S4E23: Desert Bucket List: 9 Destinations You Must See

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from 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.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:45 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and it's been busy in the world this past week. A lot of us who care about the desert have been pretty upset over the loss of the Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, lost to the Dragon Bravo Fire. The lodge was built in the 30s, or actually rebuilt in the 30s after a previous fire, and the Grand Canyon Lodge was a destination of choice for a lot of people.

0:01:15 - (Chris Clarke): I had always wanted to stay there, and it's a little difficult to think that I won't be able to. I wrote about the fire at some length in my substack newsletter, Letters from the Desert, which if you haven't seen it before, you can go to 90miles fromnatals.com letters, sample it, and possibly subscribe for free or not. You have both options. At any rate, in the newsletter I sent out on July 16, I talked about standing in a gas station in Shonto, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation between Kayenta and Tuba City and trying to decide whether to take the most direct route home through Flagstaff and Williams or taking Route 98 and going to Page and then over the Marble Canyon Bridge on U.S. 89 and 89A and then eventually to the north rim of the Grand Canyon.

0:02:02 - (Chris Clarke): About twice the driving time and an extra day or so added to the trip, and I was perplexed. I really didn't know what the best idea was. You know, I get out into the desert and a fair enough percentage of the time, after a few days I just want to get home, which is way less complicated now that I live in the desert. I don't feel like I'm cheating on the desert going home to someplace outside of the desert.

0:02:26 - (Chris Clarke): But I do sometimes feel like I'm weaseling out of potential fun. And this decision was no different. And I stood there in Shanto at the gas station for 20 minutes trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And eventually I told myself, you have plenty of time to go to the North Rim and see the Grand Canyon Lodge and maybe even snag a room in one of the cabins. As it turns out, I actually didn't have plenty of time to go stay at the Grand Canyon Lodge.

0:02:57 - (Chris Clarke): The Dragon Bravo fire began with a lightning strike on July 4, and the park Service was trying to manage it as a controlled burn for the ecological benefits. These forests have evolved in the presence of fire, and they don't do well if fires are suppressed for a couple centuries. So doing limited burns in a careful fashion to open up a mosaic of different vegetation types in different aged forests is an ecological good deed.

0:03:20 - (Chris Clarke): And it backfired this time because the fire got out of hand. And on July 12th in the evening, the fire rampaged through the North Rim community, took out a whole bunch of cabins and employee housing and utility buildings and the Grand Canyon Lodge. There's a thing that people do when they get to a certain age, or at least a lot of people do this, or at least I have done it. They take a look at what they've accomplished in life and how much time they've got left, and they prioritize. They get a rough idea of what kinds of things they'd like to do in the time they have remaining on the planet, which could be 40 years or it could be 45 minutes.

0:04:01 - (Chris Clarke): We never know. And I've had to give up some of my long term, closely held ideas about projects I'd like to take on. I'm, for instance, probably not ever going to do my public arts project, capturing half a dozen northern mockingbirds, keeping them in captivity in spacious cages with excellent food, and make them listen to a tape loop of the first 10 seconds of Tainted Love by Softcel over and over again 24,7 for about a week, just long enough for them to learn the song. And then releasing those mockingbirds back into the wild seems like a crucial project.

0:04:40 - (Chris Clarke): But I just don't have the remaining time in my life to do that. I'm probably not going to through hike the Pacific Crest Trail or the Continental Divide Trail. It's not impossible, but it does take time to do that kind of thing anyway. Going to the North Rim and at least sitting on the porch of the Grand Canyon Lodge, if I couldn't afford to stay in one of the rooms was one of those things that I intended to do someday.

0:05:07 - (Chris Clarke): So I'm having to readjust and in this episode I'll talk about A list of 9 places. Numbering is a little bit arbitrary, but we'll call it nine places that I want to go while I can still go places. These are places in the desert that are enticing, that I've read about. I've imagined being at some of them. I've been really close to some. I've actually been just inside some of them but not explored. There's others I've only seen through YouTube videos and map stalking through Google Earth.

0:05:45 - (Chris Clarke): I want to mention these partly because it's a listicle. Those do well, but also because I think that we can use a little inspiration right now. We just lost a place that's really important and it's not the first time I've had a loss like that. Those of you who've been listening since day one will remember episode three of season one. I'll link it in the show Notes about my absolute favorite place in the world and how it burned to the ground and Sema Dome in Mojave National Preserve and having places that we can still go to and enjoy, that's a little bit more energizing and inspiring.

