S4E31: 5 Years On: Cima Dome After the Flames

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.

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0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands. Think again. Foreign it's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:54  - (Newscaster): Big story on this Monday is the heat. So let's get started with the Dome Fire,  which is burning right now about 60 miles away from us here in Las Vegas. It's right near the California border.

0:00:55 - (Newscaster): Right now it's only about 8% contained. Intense heat there is making that firefight even harder. And it's also raising concerns about even more fires in the West. Lightning ignited a fire in Mojave national preserve on August 15th of 2020 on Cima Dome. Winds pushed the fire through this beloved wilderness as firefighters worked to slow the progress of the blaze. Many other fires were burning in California at the time, so air assistance was not available for the first few days.

0:01:24 - (Chris Clarke): Five years later, I don't know why I keep coming back here. Every time I come back here, it looks worse. The memories of how it used to be become more clear and more ever present in my mind. Why, why, why, why indeed. Even the wind seems different since the fire. It used to be a relief from the heat of the day. Right now it's about 95 degrees. Been walking for half an hour or so. And when the wind picks up, it just reminds me that it feels different when it's not sifted through 100 million leaves of Joshua trees on its way to my skin.

0:02:38 - (Chris Clarke): Hey y', all, Chris here. If you're listening to this episode on the day it comes out then it is the fifth anniversary of the Dome Fire,  which took out 44,000 plus acres of some of the most beautiful Joshua tree forest in the world. Certainly the part of the largest stretch of Joshua tree forest in the world. And the Dome Fire was a turning point in my life. As some of you know, it's one of those things that happens that makes you redefine your life into terms of before and then after.

0:03:09 - (Chris Clarke): Before. The Dome Fire for me was extremely different than life after the Dome Fire. So I thought it was important for me to head up to Cima  Dome this week. Was there on Wednesday the 13th. Hadn't been there in a little bit, but I wanted to see how things are progressing in the post burn area and report that to you. And there were a few things that really struck me which I describe in what I recorded on the Dome.

0:03:39 - (Chris Clarke): Unsurprisingly to anybody that knows me, I started thinking in terms of life and death and meaning and meaninglessness and all that cheerful stuff. So be forewarned. Possibly a little bit heavy of an episode, but there's some good news hidden in it. For me, the biggest piece of good news didn't happen till I came back to computer land and started listening to what I'd recorded. And I did not intend to speak as though I was trying to escape notice, but that's what I did. I spoke in my church voice. I still have my church voice. After 55 plus years of disuse, it's clear that this land is still sacred to me, that its denizens are still sacred to me.

0:04:25 - (Chris Clarke): And so that is at least something, something to lean on as we go further and further into the post Dome Fire landscape. A quick note: There are a few quotes pulled in from a video on the Dome Fire by the National Park Service, including the portion of the intro you just listened to after the news item from Vegas. In that one we heard Perry Sassnitz speaking. You'll also hear a couple of short clips from Drew Kaiser, who is on our third episode ever, talking about the Dome Fire.

0:04:58 - (Chris Clarke): Drew was at the time the chief botanist at Mojave National Preserve where the fire took place. And we will also hear from Debra Hughson, someone I greatly admire. I got to work with her in my last job, which was a wonderful thing. She was basically second in command at the preserve for a long, long time. She's now retired, got out while the getting was good on her own terms. So good for her. Now I don't go into this in the episode too much.

0:05:26 - (Chris Clarke): I certainly didn't go into a lot of detail while this recording up on the dome. But the Dome Fire is one of a series of fires that has hit almost adjacent sections of Mojave National Preserve and nearby lands in the last 20 years. We just passed the 20th anniversary of the Hackberry Fire, which burned 70,000 acres and change in the eastern section of the preserve between Hole in the Wall and Landfair Valley and Cedar Canyon Road.

