrells. “There are lots of them, right out there.” Finally we pull into an area that appears to have been cut out of a hillside. Sorrells’ grandfather’s employees excavated this site for pumacite 80 years ago. His crew scraped the ground down to a hard substrate that, hundreds of thousands of years ago, had been a muddy lakebed. She points out the footprints of two mastodons. A set of adult prints paces through the mud, paralleled by a set from a juvenile. The pair may have been hurrying along when the Yellowstone Caldera erupted about 1.3 million years ago, burying their prints in ash. Nearby lie still more tracks: footfalls from four different species of camels, one of which has only been found at this site; the big pads of saber-toothed tigers; and daintier marks left by various prehistoric horse species. Nearby, archaeologists found the entire skeleton of a mammoth some years back. Since then, another site filled with the tracks of ancient creatures has been discovered. Geologists have named this area the “Shoshone Zoo” because of the abundance and diversity of fossils. The whereabouts of these and other sites, including early shelter caves, petroglyphs, and other archaeological treasures, are kept secret to prevent looters and vandals from destroying them. But anonymity doesn’t keep off-road vehicles away. “I’ve always resented the Park Service’s hiding ancient man sites,” says Sorrells, “but now I understand why they do.” Later in the day, geographer, teacher, naturalist, and desert activist Miriam “Mim” Romero takes me for a hike into the Amargosa Canyon Natural Area, through which the Amargosa River flows from Tecopa down to the Dumont Dunes. In the early 1970s, Romero and her late husband Ben lobbied to protect this area from being open to recreational vehicles. They succeeded in the mid-1970s when the land was designated an area of critical environmental concern. We descend into a canyon with so much vegetation it is hard to believe we are in the desert at all. Mixed in with the willows and cottonwoods are large stands of tamarisk, a robust exotic brought to the area as a windbreak a hundred years ago. A new Bureau of Land Management proposal to grant Wild and Scenic status to the Amargosa would allocate funds to remove the tamarisk, which interrupts the natural hydrology of the river and crowds out native plants. “It would be great to get this exotic out of here,” says Romero. “I can just imagine this river the way it looked 200 years ago. Or 2,000. Maybe it’ll look that way again.” I thought back to what Susan Sorrells had said that morning looking at the tire-damaged Amargosa mystery rings: “I hate to imagine what this will look like in five years. It will either have a plan that protects and preserves, or be destroyed.” Gordy Slack is a freelance writer and Contributing Editor to California Wild. |
Spring 2001
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