0:06:25 - (Chris Clarke): But I also wanted to take you all on as accountability partners so that I'm on the record and I actually get some of these done and we'll go through the list and I'll talk about why I want to go there. But first, there are a couple of things that we need to cover real quick. We are making good progress on our campaign to raise funds to get this podcast to El paso for the September 27th Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta, the 21st annual such.

0:06:54 - (Chris Clarke): We have a new goal of $1,200. We're just $325 shy of that goal. You can contribute to that and help us get our podcast in front of folks in the El Paso Las Cruces Juarez region by going to 90 miles from needles.comelpaso all one word. Hopefully some of the people we run into in El Paso will have things to teach me and by extension all you listeners out there. But even if not, it's always just good to make personal contact. I've said it before, real life conversations are so much more powerful than any other way we have of talking to each other.

0:07:32 - (Chris Clarke): So if you go to 90 miles from needles.com elpaso you can toss a little bit of money into the Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund. Just like Julian Orr who donated not a little bit of money on July 16th got us significantly closer to our goal. Julian, thank you so much. Really glad you find the work that we're doing worthwhile. And it is really gratifying to be this close to getting to El Paso. We're also still trying to set up an event in Tucson.

0:08:01 - (Chris Clarke): It might be a small thing, like 10 of my closest Tucson friends meeting at a restaurant. Who knows? But we will have details available for you as soon as we have details available for us. Lastly, the hundredth episode of this podcast is coming up. We're going to record that in a live online meeting using something like Zoom. That's going to be on August 7th. Thursday evening I announced a time last episode and I'm going to have to change that just a little bit because of a conflict that I remembered that will keep some people from showing up that really want to show up. So at 7pm on the 7th, easy to remember August 7th 7pm Pacific time.

0:08:42 - (Chris Clarke): We'll have more details coming up, but we will have an eventbrite set up with the information. We're going to charge a cover charge, but we won't keep anybody from attending if they can't afford that 10 bucks. That's just to cover costs and help spread the word that the podcast is here. We could not have made it as close to having a hundredth episode as we have without your contributions and your encouragement and your ideas and your donations. And all of us here at the Desert Advocacy Media Network are just really grateful.

0:09:17 - (Chris Clarke): All that said, let's start talking about the nine places on my abbreviated desert bucket list. I've got a lot more than nine places I want to go to, but these are the ones that came to mind that I knew enough about to say a little something about them. Let's go 9 I think I've lost track of the number of times I've driven past the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, which is just a few miles south of Interstate 10 in between California and Phoenix.

0:09:46 - (Chris Clarke): Surrounded on three sides by the Yuma Test Range, the 665,000 acre stretch of southwestern Arizona is one of the most amazing Mojave Sonoran Transition Zone areas, and I've only seen it from a few miles away. The name Kofa is derivative of the King of Arizona mine, the K of A, which was a more socially acceptable name than the previous colloquial name attached to the range by local prospectors and ranchers, which was, for the record, the Shithouse Mountains, so named for the boxy shape of some of the most prominent peaks, at least as seen from the north.

0:10:25 - (Chris Clarke): There are a couple of things about Kofa that are pretty remarkable. First off of that 2/3 of a million acres, almost all of its wilderness, there are some cherry stems where you can drive your two wheeled drive vehicles or your RV with fifth wheel towed behind you can get well off the pavement. A lot of people that are regular RV campers at Quartzsite will camp there among the things that are really notable in Cofa are a wonderful population of Teddy bear Cholla Mountains that are just forbidding looking.

0:10:56 - (Chris Clarke): The only native population of California fan palms in the state of Arizona. There are geoglyphs in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. Likely the oldest is generally referred to as the Fisherman. It's a human figure holding a stick. There's a modern day geoglyph called the Spiral Labyrinth which is near Palm Canyon Road. There's just something about the mountains in western Arizona that makes them seem significantly wilder than their counterparts across the Colorado river in California.

0:11:28 - (Chris Clarke): Maybe it's the saguaros and the air of we are entering a different kind of desert than the one you were just in. Maybe it's just that it's a bit of a blank spot on the map for me. There is a plant that is almost endemic to the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge that I want to see at some point. It's called the Cofa Mountains Barberry. If you know Mahonia from gardening on the Pacific coast, you'll immediately recognize the Cofa Mountains Barberry.

0:11:56 - (Chris Clarke): It grows in and around the Cofa Mountains as well as across the Colorado in the Whipple Mountains which we'll talk about a little bit later. To get to the Cofa National Wildlife Refuge you get to either Yuma or Quartzsite in western Arizona. From Quartzsite, head south on State Route 95 towards Yuma. From Yuma, head north on 95 towards Quartzsite. Drive slow, there's a lot to look at. You'll see pronghorn crossing signs which are a really nice touch.

