S4E33: Monsoon Madness: When the Desert Comes Alive

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.

0:00:34 - (Joe Geoffrey): It's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to this episode of 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. As always, I am your host Chris Clarke, and we are talking about monsoonal rainstorms today. Partly because of it's just been what's happening in my neck of the woods. It has been wet here, a lot of water falling out of the sky. Unfortunately, the damage that our local monsoon torrents have done hasn't been anything other than financial, you know, additional demands on the tax base of 29 palms.

0:01:16 - (Chris Clarke): And sadly financial for some folks whose houses got further moistened after going through the same thing last year. Nonetheless, could have been a lot worse. Nobody badly hurt. At any rate, we'll get to talking about those monsoons in just a second. But first I want to remind you we're trying to get this show on the road to Tucson and El Paso at the end of the month. We have a wonderful gig at the Chihuahuan Desert Festival at the El paso Zoo on September 27, which is the event that sparked this whole trip.

0:01:48 - (Chris Clarke): We're still nailing down the details on a Tucson event. I had hoped that I would have details for you by this episode, but you know, just playing phone tag with some folks, hopefully next episode. I mean, even if we just have a bunch of people hanging out on a street corner talking desert protection, that would be fun enough to do. Hopefully we'll get a roof over our heads in case the monsoons kick up. Anyway, if you want to help us out meeting our expenses to get to the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts from here in the Mojave, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com

0:02:19 - (Chris Clarke): elpaso and make a donation of the magnitude that appeals to you. If you want to give us general support, you can do the same thing by going to 90 miles from needles.com donate so let's get to those monsoons. If I asked you to define the desert by what it lacks, it probably wouldn't take you very long to answer. Water. Deserts lack water. That is generally the definition of a desert. It's a place that gets less than a certain amount of water.

0:03:34 - (Chris Clarke): That certain amount is usually figured at 30 centimeters or 10 inches. Ish. That's an arbitrary line there doesn't Always really define a desert to everyone's satisfaction. Tucson gets a little bit more than 10 inches of water a year, and no one's going to suggest that Tucson isn't in a desert, least of all people in Tucson. Nonetheless, a desert is, generally speaking, a place that's characterized by lack of precipitation, lack of available water for living things.

0:04:04 - (Chris Clarke): And so that's why you get all the nifty evolutionary innovations that you see in deserts. Water is like currency in the desert. It's scarce, and so therefore it's valuable. That's why saguaros and Joshua trees have spines, and that's why a lot of cacti have alkaloids that make it unpleasant to consume them. They're trying to conserve their water by making it less likely that other desert dwellers will eat them.

0:04:32 - (Chris Clarke): If I asked you a slightly different question, which is what makes the desert shaped the way it is, the answer might not be as obvious, but it is the same answer for all that deserts are defined by lacking water. It is, for the most part, water that makes the desert shaped the way it is. And sure, there are other factors at play. There's wind, erosion, sandblasting rock faces and cliffs and trash and soda cans and living organisms.

0:05:03 - (Chris Clarke): You can pretty much tell how long a soda can has been sitting in the desert by how much of the paint is left on it. That's wind erosion. And sure, there are longer term processes that make the broad outlines of the desert the way they are. Plate tectonics and volcanic activity, things like that. Geology raises the mountains, but in the main, those mountains are shaped by water. The valleys between them are shaped by water.

0:05:31 - (Chris Clarke): Want some examples? I got examples. That wash you're walking through on your hike carved by a flash flood. People don't always think about this. It's called a dry wash, after all. If you see a big boulder out in the middle of the desert and there's a mountain a quarter mile away that the boulder clearly came from, at some point, that boulder was almost certainly put there by water. Maybe a flash flood pushed it downhill or cut out the base that the boulder was sitting on and made it just roll downhill.

0:06:01 - (Chris Clarke): Or maybe that water moved the boulder just by seeping into a crack between the boulder and its parent rock. And then water expands when it freezes year after year. That little crowbar of that frozen water pried that boulder away from that rock and eventually, eventually sent it tumbling. There are slot canyons. Slot canyons are formed by year after year after year of flash floods going through rock that is softer than the granite that we have around here.