0:05:52 - (Chris Clarke): The Dome Fire in 2020 five years ago today, and then in July 2023 a little bit more than two years ago, the York Fire started on private land near the New York Mountains in a preserve, and that became the largest fire in the preserve's history at 93,000 acres and change. The cause of the York Fire is still unknown, and this one actually escaped Mojave National Preserve and burned portions of Mountains National Monument and Avi Kwa Ame National Monument In Nevada.

0:06:25 - (Chris Clarke): The York Fire almost certainly will not be the last, though we hope it's the largest for quite some time. But it was the Dome Fire that really hurt my heart. So I went there Wednesday and it was bleak. But it wasn't all bleak. I'm still coming to terms with what I saw there on Wednesday. But at any rate, I'll probably be dealing with this for a much longer time than five years. And nonetheless, it is what it is.

0:06:48 - (Chris Clarke): I felt pretty helpless when it was happening. I was only a two-hour drive away and my job at the time made me responsible for saving all of the national parks in the California desert. Did I do a goddamn thing to stop the Dome Fire? No, I did not. I could not. My brain knows I couldn't have done anything. Other parts of me differ. Let's head to the Dome. I feel as if I'm visiting someone that I have loved for a long time.

0:07:21 - (Chris Clarke): In hospice after all of their brain activity has ended. My pulse still beats, the chest still breathes. But the person I loved is dead. The thing I loved is dead. I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm saying that's what it feels like. I have been coming to this place since 1995. I've been camping in this place since October 1997 for the last five years. Coming here makes me intensely sad and it takes me several days to get over it.

0:07:54 - (Chris Clarke): Or maybe, maybe I don't get over it. I tell myself things like I should be grateful for the 23 years I had with Cima Dome in its unburned state. And I am on an intellectual level, intensely grateful for that. And yet, and yet. If I did not have those 23 years of spending time with Cima Dome's pre fire Joshua Tree Forest. And maybe I could come here on a day like today and be present to be in the moment and think about how beautiful it is here.

0:08:33 - (Chris Clarke): I have done that from time to time. Even my choice of where to sit and get out of the sun a little bit is telling to me because of course I pick a spot from which, at least in the foreground, in the middle distance, it's unburned. You can see the burned scar beyond a quarter mile away. This is a big patch of intact Joshua trees and non-charred chollas. Banana yuccas that have not had to regrow from the ground, black brush and acacia.

0:09:10 - (Chris Clarke): Just the black brush by itself shows that the fire didn't reach here because black brush does not grow back. On previous visits after the fire, I've been up here probably six times since the fire. A couple of times to take part in the replanting effort. Once last year, the day after election Day, when the destroyed surround marvelously matched my mood on that day. Once before for this podcast, a year after the fire.

0:09:44 - (Chris Clarke): Once, very briefly, a week after the fire. On one of those visits, in some context or other, in the midst of a conversation, I sort of glibly said, well, these trees aren't getting any deader. But it turns out that was not really true. A year after the fire, there was still plenty of standing dead Joshua trees. Like a ghost forest, a zombie forest here. There are a few here now. I mean, in the aggregate, it's probably hundreds of thousands of standing dead Joshua trees. But so many of them have fallen.

0:10:26 - (Chris Clarke): In another five years, maybe 10 years, a lot of those fallen trunks might not really be there anymore. Termites gotta eat. There's still stuff alive here. It's. It's an ecosystem. It's trying to recover. Got to my usual campsite and Audubon's cottontail was sitting there waiting for me. Been hearing a flicker, possibly a gilded flicker, somewhere off in the live trees to the east of me, and ubiquitous signs of things like antelope, ground squirrels.

0:11:27 - (Chris Clarke): There's a pack rat midden right in front of me underneath a boulder. Hard to tell whether anything's been added to it. The Yucca baccata or banana yucca is growing in areas that were burned to the ground, coming back up from roots. Same with the Mojave aster. Same with the acacia turpentine bushes coming back in places. And I know somewhere on this dome, or at least, at least I know that this was true. A few years ago when we were doing our planting, the fire was friendly enough that a double-digit percentage of the Joshua trees had new shoots coming up from the ground near them.