0:12:23 - (Chris Clarke): Never seen pronghorn crossing there, but the signs themselves are cool and you will see eventually roads like Palm Canyon Road which will get you into Cofa National Wildlife Refuge. Here's the ridiculous thing. It's only a three and a half hour drive from my house. I've been living around here for 13 years at this recording and I have never once invested the seven hours of driving round trip it would take me to get to Cofa. And that's going to have to change.

0:12:52 - (Chris Clarke): 8. I want to go see the El Pinacate and Gran de Sierto del Tar Bon Biosphere Reserve. It's in the Sonoran Desert in northwest Mexico between the beach town of Puerto Peniasco and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. And in fact the Pinakate volcanic range does extend a little ways into Cabeza Prieta, like a couple of miles of the lava flow. I first learned about the Pinakate in the writings of Gary nabhan in the 1980s.

0:13:23 - (Chris Clarke): It's a traditional home of the Hyacinto Oddum people, close relatives of the Tohono O'Odham. They were hunters and gatherers, ate jackrabbit and mountain sheep and mule deer, pronghorn and sand food. The Pinakate lava field is over 600 square miles. There are nine really big volcanic craters in it, with remains of volcanic activity like welded ash and basalt, and lava fields. There are a couple of cinder cones, in fact 400 of them, 560 species of plants, 56 mammals, 43 reptiles, 222 bird species, and two species of freshwater fish, including the Sonoita pupfish.

0:14:11 - (Chris Clarke): The volcanoes in the Pinakate have erupted sporadically since about 4 million years ago. There are geologists that conjecture the volcanic activity here is pretty closely related to the opening of the Gulf of California along the tectonic plate margin between the North American and Pacific plates. The Gulf of California, after all, is basically an extension of the San Andreas Fault. The most recent volcanic activity was about 11,000 years ago, and it's hot enough even without volcanic eruptions.

0:14:41 - (Chris Clarke): If you're thinking that the word Pinakate is familiar to you, you might be remembering that word in its association with Eliotes beetles, a very large group of species commonly called Pinakate beetles or stink bugs. I tried to look up what the definition of Pinakate was for this episode because I knew that there had been some confusion as to whether it was a mangled Spanish word or a native word or what it meant. And I went to the Wikipedia page, which is almost always a good place to start, almost never a good place to finish.

0:15:13 - (Chris Clarke): And the Wikipedia page said it was from the Nahuat language, the Aztec language, basically meaning little black beetle. And there was a footnote, and I clicked on the footnote and up came a link to something I wrote at KCET more than a decade ago. So do I trust that source? I'm honestly not sure. At any rate, Pinakate beetles do live in the Pinakate Mountains. And not to get too far off on a tangent, but I just really have to share this.

0:15:41 - (Chris Clarke): Depending on which species we're talking about, the beetles will either spray or just sort of ooze horrible repellent chemicals at you from their hind ends. Those chemicals are secreted and stored in special organs called repugnatorial glands, which is officially my favorite technical term. Now, the best way to get to the Pinacate is to get to Puerto Penasco, also known as Rocky Point, the state of Sonora Go to Oregon Pipe Cactus National Monument, keep going through the border, crossing through Sonoita and then into Puerto Penasco.

0:16:17 - (Chris Clarke): Hook up with a tour group. It'll be affordable based on the exchange rate and you'll have somebody around to interpret things where if you go on your own, it's kind of catch as catch can for understanding what you're saying. And there are no facilities in the Pinakate outside the visitor center and they don't have food there. They have water to drink, maps and such, but you have to be pretty self contained or you could go on a tour group.

0:16:44 - (Chris Clarke): I have seen the Pinacate Mountains from far far away at the corner of Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta and the border. I'll talk a little bit more about that, but I really want to get in there and see what it's like in the heart of Pinakate. Seven Destinations number seven and six are pretty closely related, which is why I was hemming and hawing over the number of bucket list destinations I'm going to share with you on this podcast. But I decided to break them up into two separate destinations because they're both really big.

0:17:16 - (Chris Clarke): Number seven is the Valle de los Sirios, the second largest natural protected area in Mexico. It is more than 2.5 million hectares which comes out to 9,700 square miles and change. A huge protected area. It covers a third of the surface area of the state of Baja California. It's extremely mountainous, notable for having at the top of one 5,400 foot summit, the southernmost Californian population of the single leaf pine, Pinus monophylla, relict population from cooler wetter times back in the Pleistocene.

