S4E19: Finding Nature's Refuge in Salt Lake Sprawl

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:26 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think in it's time for 90 miles from Neil's the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:47 - (Chris Clarke): When you're in the general vicinity of Salt Lake City, it's not hard to figure out where you are. You just got to look for street signs. The streets here are about as systematically laid out as in any other city of this size in the country. It's all very logical. From the main headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, still a very strong political force in Utah, the streets are named with simple numbers in increments of a hundred, 100 south, 300 west, 200 north, 500 east.

0:01:21 - (Chris Clarke): The numbers go up as you gain distance from the temple, about 100 for every 0.15 miles. And that is the trick to knowing where you are in the Salt Lake City area, at least relative to the Mormon temple in downtown. And that means that if you happen to be standing on the sidewalk at 3300 south and around 1100 west, you know, you're quite a ways from the center of Salt Lake City. In fact, you're not in Salt Lake City anymore at all.

0:01:51 - (Chris Clarke): You're in South Salt Lake, considered a core suburb of the Salt Lake City metropolitan region. And a couple hundred yards to your west lies the Jordan river, with the city of West Valley on the other side. West Valley City is the second largest city in the state of Utah, a fact that is true even though you probably haven't heard of West Valley City before. On this cusp of South Salt Lake and West Valley, I'm surrounded by an air conditioning repair place, an auto renovation business, an extremely modest housing development, a golf course, a less modest housing development, a food bank headquarters, a cultural celebration center that has some Orientalist motifs in its architectural design, and the Salt Lake City Oxbow Jail, which has no motifs in its architectural design.

0:02:44 - (Chris Clarke): This is a neighborhood that is extremely active in an economic sense. It's in fact bustling with lots of loud traffic, and yet it has very little evidence of having an overall development plan. I get the feeling standing here that if a person bought a piece of land and had an idea, they could build that idea, whether it was an ice cream parlor or a penitentiary. But at this particular corner of 3300 south and 1100 west, on the very west edge of the community of South Salt Lake.

0:03:14 - (Chris Clarke): When I turn my back to the road, the traffic noise ebbs just a little. And there's something different about this spot that becomes obvious. There's something a bit more restful, a bit more inviting about it. I'm here to be shown around what is a truly remarkable piece of urban planning, albeit done by a non governmental organization. The project aims to restore 12 acres of the landscape not to its original condition, but at least to habitability by some of the area's original non human inhabitants, while at the same time creating a welcoming and instructive place for the area's current human inhabitants.

0:03:58 - (Chris Clarke): I'm talking about the Pia Okwai Nature Center, a project of the Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City.

0:04:11 - (Parker Lloyd): So from the top of the observation tower here to the north, of course, you see condominiums and the road. And if you really peer out, you can see the magnesium mine. But a little bit closer, you can see cottonwoods and hawthorn trees and serviceberries and native birds and a little pond and even a piece of the Jordan River. And if we look to the south, that industrial sprawl continues. But again, we have Palmer's penstemon and woods rows and these keystone native species just a stone's throw away, buffering us from kind of that industrial stuff.

0:04:48 - (Chris Clarke): And there's a great big tilt up style building about a Frisbee's throw away from us. What's that?

0:04:54 - (Parker Lloyd): That is the South Salt Lake men's shelter, where we have actually a pretty good working relationship with them, where folks come over and they volunteer, they appreciate the space. They can kind of lounge in the shade or, you know, hang out on the observation deck where we're at right here. We even do special programming where they can just come hang out, drink some coffee and experience nature a little bit up close, even in the middle of the city here.

0:05:28 - (Parker Lloyd): My name is Parker Lloyd. I am the current horticulture lead at Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City. But I am transitioning into a new role here, Conservation education manager. Tracy Aviary is an AZA conservation bird zoo located right in the heart of Liberty Wells, a neighborhood here in Salt Lake City. And in addition to being the oldest freestanding aviary in the United States, we have a new project that we're working on, which is the Nature center at pio Okwai, about 20 minutes away from the Aviary.

0:06:05 - (Parker Lloyd): This is an urban green space in South Salt Lake, which sits right along the Jordan River. Pia Okwai is the Neue, or Goshu Shoshone language for the Jordan river, which cuts through Salt Lake Valley, it approximately translates to big flow, which kind of harkens to a time when this river was a river and not functionally a canal running through the industrial parks of West Valley and South Salt Lake.