0:12:12 - (Chris Clarke): This is how Joshua trees in the west of the range, all the way over in Los Angeles county. That's how they've survived stump sprouting after fires. But around my campsite in the area that was burned, out of a couple hundred Joshua trees I just looked at, there was one that was sprouting from the ground. It In 1997, in October, I had just quit my job editing Terrain at the Ecology Center and I went on a road trip.

0:13:10 - (Chris Clarke): The idea being that I was going to spend a little time among the Joshua trees and write a book about them and get it published. And I imagined that that would happen before the turn of the century. I haven't yet finished that some of this is my temperament, some of this is the fact that I've had to have paid jobs. And some of it is because in the first few years, the first decade of coming down here, this was an escape from the city. And so if I finished the book, I would have lost a reason to come down to the Mojave from the Bay Area.

0:13:46 - (Chris Clarke): I've written two drafts of the book and thrown them both away. Not out of a sense of perfectionism. I am very, very much aware that things are never perfect. Been an editor for a long time. I know the easiest way to find typos, for instance, is to publish. Put the thing away for a couple of months and pick it up and read. You'll find all the typos works every time I'm talking about big existential wrongs.

0:14:20 - (Chris Clarke): I imagined writing something about the trees and the ecosystems they functioned in and natural history and having it be a statement about the way things were and the way things would be when people read the book, even if they read it 100 years from now. And that's clearly wrong. I thought that there would be a version that would be centered on my divorce and the Joshua trees and my personal life serving as metaphors for each other. And there will still be elements of that in whatever book I write if I ever finish it.

0:14:54 - (Chris Clarke): But that's not it either. I thought that I would be writing about a species that was revered and beloved, and to some extent these guys still are. But there are so many people I used to count among my tribe that see them as less valuable than a source of non-fossil fuel based electrical power. So the book has kept changing. In the meantime though, this place became at first a recreational spot. Come here and sit by a fire, watch the winter stars go wheeling overhead.

0:15:33 - (Chris Clarke): Wake up covered with snow, with friends and girlfriends and wives, with tour groups. Eventually, eventually it became a refuge. It used to be that when things were getting to me in the Bay Area, I would throw some camping gear in the truck, pull out of the driveway and have no idea where I was headed. Ended up in places ranging from Mono Lake to Lava Beds National Monument, to a lot of times, Red Rock Canyon State park in the West Mojave.

0:16:08 - (Chris Clarke): After October 1997, I knew where I was going. In 2005, early in the year, I started taking medication for ADHD. And first time I came here while medicated, I was like, there were all these things I had no idea existed here that jumped up and said, hey Chris, we've been waiting for you to notice us. Sage Sparrows with a beautiful little dot on their breast, like a little charcoal smudge. The artistry of spider webs and of chollas, the endolithic critters, blue green algae or something similar, growing half an inch or even an inch down into the rock.

0:17:20 - (Chris Clarke): You can only find it if you broke the rock. It was living on whatever little bit of light filtered through the granite.

0:17:29 - (Debra Hughson): I thought it was so unique. It was so picturesque. You know, this thick, dense, black brush with these Joshua trees coming up through it. I thought that was the coolest vegetation alliance that we had in the entire preserve. I thought that was just phenomenally beautiful.

0:17:45 - (Drew Kaiser): Planning for the restoration started basically while the Dome Fire was still going on. I was driving around doing a burn severity assessment, just thinking to myself, like, gosh, what do I do? It's one of the densest, largest Joshua tree forests in the world, and I'm just one person. If this place burns again, you know, that's going to set us back. Red Brome is pretty much, I would say, the number one immediate threat to our project and to the Joshua tree forest up here. One of the reasons why the Dome Fire was so bad kind of forms a continuous layer of fuel which, when you get a wildfire, will carry that fire from one shrub to another.