0:17:56 - (Chris Clarke): There are other really wonderful plants and animals living in the Valle de los Sirios. The Baja elephant tree, Pachychormis discolor, a stem succulent that actually has leaves on it. It's a really interesting looking tree, kind of appealing bark. There is Peninsular Pronghorn, which is a subspecies of the pronghorn similar to the Sonoran pronghorn subspecies. The Peninsular pronghorn is at critical risk for extinction with just around 200 remaining in the wild.

0:18:26 - (Chris Clarke): There is a pronghorn captive breeding and restoration nonprofit working in the area that I would love to go see. I would love to also get them on the podcast at some point. But the star of the Valle de los Sirios are the cereals, which is Spanish for candles for those of you who don't speak the tongue. And there are not a lot of candles in the Vallee, but there are boojums Fucaria columnaris, also known as Idria columnaris, depending on which taxonomist you prefer to follow.

0:19:03 - (Chris Clarke): They are called boojums in honor of the mystical boojum in the Lewis Carroll poem the Hunting of the Snark. And that name was applied to the plants for the first time by Godfrey Sykes of Tucson's Desert Laboratory. There are places in the Valle de los Sirios that are just dominated by these weird inverted hairy carrot looking beasts. The Valle de los Sirios runs right up to the southern state line of Baja California. And on the other side in the state of Baja California Sur, is 6 the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, which covers most of the widest northern part of Baja California Sur, AKA South Baja.

0:19:48 - (Chris Clarke): The Viscano extends from north of El Rosario to the Magdalena Plain, inland in the south and along the coast. Average rainfall there is about 2 inches per year. We have bojums growing there as well, in addition to cardone cacti or Pachycereus pringlei. Again, elephant trees, Pachychormis discolor, Tillandsia recovata, which is ball moss in the pineapple family, the bromeliad family, Stenocerias gamosis, AKA pitahaya, which is what the fruit are called as well, and Yucca vallada, which is a yucca that's arborescent and it resembles at first glance Joshua trees of further north into Mojave.

0:20:35 - (Chris Clarke): And the Viscano doesn't just have desert. There are sea cliffs, zostera beds in the estuaries, Coastal California Floristic province type scrub. To get to the Vizcaino and the Valle de los Sirios. Your best bet if you're driving in from Alta California in the US can take Mexico Route 5 down from Mexicali or Route 1 from Tijuana and Ensenada. If you're coming from Cabo San Lucas or La Paz or someplace else toward the southern end of the peninsula, just head north on Highway 1.

0:21:06 - (Chris Clarke): There is a whole lot to do in the Valle de los Sirios and the Viscaino Biosphere Reserve, including whale watching at San Ignacio Lagoon near Guerrero Negro just at the south end of Vizcaino. It's a gray whale nursery. They show up in the San Ignacio Lagoon to give birth and that has got to be a sight to see.

0:21:26 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away, we'll be right back.

0:21:29 - (Chris Clarke): Up until 2022, Great Basin national park could have been on this list, but I went there for a work trip and I definitely need to go back as a little bit of a palate cleanser from all this information, let's take a break and listen to Fred Bell's recording of some ambient sound from that wonderful, wonderful desert outpost.

0:23:06 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Sunscreen is your friend.

0:23:15 - (Chris Clarke): 5 oh the Ruby Mountains. They have been beckoning to me for most of my life. They're one of the first things I really noticed in the desert as an adult. Not counting the trip when I was 6 years old in the back of the Malibu station wagon. No. Let's skip ahead a couple of decades. Waking up in a Greyhound bus on Interstate 80 at age 22. And when I was 22, Interstate 80 was not yet complete. Across the country there were couple of miles that were still unbuilt and so cross country traffic on Interstate 80 had to go through city streets in Lovelock, Nevada and stop at a stoplight.

0:23:59 - (Chris Clarke): That's no longer true. The Ruby Mountains I saw for the first time I opened my eyes after sleeping through an hour or so of a northern Great Basin landscape after getting out in West Wendover to use the bathroom Greyhound bus stop. To my eyes new to the Great Basin desert, the Rubies looked out of place. Rising from the sagebrush 11,387ft on the summit of Ruby Dome, the Rubies are contiguous with the East Humboldt Range. There is a pass in between them called Secret Pass that's honest to God the name of the pass.