0:06:36 - (Parker Lloyd): At one point in time, it was a large, wide, variable river with floodplains around it and a lot more personality than it has now. And at the Nature center here, we try to envision what that past could have looked like with more habitat and more native plants, more wildlife. But beyond that, we're really focused on bringing community to the nature center and creating a space on the west side of Salt Lake which has been really historically neglected as far as parks and museums and green spaces go. And we get to directly interface with the community out here. And it's beyond fulfilling. It's exciting. I live in West Valley. I live half a mile down the road, and I didn't know about this place when I first moved to Salt Lake. And it's a comforting place to take a step back from the cars and the warehouses and the fast food restaurants and just spot an unusual bird. Look at a kingfisher, see some pretty native flowers.

0:07:40 - (Parker Lloyd): We're sitting inside the bird blind. We're just two floors down from the top of the observation deck, and we can actually look out on our. Our bird feeders. You might notice on the windows, we have little, little dots. That's to keep them bird safe. We want to be working with the environment out here. We're not here to cause any harm to the native animals. Through this space, we're able to offer interpretive programming where volunteers will sit and just tell people about the birds that are hanging out. We have some Sibley guides and binoculars on the table over there just for people to use while they're in here.

0:08:17 - (Parker Lloyd): And then sometimes our conservation team will set up bird banding in here where they have actual, like, structured science they're doing, gently capturing the birds on grounds and putting little bands onto their ankles so that they can track their population data, see where they're coming from, where they're going, see how old they are. We have banded things as tiny as lesser goldfinch and all the way up to. We got a flicker woodpecker earlier this year, so a pretty good sized bird for a little songbird survey.

0:08:51 - (Chris Clarke): I'm seeing some male red wing blackbirds.

0:08:54 - (Parker Lloyd): They're prolific here. We have a very large breeding population of them that just lives right along the river. And yeah, they make quick work of our bird seed.

0:09:20 - (Chris Clarke): Earlier in the day, Parker had shown me around the Liberty park campus of Tracy Aviary, which is a really impressive place, if not specifically about the desert. And Parker told me a little bit about his background and how he got into his current position. And it was a great story and really inspiring for those of us who haven't been angling for conservation jobs for our entire career. You really need enthusiasm and luck and not much else in order to work in conservation. So I asked him to repeat that.

0:09:50 - (Parker Lloyd): I'm actually a college dropout. Dropout, class of 2015 from Portland State University back in Oregon. Went to architecture school, also studying environmental science, but only stuck around for about a year and a half. And at that point I moved out to rural eastern Oregon at Klamath Falls, right on the California border and got a part time job as a caregiver working in a hospital there. And after a little while they made me a manager. And from there they promoted me into the inpatient part of the hospital where I was doing case management for five more years and really loved having that community impact, working face to face with people, going through difficult situations, just helping them get out of the hospital and stay out of the hospital.

0:10:38 - (Parker Lloyd): My partner got accepted into air traffic control school and eventually got posted to Salt Lake City. Here he works in the radar facility just over by the airport. And that brought us to Salt Lake about three years ago. Bummed around in a couple of different little careers here. I worked in a greenhouse. I very briefly attempted retail and started volunteering at the Aviary. And eventually a job opportunity came along and I got hired on as the horticulture lead for the Aviary. And now I'm transitioning into the role of conservation education manager.

0:11:17 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll be right back.

0:11:21 - (Chris Clarke): If you were to leave South Salt Lake, leaving Parker and I standing there at Pia Okwai and hop on Interstate 15 and drive for about 80 miles until you got to Utah State Route 132, which heads west from Nephi. And then if you took that road to U.S. route 6 and then took that road to U.S. 50 at Delta, Utah and then kept going west after about three and a half total hours of driving, you'd get to Great Basin national park in Nevada, which is basically Catter Corner across the Great Salt Lake and the Great Salt Desert. From Salt Lake City, it's a beautiful place.

0:11:59 - (Chris Clarke): Wheeler Peak, the centerpiece of Great Basin national park, is an amazing mountain. It's just beautiful high desert country all around. And one cold October evening, our sound recordist Fred Bell caught this audio of two bull elk bugling facing off against each Other trying to figure out who the boss was of that section of Great Basin National Park. Enjoy.

0:12:28 - (Parker Lloyd): You.

0:13:30 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. Confusion and irritability are the first signs of heat injury and of hosting a podcast.

0:13:43 - (Chris Clarke): We're back to my visit to Pia Okwai Nature Center. Talking with Parker Lloyd, I asked Parker about the demographics of the neighborhood.