0:06:33 - (Chris Clarke): Sandstone and siltstone and beautiful Red Chinle Formation sedimentary rock that wouldn't have slot canyons in it without water. Alluvial fans and bajadas, those broad aprons of sediment that circle most mountains in the desert. Most of the washes that you're likely to hike into cut into those broad aprons of sediment and allow you to look at the internal anatomy of them. It's all flash flood runoff dropping the larger pieces of sediment, those house sized boulders closer to the mountains.

0:07:09 - (Chris Clarke): And then silt and sand get carried many miles away from the mountains. Sometimes those alluvial fans and bajadas wouldn't be there except for water in the desert. Even the visual symbol of how deserts are dry playas, dry lake beds, or saline lake beds, often called salinas, they got there because there used to be water there. Often enough, there's still water there. That water percolates up in places like the Devil's Golf Course in Mojave National Preserve.

0:07:43 - (Chris Clarke): It percolates and evaporates and builds fantastical towers of salt crystals. Desert varnish. You see drippy looking streaks on desert varnish on red rock cliffs, and it's quite clear that that was caused by moisture seeping down the face of the cliffs. Just a simple little molecule, two hydrogens attached to an oxygen and it shapes the desert. And in the last couple of weeks, where I live in Twentynine Palms, and I know elsewhere in the desert as well, we've had a demonstration of this. We had something like six tenths of an inch fall over the course of a couple of days in the last week of August.

0:08:27 - (Chris Clarke): Other places where I've lived, that would be hardly anything at all. You might cancel a picnic, but aside from that, it would basically be a typical spring day. But in Twentynine Palms and in other desert cities, getting two thirds of an inch of water in a couple of days can be a big problem. And we don't always think of it as a problem. We celebrate those summer rainstorms and the monsoons. But sometimes it seems like for every thousand people celebrating a monsoon, one person gets really badly damaged.

0:08:58 - (Chris Clarke): Sometimes they're making a bad choice, sometimes through no fault of their own. And while no one got badly hurt in this most recent monsoonal outburst, in Twentynine Palms, at least not that made the news, enough rain fell that it almost overwhelmed the city's defenses. There are neighborhoods in Twentynine Palms that routinely get flooded when there's a monsoonal rainstorm. They tend to be in the commercial areas.

0:09:29 - (Chris Clarke): There are some Roads that just. If there is a rainstorm in summer, that road will be closed. And people around here are used to that, and they know where to go to avoid those closures. We have a significant and impressive flood control network in 29 palms. There's a broad wash that comes out of Joshua Tree National park around 49 Palms Oasis. Because it's mountainous, a lot of rain falls in the vicinity there.

0:09:56 - (Chris Clarke): And when it does, it gets channeled into this flood control channel. It has some tributaries that add to it, and it flows into a place that's called Wonder Valley. I live right by the bottom end of that flood control channel, and I'm here to tell you it was almost overcome by a little bit more than half an inch of rain. I missed it, to be honest. I was up in the Bay Area going to a memorial service for an old friend I hadn't seen in a while, spending time with other friends that thankfully have not departed this plane of existence, and giving my friend Matthew a ride to Fresno at the end of the visit, where he met his brother to go backpacking in the southern Sierra.

0:10:37 - (Chris Clarke): Had lunch with the two of them, got back in the car, headed south to go through Bakersfield and into the West Mojave and through Barstow and home. And I got a call from my wife who said, it's not safe to come home, find a place to stay. That flood control channel had almost failed. The flash floods filled the flood control channel with silt. There is a foot left of the levees above the water course.

0:11:03 - (Chris Clarke): A lot of those levees had been eroded away, and the rain stopped just before it catastrophically failed. And the city crews got busy excavating the silt left in the channel, 20ft of it or so. That's a lot. They're doing some hard, good work to get that going again. That's not to say that there wasn't significant damage. The flood control channel where it flooded, and also in places where the stormwater runoff just found its own path, damaged streets throughout Twentynine Palms, including major streets. Adobe Road, which is the second biggest street in the city, has one whole lane that's basically unsafe to drive. Where it crosses the flood control channel, the pavement is broken up into big blocks and tilted badly. And on this Thursday afternoon, as I record this, as city and county workers struggle to reopen roads that have been hammered by last week's rainstorms, towering thunderheads surround me in all directions.

0:12:01 - (Chris Clarke): When temperatures here have exceeded, yeah, around 105 degrees or so Fahrenheit for a few days in sequence. And that happens a lot. And it's been many more than a few days this year. There's a kind of desert alchemy that happens. The air is baked by the unrepentant sun. It gets hot. The soil reaches surface temperatures that are sometimes 20 or 30 degrees hotter than the air. Not only does it make difficult and painful for your dog to go for a walk, but it also heats the air.