0:18:34 - (Chris Clarke): This place was here for me as I had marital turmoil in my last marriage. It was here for me as I had frustration after frustration in my work life, as I uncovered and realized one upsetting thing after another from my early life that I had to deal with, that I still have to deal with. It was here for me when my dog Zeke died. He didn't particularly like the place, even. We brought him here on the way back from a trip to Tucson in January 2004.

0:19:09 - (Chris Clarke): He got out of the car, walked several feet, and then balked. He wanted nothing more than to get back in the car and go. But this, this was where I came to talk to him eight months after he died. When my marriage ended and my ex said, I think it's time for you to move to the desert, which she meant as an intense kindness, this was where I came. I found the closest house I could find in Nipton, maybe a half an hour drive if I was taking my time, had a short, tempestuous relationship, and after she called me to say it wasn't working, which was correct, I left my house in Nipton and came up here.

0:20:01 - (Chris Clarke): I immediately felt better, at least for the time being. I have lived in this place longer, if sporadically, than in any building that has ever had an address that I called home. And it is so hard for me to come back here now. Just so hard. And this could have been avoided. This fire could have been put out. This fire could have been kept to a couple hundred acres. But other places were more important.

0:20:33 - (Chris Clarke): There were a few other fires in California that week. Some of them actually threatened houses. Others threatened forests. Not Joshua tree forests, but forests of conifers and other trees that people respect more because these are not even real trees. Right. That's the story we keep hearing from people that think they're repeating something that makes sense. It's in the desert, so it can't be real, can't be important.

0:21:02 - (Chris Clarke): They needed to save the real trees, not these scraggly ass monocots.

0:21:09 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll be right back.

0:21:13 - (Chris Clarke): At this point if you want to hear what the Joshua tree forest on Cima Dome sounded like before the fire. There’s no better close approximationthan this field recording by Fred Bell of We Thump Wilderness in Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. Just a stone's throw away. If you're really good at throwing stones. Let's listen.

0:22:53 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. You can help the desert by picking up those dang Mylar balloons.

0:23:03 - (Chris Clarke): I think about all the other wonderful places in the Mojave Desert and in other deserts that I have not yet gotten to know, in part because I spent so much time here. A lot of them are beautiful and a lot of them are ecologically intact. If struggling, they're worth knowing or worth getting to know.

0:23:22 - (Chris Clarke): And I'm glad that those places are there. But I was married to this place. It is the strangest, strangest thing. People who know me know that I don't have too much trouble bursting into tears again. Some of that is just temperament. Some of that is probably response to impossibly old traumas that are just incredibly boring. My father's the same way. I mean, if there's a sad puppy on a video on the Internet, I feel my eyes starting to wail up.

0:23:59 - (Chris Clarke): I don't mind it. It gets in the way sometimes. But I like having my emotions that close to the surface. And it has been five years since my favorite place in the world was destroyed is not too far from accurate. It's been five years since catastrophe hit the place I loved most in the world, and I have not yet wept it. I made it back to my usual campsite. Just sitting here looking around and thinking about before.

0:25:03 - (Chris Clarke): I mean, from certain vantage points, this is still a really Nice campsite. And if I had not been cursed with the memories of the beauty of this place before the fire, I might think that this is a fantastic place to camp. And it probably still is. I can't count how many times I woke up here. Stumbled out of my sleeping bag, either got dressed or didn't, depending on the weather and the crowds. Crowds only grew as my acquaintance with this place lengthened.

0:25:34 - (Chris Clarke): The first order of business was always fire up the stove, make the coffee, and once the coffee was made, I'd sit in my camping chair, the coffee in my hand. After the second or third swallow, I would be as content as I ever have been in my life, feeling that all was right with the world. Since the fire, I've stayed here a few times, and that feeling does not show up, no matter how good the coffee is. Sun's getting ready to go down.