0:13:54 - (Parker Lloyd): So, like many things in Utah and Salt Lake Valley, a lot of the recent history of West Valley is tied to the Mormon Church, Mormon settlers. Being located along the Jordan river, there has historically been a lot of farms along here. As Salt Lake City grew and got larger, there was also a need for a lot of industrial spaces and warehouses, and you have to park all your FedEx boxes somewhere. And those buildings happen to be in West Valley. There's huge warehouse complexes out here.

0:14:33 - (Parker Lloyd): But West Valley itself is made up of many small former towns and communities that eventually got reincorporated as West Valley City. So you have these neighborhoods and these suburban households and these families that are living next to an Amazon distribution center and telephone repair shop. The community out here is heavily influenced by Mexican and Latin cultures. There's a lot of indigenous people out here. There is a robust Tongan and Pacific Islander and Filipino and Samoan culture out here, and they are phenomenal community partners to have. We host events specifically for and with these communities and just being able to not just bring these cottonwoods to them, but to also learn from these communities about their native plants and their relationship with the land.

0:15:37 - (Parker Lloyd): It's impactful, and it's a level of job satisfaction I've never found anywhere.

0:15:43 - (Chris Clarke): It seems like a strong environmental justice component to what you're doing out here.

0:15:47 - (Parker Lloyd): The goal of the Nature center is to create this sense of community, which to me, that doesn't just apply to the people, it applies to the animals, too, and how it's all interconnected. It's a brand of environmental justice that I hope more people can recreate across not just Salt Lake. There's plenty of empty lots that you can start planting native trees in. But across the west, there's abandoned industrial parks everywhere. And they could all have so much more potential to have impact and meaning on their communities.

0:16:19 - (Chris Clarke): How have you been received by people that live nearby?

0:16:22 - (Chris Clarke): I mean, you're one of them.

0:16:23 - (Parker Lloyd): Yeah, it's definitely a mixed bag. Generally positive people come through and they're amazed at the space. I think what we really need is two to let those communities know that we're here. Most people just don't know we're Here.

0:16:39 - (Chris Clarke): What do you folks have in mind for what this place will look like in 25 or 30 years?

0:16:44 - (Parker Lloyd): We just broke ground on our newest building, which will be an eco learning lab. It's going to be a greenhouse and classroom all rolled into one where we can have school groups and classes out in the setting to get dirty, to work with plants, to learn about soil biology, to check out the little bugs that are just crawling around. And that should hopefully be done within the next year. But 25 years from now, we want an oasis of mature trees, native plants, not your typical manicured lawns, but instead interactive environments like wildflower meadows that support native plants, that then support native bugs, that then support native birds.

0:17:29 - (Parker Lloyd): And we want to be involved in the community. We want to be a staple place where people can bring their kids and start those core memories. We see this at the Liberty park campus where the Aviary exhibits are at, where we've been around for 70, 80 years. There are grandparents now who remember coming to the Aviary as kids, and they have this deep, fundamental sense of place and sense of community. With the Aviary, the Nature center has potential to have that same role for people in South Salt Lake and in West Valley and West Jordan and all these other west side communities that don't have many places like that.

0:18:11 - (Parker Lloyd): In my role as horticulture lead, I primarily worked at the Liberty park campus. I spend a day or two a week at the Nature center, so I can't take much credit for all the amazing work that gets done out here. That's the rest of our horticulture team. That's Haley, that's Bobby, that's Nicole. That's all of our incredible volunteers that we couldn't do any of this without. But at the Liberty park campus, we have this dynamic team of all these passionate individuals. We have conservationists, we have botanists, we have horticulturists, we have zookeepers, People that are beyond passionate about what they do.

0:18:58 - (Parker Lloyd): It's exciting to be part of that dynamic, to bring that kind of botanical knowledge into this sphere of experts and to work as a team to bring that to the guests and the community that comes to the Nature center and to the Aviary. It's just phenomenal.

0:19:19 - (Chris Clarke): The Liberty park campus has a more Of a global perspective.

0:19:24 - (Parker Lloyd): At the Liberty park campus, we have birds from around the world. Some of our animals that we care for live here in Utah, but others are from the high Andes of Chile. Others are from the Eurasian steppe. We have a particularly dynamic little bird, the Guam Sea Heck, or the Guam Kingfisher from the island of Guam. These are phenomenal little birds that unfortunately, due to an introduced predator on the island of Guam, are extinct in the wild.