0:24:37 - (Chris Clarke): And the Rubies run about 80 miles south ish from Secret Pass. And if you saw a random photo of the Ruby Mountains, especially if it was taken from within the Ruby Mountains above timberline, you might be more likely to guess that it was from a more humid place like the Sierra Nevada. The Moyle Canyon in the Rubies is a broad U shaped valley which clearly had a huge glacier grinding away at it. At one point there is a backpacking trail that runs the length of the range, going from Alpine Lake to Alpine Lake.

0:25:15 - (Chris Clarke): Here's a fun fact that is not particularly useful. The Ruby Mountains are the only place where the Himalayan snowcock survives in North America. That's an introduced pheasant relative, roughly similar to a chukar. 30 years ago I was driving past the Rupee Mountains on my way back east and I just couldn't take my eyes off of it. I was a passenger, so I ended up writing a very long, hastily scribbled, almost illegible letter to my girlfriend at the time.

0:25:44 - (Chris Clarke): Just words dripping with ecstasy at seeing the mountains from a few miles away. Now the Rupee Mountains are under threat A lot of the time there's resource extraction opportunities all around them, groundwater mining, geothermal, and of course the snow fields in the range are vulnerable to climate change. I have to get up there and do a little backpacking before the entire range burns down. Anyway, if you go to Elko and from Elko take Nevada Route 227 the Lamoille Highway. It'll get you to the Ruby Mountains.

0:26:17 - (Chris Clarke): It is a sublime piece of landscape and I need to do something more than looking at it from far away. 4 I've actually been to the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife refuge, or about 100 yards into it, on the corner of the refuge that abuts both Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Mexico. In 2006 I was working on a story on the border. I've mentioned that story a few times on this podcast and I've got a little glimpse of what it was like, at least at the outset of the journey across the Cabeza Prieta that so many migrants take.

0:26:52 - (Chris Clarke): I've also been to the visitor center in Ajo, which is about four miles from the boundary. On that same reporting trip I did a ride along with a Border Patrol guy and we may have crossed into the western end of Cabeza Prieta. I am not certain south of Welton, Arizona. Anyway, it is time for me to go. The Cabeza Prieta has been written about in huge amounts. Just so many tens of thousands of words on the Cabeza Prieta, notably including Edward Abbey, who, among the many words he wrote on the Cabeza Prieta tells the story of being in the middle of the refuge and having Bill Broyles, a mutual friend of Ed's and mine, show up walking across the Cabeza Prieta and they visited a little bit and then Bill kept walking.

0:27:42 - (Chris Clarke): I have read stories about El Camino del Diablo, which is the main 19th century migration road that runs from Yuma to just south of Ajo. It's a storied landscape in the literal sense. Cabeza Prieta is the third largest National Wildlife Refuge in the Lower 48. There are a bunch of way bigger ones in Alaska. As you might guess. Cabeza Prieta is 860,000 acres and change home to 275 different species of animals and 400 species of plants.

0:28:16 - (Chris Clarke): Almost. Cabeza Prieta shares an origin story with the Cofa National Wildlife refuge. In the 30s a group of Boy Scouts in Arizona who are worried about the survival of desert bighorn sheep campaigned to get both national wildlife refuges established successfully. So we owe them some thanks. Now, truth be told, Cabeza Prieta is not the safest place to go these days. You may encounter migrants who mostly want to be left alone, but in extreme cases might need life saving assistance. And who could blame them if they took that life saving assistance, even if you didn't want to give it to them?

0:28:53 - (Chris Clarke): Even the best people can do horrible things if they feel like they're going to die. If they don't, you might also run into smugglers, including the smugglers who smuggle the migrants. Aside from the two legged inhabitants and visitors to the refuge you may run into, there's also the landscape, the usual dangers of Sonoran Desert, pointy things and venomous snakes and Gila monsters. Gila monsters won't chase you, but if you accidentally put your hand on one and it bites you, that can be really unpleasant.

0:29:25 - (Chris Clarke): There are ways to fall, ways to twist your ankle and die of thirst, and most of all, most of all heat injury and associated things like dehydration. There are no paved roads within the refuge. Monsoons and people getting their vehicles stuck in washes and such can really chew up the roads and make it almost impossible to drive across the refuge without getting yourself stuck. So don't go by yourself.

0:29:57 - (Chris Clarke): A lot of people do and I probably would. But don't do it. To get to Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, your best bet is to drive to Ajo, Arizona. It's a sweet little desert town south of Gila Bend. Visit the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge Visitor center just a little bit north of town. There's maps there and some displays, and there's also easy access to the roads leading into Cabeza prieta from the east.