0:26:06 - (Chris Clarke): Shadows are long, just like on so many other visits before. If I was staying here, it might bring on a sense of peace. And I'd still hear the owls and see the silhouettes of the living Joshua trees across the road against a sky full of stars. There's a place in this campsite where I used to put my tent almost all the time. Every once in a while, I would branch out, find a different place. But this spot was a little bit isolated, a little bit out of the way, sort of in the corner of the campsite, sheltered by a bunch of big Joshua trees.

0:26:44 - (Chris Clarke): Some of those big trees are fallen down, cut up in a pile where my tent used to go. After five years of weathering, the bark is almost completely gone, but you can still see the burn scars.

0:26:55 - (Treebeard): Many of these trees were my friends. They had voices of their own.

0:27:01 - (Chris Clarke): So much is the same so much is the same. The blonde soil and the white rock with the speckles. Quartz, monzonite. Translucent until you get about an inch and a half thick.

0:27:20 - (Chris Clarke): There are four clocks growing. There are globe mallows in bloom. And there is an ocean of cheatgrass. So much cheatgrass, nothing eats it. It grows, it flowers, it sets a ton of seed and then it dies. And then the seeds germinate and they grow and they flower and they set a ton of seeds and then they die. And it's all fuel. Fuel that was never here before. So I look across the road at the Joshua trees that are still there, still growing, still alive, and I think they are on the edge.

0:27:57 - (Chris Clarke): They look really healthy. Some of them will live for another century, potentially, unless this cheatgrass catches on fire and the dome burns again. On previous visits, after the fire, I was able to say, well, there's still some of it left. I'm not sure which stage of dealing with grief that is. Probably denial, I guess. Looking on the bright side is a form of denial. I feel in this landscape like I'm obsolete, like I am a vestige of what was just getting in the way of the future taking place.

0:28:34 - (Chris Clarke): I'm a Shasta ground sloth or a dire wolf. Kids born this year will in 20 years think of this place as beautiful. And they'll be right. But it won't be what it was. It won't be the landscape I fell in love with. It won't be the landscape that seemed pretty much like it fell in love with me. The word solastalgia gets used these days to mean longing for a place that's not there anymore. Like nostalgia is for a time that's not there anymore.

0:29:05 - (Chris Clarke): And technically this place is still here. So I'm not sure what to call this feeling I have. It's like having two beings inside my head, one of them insisting that I focus on the beauty that's here. That being sounds a whole lot like my wife. The other being calls itself a realist. And it makes me glance to my right every now and then to see the Joshua trees that I slept under for decades. Dead limbs waving in the mild breeze.

0:29:38 - (Chris Clarke): Skin stripped off, white flesh beneath black bark. This is Cima Dome now a schizophrenic landscape. A bat just launched itself out of the Joshua tree that's across the road and thriving. The sun is half set. Three or four minutes ago a coyote sang from a couple miles west side. Blotched lizards are running around trying to catch the last small fly or even smaller lizard. Flights heading out of Harry Reid International Airport, heading for parts unknown.

0:30:18 - (Chris Clarke): The air is calm and the lack of shadows has done something strange, really strange to the burned areas. I guess maybe it's the lower contrast between the black and white sections of the stems of the dead trees. Or maybe it's just the light is softer. But it gets harder to tell the dead trees from the live ones. You have to look at the dead trees really hard unless you're right up next to them in order to tell whether they're dead or just regular weird looking Joshua trees.

0:30:54 - (Chris Clarke): When I die, and I hope that's a long time away, my father's 25 years older than me and he's still around. But when I die, I want to be burned to ash and I want the people that love me. If there are any Left to bring those ashes here, possibly stir in the ashes of pets that have meant a lot to me, and let those ashes go at Cima Dome, do I have them Put them in the places that haven't burned yet or the places that have? I don't know which is more fitting, and I'm hoping I don't have to think about that for a few more decades.