0:19:53 - (Parker Lloyd): Currently, there's a project, the sea hack recovery project, underway, attempting to reintroduce these birds into a snake free wild environment. The aviary has gotten to participate in that project by both the genetic diversity of the birds we care for, but also the skill of our keepers. There's currently nine Guam sea hec living in the wild under the careful watch of some biologists on Palmyra atoll, about dead center in the Pacific, halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand.

0:20:28 - (Parker Lloyd): One of those birds was actually hatched by Ali, our aviculture manager, who helped care for that bird its very first few days of its existence. And now that bird is living in the wild, potentially bringing this species back from the brink of extinction. It's cool just to be in the sphere of people like that.

0:20:50 - (Chris Clarke): It's a considerably different neighborhood, reminiscent of Portland, Oregon in some ways it seems maybe a little more affluent.

0:20:56 - (Parker Lloyd): Yeah, no, you're definitely right. The Liberty Wells neighborhood. It's a lot of old brick craftsman houses, very small, but typically meticulously manicured lawns. It can be deceiving about the affluent nature of that neighborhood. Most of the people that live around the aviary rent. There are houses that have been converted into duplexes or triplexes to be multiple one and two bedroom apartments. And people rent these homes, but they still get to live in some amount of comfort. There's mature shade trees. There's public transit options all around them. They're walking distance to small businesses, to cafes, to bike shops. And you really don't get that on the west side. There's very few, even just local coffee shops where you can go hang out and have a coffee.

0:21:48 - (Parker Lloyd): I will say west valley has phenomenal food choices, particularly Mexican and Central American cuisine. There's multiple excellent places to get a Papua, lots of delicious taco trucks.

0:22:04 - (Chris Clarke): So this is the part of this episode where I cop to my inaccurate assumptions coming into this meeting, making the confession that this place was not at all what I was picturing. That when Parker first reached out to me and asked if I wanted to take a look at Pia Okwai. The way he described it, I had sort of an image of rolling hills, maybe some development off in the distance, A river fringed with cattails and tules and canyon willows and cottonwoods hanging over the banks, the river flowing and upwellings and eddies.

0:22:38 - (Chris Clarke): And yeah, there are a lot of nature centers that are in places like that that have been largely undeveloped over the years or re undeveloped over the years. And those places are wonderful and they're important. But there is an element of justice in the place where Pia Okwai actually is surrounded by sprawl and communities where people are just trying to live their lives. And I have to say there's a particular beauty to the project as it is that I was not anticipating.

0:23:05 - (Parker Lloyd): It's been within my short time here that we've expanded from that tiny little 1 1/2 acres of old parkland into this giant 12 acre campus. It seems giant on paper. You even said when we were up on top like this is way more compact, this is way more direct than you'd imagined. It's definitely filling up quickly like a lot of people.

0:23:32 - Chris ClarkeWhen you say nature center on the river I have this impression in my mind because of my own experiences and assumptions. I have lived in neighborhoods like this and been mournful for the lack of open spaces or places where there are trees that people don't Poodle Ball what.

0:23:53 - (Parker Lloyd): Is a poodle ball?

0:23:54 - (Chris Clarke): Like topiary pruning.

0:23:55 - (Parker Lloyd):  yes, Utah does love to poodle ball. We have an awful lot of boxwoods here in Utah. Fortunately, we have no boxwoods at the nature center nor at the Liberty park campus that I'm aware of. If there are, I'll have to get rid of them.

0:24:12 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I have a love hate relationship with boxwoods because the smell takes me back to some of the happy times in my childhood. Going to the historical parks on the east coast, Colonial Williamsburg, places like that. I am not under any illusions that they are helpful.

0:24:30 - (Parker Lloyd): They're green, they provide shade, they provide some shelter. We just had a rock pigeon show up. Just your typical city pigeons. We don't see them in the nature center too often, although there is a pretty good sized colony about half a mile down the road. We have hummingbird feeders hung up too. There's been a couple hummingbirds popping by. Haven't gotten a good look at what hummingbird it is, but get a lot of calliopes a lot of especially later in the season, black chinned.

0:25:02 - (Parker Lloyd): Once in a while we'll get an Anna's.

0:25:03 - (Chris Clarke): Here's a note about the room that we're sitting in. It's called the bird blind because the glass basically obscures people inside from being seen by people and birds outside the room. The west side of the room is dominated by three huge panes of glass which essentially make up half a hexagon with a room behind it filling up just a little bit more than half of that hexagon. There's a spotting scope in the corner of the room for people to use when they're visiting. The scope is probably used a lot of the time, at least with kids to look at birds on the feeders that are maybe 20ft away from the windows.