0:30:26 - (Chris Clarke): 3. Next up is an area where there are a whole lot of different attractive things crammed into one conveniently inaccessible region. You can definitely combine the places I'm talking about and a bunch of other really great places into an easy few days of tourism. I am speaking of the general area of Vermillion Cliffs and the western part of the Navajo Reservation. In particular Antelope Canyon and the wave.

0:30:56 - (Chris Clarke): Let's talk about the wave first. The wave is in Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. It is extremely well known in social media photos for its sort of sensual, almost human body looking curves. The wave is made up of intersecting broad troughs that have been eroded into Navajo sandstone with a lot of striations in it. Navajo sandstone is generally white, though sometimes it does wither into reddish tones like the Chinle Formation. There's a lot of red rock in the area to compare it to.

0:31:27 - (Chris Clarke): Now, these troughs at the wave were started when water eroded them in wetter times, but the landscape dried up. And so for the last several thousand years, it's been an aeolian erosion feature eroded by wind. And if you go there, you'll see that that wind has eroded out the softer layers of the striated rock in some places and left the harder layers, which makes things like staircases and risers and really fragile looking comb type formations.

0:31:57 - (Chris Clarke): Now, the wave is not a place where you can just decide to go and then just go. The blm, which manages Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, has a lottery system. A very limited number of permits per day. You can arrange for some in advance. There are a limited number that are available the day prior. It's about a six mile round trip hike with no trail markings. So you gotta be able to find your way in the desert.

0:32:22 - (Chris Clarke): And as you can guess, that's my kind of place. And to be honest, in preparation of this episode, I went and put the $6 down to enter myself and my beloved spouse into the lottery for a chance to win some passes to go there in November. We'll see if we win. It's six bucks to put your name in for the lottery and then if you win, it's around 7 for the permit. Pretty cheap thrills. Not too far away from the wave is Antelope Canyon in Lake Powell Navajo Tribal park near Rainbow Bridge National Monument.

0:32:56 - (Chris Clarke): Antelope Canyon is perhaps the most photographed red rock slot canyon in the world. Strictly regulated, you have to be in the company of a native guide. There are a few good reasons for this. The tribes are a little bit more wary of non tribe members wandering around on their land than say the BLM would be. But also Antelope Canyon. In fact, both the upper and lower canyon is actually two canyons. But they are both dangerous places if you don't play your cards right, if you go on the wrong day, if there's a rainstorm upstream, you can die.

0:33:30 - (Chris Clarke): In August 1997, 11 tourists were flushed out of Lower Antelope Canyon by a flash flood. There was a thunderstorm seven miles upstream. The only person that survived was the native tour guide who had had swift water training and his survival was by no means guaranteed. Even with that training. To lower the risk a little bit, the ladders that were in place at the time, which were kind of homemade deals with, you know, wood nailed together, those have been replaced by metal ladders that are bolted to the rock.

0:34:05 - (Chris Clarke): And the top of the canyon has cargo nets that they can Deploy when necessary. There's an alarm horn at the fee booth. That's the get the hell out of the canyon alarm. If you Google Antelope Canyon and select images, you'll see why people go there, even at the risk of getting flushed out unceremoniously and fatally. That whole area, Vermilion Cliffs, north of the North Rim, and adjacent places on the Navajo Reservation, which I've driven past a bunch of times, but I've never really stopped in.

0:34:38 - (Chris Clarke): That's a region I've wanted to go to and explore for a long time. I've been past Antelope Canyon a bunch of times, like I mentioned. Never stopped. I've never even gotten close to the Wave or Paria Canyon or Coyote Buttes. There's just something about the red rock that it's. It's an iconic desert landscape and I need to go Antelope Canyon can be reached by going to Page and following the signs. There will be an eastward turnoff, Route 89, right at the welcome to City of Page sign south of town.

0:35:07 - (Chris Clarke): That'll lead you into the tribal park and along the roadside you'll see parking areas where you can hire a guide to take you into the canyon. To get to the Wave, first off, you need to have that permit. But if you want to get to the neighborhood, the best place to go is Kanab, Utah, just on the Arizona line. There's a visitor center there where you can sign your permit. If you can't get a permit to go to the Wave, you can always go to the dinosaur tracks a little bit north of town on Route 89.

0:35:34 - (Chris Clarke): 2. Oh, man. What can I say about the Whipple Mountains in California? I've been looking at them for so long. I've been on all four sides of this mountain range. I've been pretty close, especially along the south side. But I've never gone hiking in the Whipple Mountains. And this is despite the fact that some time ago I set myself an aspirational goal of hiking at least five miles and every protected wilderness in the California desert.