0:31:27 - (Chris Clarke): I knew this was coming. That's the thing that kills me about it. In 2005, in August, I stood on the edges of the Hackberry fire that had just been put out, and I looked north and I saw the whole broad slope of Cima Dome, and I saw an essentially unbroken carpet of vegetation between where I stood a good 15 miles away and where I am now. And the thought came to me, the dome will burn. And I wrote about it, and I wrote, I only hope I'm not around to see it.

0:32:03 - (Chris Clarke): There are times when I hate being right. And my being around to see it, if you take that literally, is a choice on my part. And I'm not sure why I keep coming back, but the earth still spins, and the sun heading for the western horizon reddening, and that orange glow illuminates the trunks of the Joshua trees that have survived. And if I cultivate a sense of tunnel vision, I might be able to enjoy this moment.

0:32:39 - (Chris Clarke): Well, then, if you're still with us and you've listened to the whole episode so far, I admire your fortitude. I've been in the environmental comms field for quite some time, and it is really drilled into us from editor and readers and ad salespeople and all those different kinds of colleagues, that there has to be some good news. You can't just report on bleak because that depresses people. It immobilizes people, makes them apathetic in reaction to the bad news. And, you know, they have a point.

0:33:10 - (Chris Clarke): We gotta make sure not to dispirit people, But I also really firmly believe that we are up against a whole lot of bad stuff. And if we cast a blind eye at the bleakness, we don't have an accurate picture of what's going on. And we need to have an accurate picture of what's going on. You don't want to stare too long into the abyss, but if you pretend it's not there, you might fall into it. We're all of us going to lose. Places that are important to us in the next couple of decades might be a home, it might be a community that's targeted and driven into exile or underground. It might be a gentle desert hillside covered with Joshua trees that burns down.

0:33:49 - (Chris Clarke): It might be a forest that gets clear cut, or a stretch of river that has an oil pipeline break above it, or a piece of desert valley that gets sacrificed for renewable energy. So yes, we need to celebrate the positive and we're going to do that here. We also need to pay attention to the negative. And on the negative side, one much smaller negative thing is that it's been a month since we had our last new donor. I know there's a lot of stuff going on in the world, a lot of places to put your money that are incredibly worthy, but if you are so inclined and you want to go to 90 miles from needles.com

0:34:24 - (Chris Clarke): donate and throw in either a one time or recurring donation of whatever amount makes sense to you, we would be incredibly thankful. We'll mention your name in the next episode. If you want to help us get to El Paso and Tucson at the end of September for our Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta trip with a subsidiary event in Tucson, let us know. You can go to 90 miles from needles.com elpaso gonna hit the Chihuahuan Desert Festival in El Paso on September 27th and on the way there we're still trying to put together something in Tucson.

0:34:59 - (Chris Clarke): If you have a restaurant or a church basement or something similar in Tucson that you would love to have a little 90 miles from Needles neat and greet, let us know. I want to thank Drew Kaiser and Debra Hughson for working to defend and restore a place that is so important to me. They are heroes. They are my heroes and the fact that I know them reasonably well disproves that old adage about don't meet your heroes.

0:35:27 - (Chris Clarke): I also want to thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork creator. Our Nature Sounds recordist is Fred Bell. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Bright side Studio. We have just gotten through the, I believe, the third high temperature warning that the National Weather Service put out. They apparently still have the staff to do that. We've been remarking lately on how surprising it is that both of us here have become acclimated to the triple digit temperatures. You know, we can walk out onto the pavement of a parking lot when it's 110 and we don't have a immediate sense of urgent death. And that's a comforting feeling that you can acclimate to that kind of heat. And it's also really dangerous because if we were to falsely take that relative comfort as indication that we could load up packs with about 20 pounds worth of water and hike into the desert.

0:36:29 - (Chris Clarke): We would be foolish and I have been foolish like that on occasion and I'm here to tell you it's not worth it. There will be October Again. Thanks so much for listening to this rather personal episode on my part. I look forward to bringing you some happier news and episodes to come mixed in with the bad stuff. Thank you for listening. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.