0:25:37 - (Chris Clarke): They look like they're thoroughly squirrel proofed, though I thought at the time that saying so was probably tempting fate, because squirrels take that kind of thing as a personal challenge. There are also some educational posters, profiles of individual birds, presumably birds you're likely to see at Pia Okwai. And those posters had what I assumed were the bird Shoshone names prominently featured, so I asked Parker about those.

0:26:00 - (Parker Lloyd): Some of our birds have indigenous names. Some of them have names in Spanish, and then they also have their English and Latin names too. But the indigenous names are the first thing you notice on these signs. And Chris, I know most of your listeners probably aren't in the Salt Lake Valley, and this isn't going to necessarily increase our uptick of guests, but it's exciting to have someone from so far away that we just got connected and now you're here. And this one on one connection is so important to the Nature center because maybe you know someone in Salt Lake Valley, or one of your listeners do and that person's going to say, hey, go check out the nature center at Pia Okwai. And it starts this chain reaction. And having these conversations is the first step to make those connections.

0:26:51 - (Chris Clarke): And that's about as good a note to end this episode on as I can possibly imagine. And like Parker said, if you are in the Salt Lake City area or going to be there sometime soon, or if you have friends and family that are there, or colleagues, ask them if they have been to Pia Okwai Nature center out in South Salt Lake. Contact info will be in the show. Notes I want to thank Parker Lloyd for showing me around and giving me the wonderful tour of both the Tracy Aviary Liberty park campus and the Pia Okwai Nature center in South Salt Lake.

0:27:24 - (Chris Clarke): Additional thanks to Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover announcer, Martine Mancha, our podcast artist, and Fred Bell, our nature sound recordist. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. Special Big enthusiastic thanks not only to the anonymous donor of $100 who said some very nice things about the podcast in their note. Much appreciated. But also to my dear, dear friend Blanca Villalobos, who rejoined us as a donor. She had to bow out for a minute when her life got a little complicated.

0:27:58 - (Chris Clarke): I think in some good ways, which is always nice. And she just started up again with a lovely note. I love her so dearly. She is an amazing person and we need to have her on the podcast. Blanca, heads up. Gonna call you. Couple other things before we close out. First off, I played a little bit with the format here just because the demand of the narrative arc kind of suggested it. So my heartfelt expression of gratitude to the people who donated and otherwise contributed didn't show up until the end.

0:28:32 - (Chris Clarke): Let me know how you feel about that. Secondly, I am very interested in taking the show on the road to El Paso in September. There is a event there put on by the Chihuahuan Desert Education Coalition based in El Paso. This is the 21st annual Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta happening in late September, which is a big old party of people that are working to protect the Chihuahuan Desert. And it's open to the public with lots and lots of educational stuff going on.

0:29:01 - (Chris Clarke): So it seems like a place we ought to be. I'm going to need to raise about 6 or 700 extra bucks over and above our usual budget. I think it's just a really good opportunity to introduce people to the podcast and to bring new episodes and new campaigns to your attention. So 90 miles from needles.com donate if you want to put some money into that trip. If you're leaving a donation and you want it to be earmarked for that trip, just let us know in the little note field.

0:29:29 - (Chris Clarke): Much appreciated. One other thing you can do that won't cost you any money unless you wanted to, is to take our survey 90 miles from needles.com survey. It says May 2025, but it's still current. You can let us know what you think and also provide us with a little bit of demographic information not tied to your identity so that when we do start approaching small businesses for sponsorships, we can tell them who's listening.

0:29:59 - (Chris Clarke): Today is the first relatively temperate day we've had in almost a week. Sitting here with a mini split off because it makes a lot of noise when I'm trying to record, and I'm actually still pretty comfortable. But our home thermometer over the last few days maxed out at about 113. The official high temperature in 29 palms yesterday was 116. And so summer is here, not waiting for the solstice. It is here.

0:30:23 - (Chris Clarke): And so just please don't overestimate your ability to stand the heat. I've been living in the Mojave for getting pretty close to 20 years at this point, and when the weather shifts like this, and it's 114 or 115 in my driveway. It makes me feel sick. And I'm not even trying to hike. So just keep that in mind. You know, if you die, you don't count as a listener anymore. That's bad for our numbers. But also, and far more importantly, we would miss you, as would a bunch of other people.

0:30:52 - (Chris Clarke): So please, just take care. Remember to hydrate, even if you're just sitting around the house, and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye, now.

0:31:07 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.