0:36:04 - (Chris Clarke): And there is the Whipple Mountains Wilderness, and it's not that far from thy house. It's like an hour and a half drive. And that's along one of the prettiest drives in the California desert, Route 62, east of Twentynine Palms. The Whipple Mountains are a multicolored assemblage of lots of different kinds of rock, including some relatively recent volcanism, the Tertiary volcanic period, just a couple million years old.

0:36:30 - (Chris Clarke): And there's some rock in the Whipples That's Precambrian, before anything with a backbone had evolved. It's the easternmost mountain range in California. In fact, it's the easternmost point in California. The Whipples force the Colorado river to make a big half circle to the east. The Whipple Mountains are as far east as Wendover, Utah, west Wendover, Nevada, or Haley, Idaho, or Calgary, Alberta. It is east for California.

0:37:01 - (Chris Clarke): I have done a lot of hiking around the area. There's a mountain range immediately to the west called the Turtle Mountains, where I've hiked a bunch. The Turtle Mountains have the northernmost palm oasis in the desert, and the Chemoevi Mountains just in the north of the Whipples. That's a beautiful place. Lots of barrel cacti. The Stepladder Mountains are nearby. One of the things that attracted me to finding out more about the Whipples in the first place is that up until pretty recently, 15 years or so ago, the Whipples were the only place in the state of California where wild saguaros were known to grow.

0:37:39 - (Chris Clarke): They had been brought across the Colorado river in the gut of a bird or something like that, the one spot in the United States outside of Arizona where saguaros were known to grow wild. And that is no longer true. My friend Duncan Bell, a botanist working at California Botanic Garden, found some saguaros in Imperial county, quite a few miles further south in California. So the Whipple Mountains don't have a monopoly on California wild saguaros anymore, but they still have a robust, if somewhat small, population. It's definitely worth going to see them. I've actually seen some of them on the California side, just in the foothills of the Whipple Mountains on the road up to Parker Dam.

0:38:21 - (Chris Clarke): Parker Dam is a dam on the Colorado river, basically right at the Whipple's easternmost extension. There's something really compelling about the Whipples that I have wanted to check out for some time, and that is Whipple Wash, which, if you're hiking upstream, it starts at the Colorado river and climbs up through the entire range. Basically, it's an incised drainage, meaning that with a relatively level walk, you can get from the Colorado river up into the mountains through first a small slot canyon and then after that, a big slot canyon.

0:38:59 - (Chris Clarke): The first thing I really noticed about the Whipple Mountains, when I knew what I was looking at, I was in Parker, Arizona, a good 20 years ago, and looking at the Whipples from the east or the southeast at least, there's a peak in the Whipples that appears to be an obelisk. Called Monument Peak. It is really striking. And it's just there. Nobody really makes a big deal about it. It's a marker of home for people that live in Parker.

0:39:27 - (Chris Clarke): A spectacular piece of rock. Anyway, of all the mountain ranges in the California desert, that's the one I need to make sure and hike in before I can't hike anymore. 1 so it probably won't come as a surprise to you that destination number one in this list of places on Chris Clark's bucket list is the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Despite the fire, I can't do it this year. This season is over for the North Rim. Even if they get the fire out in the next three days, which they won't, the North Rim is closed until 2026 at the earliest.

0:40:02 - (Chris Clarke): But I still need to go. You know, aside from the opportunity I had in June that I passed up 20 years ago, I was set to do a rim to rim hike in the Grand Canyon with some friends, including the same Bill Broyles that I mentioned. Running into Ed Abbey and Cabeza Prieta. We had all the paperwork we needed. We had our permits, we had reservations for campsites. We were going to camp on the North Rim, hike down along Bright Angel Creek to Phantom Ranch, eat steak dinners at the bottom of the Grand Canyon for a couple of days, and then hike up the Bright Angel Trail to Havasupai Gardens, which was called something different 20 years ago, and then from there up to the South Rim. And I was really looking forward to it.

0:40:45 - (Chris Clarke): It was a trifle impetuous for me to consider. Basically, I weighed 50 pounds more than I do now, and I am not skinny right now. Committing to that hike was taking a great deal of faith in my knees and my ankles. And in fact, that challenge never came to pass because by the time it came for us to go to the Grand Canyon, the North Rim was still under 10ft of snow. So we checked with the rangers, changed our itinerary around a little bit, hiked from the South Rim down to Phantom Ranch and then back out.

0:41:19 - (Chris Clarke): It was a fantastic trip. Zero complaints about it. It was so much fun. I have a little bit of acrophobia that kicks in in places like the Grand Canyon, and this trip was no exception to that rule. But that really only added to the fun, to be honest. Anyway, I've been to the South Rim so many times, starting in 1966, and that was one more time. And there is something about the idea of having an extra thousand or so feet above the river.

0:41:47 - (Chris Clarke): The vantage points that come from that it's just really compelling to me. And after these fires are out, assuming some relatively good news, we'll have a mixed age stand of some high intensity burn areas, some low intensity burn areas. Some of the seeds of plants up there rely on fire in order to germinate. Who knows, we could get a really good wildflower year up there next year. Maybe that's when I'll go.

0:42:11 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. The Grand Canyon lodge has burned down. The saloon has burned down. At last count, about half of the budget cabins had burned down. It's chaos up there right now. As far as the built environment goes, we will have lost some big trees. We don't have simple restorative fires in the west these days. They are hotter than usual because we've messed things up so badly. Sometimes fires actually do damage to the environment, even in fire evolved forests. And that may be true of the fires on the North Rim right now.

0:42:43 - (Chris Clarke): But when you've got that many square miles burning, there's going to be inconsistency in the severity of the burn. There's going to be some places where, for instance, all of the needles get singed off of the conifers and next year they put out a new crop of needles and they get on with their lives. And this fire gives me actually more reason to go to the North Rim because I want to see how this landscape returns to something like health.

0:43:07 - (Chris Clarke): I still have a couple of decades of hiking left, I think. I mean, I'd really like to be able to hike when I get there. But even if I don't venture more than about 15 or 20 yards from whatever vehicle I got there in, I need to go to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. And that is it for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles. The Desert Protection Podcast. Again, big thanks to Julian Orr for making a generous contribution to our Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund.

0:43:34 - (Chris Clarke): You can follow Julian's lead by going to 90 miles from needles.com elpasso if you want to give us some money that is not earmarked for the Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund, you can do that at 9zeromiles from needles.com donate as always, we want to thank our voiceover guy, Joe Jeffrey, our podcast artist Martine Mancha, our nature sound recordist Fred Bell. Our theme song, Moody Western is by Brightside Studio.

0:44:02 - (Chris Clarke): The woman's voice countdown in this episode was recorded by Apple Hill Studios. We are solidly into monsoon season here, folks, which is of course why we had lightning caused fires in some of the places we talked about today. I was awoken in the earliest hours of this morning, Friday, July 18, by torrential rainstorms hitting the roof. And you know how it is sometimes when you're waking up, especially if you've taken some edibles to help you get to sleep.

0:44:30 - (Chris Clarke): I wasn't sure what I was listening to at first until I woke all the way up, which took a minute. It sounded like applause. The rain passed and there were some very, very loud thunderclaps and I fell back asleep and woke up at 4 o' clock to let the pit bull out. Usually she comes back in after about three or four minutes, sometimes 15. She barks softly at the door to be let back in. But this morning she started barking loudly and she wouldn't stop.

0:44:58 - (Chris Clarke): Our neighbors are very patient, but we like to not put that to the test. And so I threw on a bathrobe and went outside barefoot onto the moist sand in our yard with that pebbled texture that only a rainstorm can make so magic. And I found out that the pit bull was at our front gate barking at a dog about her size who was two feet away on the other side of the gate, who I think maybe got out of his yard when lightning was making a lot of noise.

0:45:25 - (Chris Clarke): There were some very close strikes, some apocalyptic sounding thunderclaps. In fact, when the thunder was going on, I got up and went to make sure that our German shepherd in the other room was inside because he knows how to escape the backyard. I think this other dog might have done just that. I hope he's okay. He barked when he saw me. He kept barking at me. He was alarmed. He headed up away from the highway, looked like he knew where he was going, so that's good. But anyway, dog stories aside, it still smells like rain right here in the desert.

0:45:58 - (Chris Clarke): Incidentally, I'm getting a little tired of my usual sign off line about the next watering hole, partly because we have watering holes all over the yard right now. But if I don't say that, I'm kind of at a loss for how to close out the podcast. So it's an opportunity for all y' all to get involved. If you have an idea for a good sign off catchphrase, email it to me at Chris90miles from needles.com the one I like best will get one of our custom Desert Liberation Front T shirts with that militant coyote. So email me your suggestion of a sign off line and include your T shirt size and your address and we'll see if we have a winner among the suggestions.

0:46:36 - (Chris Clarke): Until then, be sure and check things off your bucket list. It's only a short time we have on this planet. Sometimes things go away while we're really seriously intending to get to them. Bye now.

0:46:51 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.