0:12:35 - (Chris Clarke): That air is already hot, but the soil just bakes and makes that air even hotter. There's not a lot of vegetation to cool things off by transpiring water vapor. So the soil gets really hot, and the air's already hot, and the soil gets it even hotter. Hot air rises, and when it does so in the area that it's rising from, the air pressure gets lower, it leaves a partial vacuum, and air from surrounding regions moves in to equalize that pressure differential.

0:13:04 - (Chris Clarke): It gets heated up. It's usually already pretty hot, and it rises, and more air gets sucked in from the surroundings, and you get a giant pattern of convection. And across the deserts from Los Angeles to central Texas, we have these gigantic bodies of water. To the south, the Chihuahuan Desert's not all that far from the Gulf of Mexico. Further west, we have the Gulf of California, AKA the Sea of Cortez.

0:13:32 - (Chris Clarke): And warm air that's been sitting over these large bodies of water has a lot of water vapor in it. There's an updraft to the north created by a sun irradiated desert. And that moist air over the water heads to refill that area of lower air pressure that the rising hot air in the middle of the desert leaves. And as that air moves in, it brings with it the moisture that's evaporated from the Gulf of Mexico and the Sea of Cortez.

0:13:59 - (Chris Clarke): And moisture and hot air in the desert equals clouds, equals towering thunderheads that form first over the mountains, of which we have our fair share around here. And of course, the thing about hot air rising is that as it rises, it cools down. It's like 10 degrees per thousand feet of altitude in the desert. And when it cools down, it can't hold as much water vapor. And so first you can see the water vapor as it comes out a solution from the air and forms visible clouds of water vapor over the desert mountain ranges. And then at some point, those tiny, tiny droplets of condensed water vapor will grow, and they eventually get too heavy to be held up by the swirling rising hot air within the clouds, and they fall as rain thunder rolls across the Desert.

0:14:51 - (Chris Clarke): Your dog heads for the bedroom closet. Fat raindrops make random patterns on the desiccated desert soil, on driveways, on rooftops. Eventually those patterns merge and water begins to pool on the surface. Desert tortoises, in places where they still live, come out. They know their territory. They know where the water is going to sit in little puddles. They go to one of those puddles and they drink.

0:15:21 - (Chris Clarke): Some of the rain soaks in, but most of it runs off. And it runs off with a fury. And it begins to rain harder. The air is literally electric. The temperature drops by 20 degrees. Relative humidity triples. All around us, the desert is suddenly alive. Small dark clouds trailing curtains of dark rain drift across the landscape like giant aerial jellyfish. Mojave men of war with million-volt stings. Desert birds who know a good thing when they see it, start singing even in midday.

0:16:05 - (Chris Clarke): Insects will alight on the plants, drinking water off the leaves and seed pods. The air fills with the scent of wet summer creosote. It's a scent that's impossible to describe but let me try anyway. Its camphor and turpentine and resiny green plant stuff. Incidentally, the smell of monsoon washed creosote is not the same as the smell of winter wet creosote. It's about the same magnitude of differences as it is between chewing a stick of Wrigley's on one hand compared to falling face first into a vat of macerated spearmint leaves on the other hand.

0:16:49 - (Chris Clarke): When I notice winter wet creosote, I spend some time sticking my face into local individual creosotes and I breathe deeply through my nose. And it's a lovely thing and I enjoy it. And it makes me think about chemistry and botany and ethnography and then being wired the way I am, I usually go on to think about how old creosotes are and then of something else altogether. Typical day for Chris. That's winter washed creosote. The smell of summer monsoon washed creosote does not allow idle intellectualizing like that. It is a sledgehammer to the soul.

0:17:25 - (Chris Clarke): You don't need to find a nearby creosote to stick your face into in order to smell it. That smell permeates the desert. It's ubiquitous. It seeps past the weather stripping into your clothing. Forget about noticing the smell. Would you? Quote, notice, end quote, a flash flood sweeping you down in arroyo. Noticing is beside the point. It slams you. I once wrote that monsoons are a reminder that the best days in the desert are full of passionate intensity, while the worst lack all conviction. I didn't get the reactions I was hoping for.

0:18:04 - (Chris Clarke): Might be that people are trying not to encourage me. It might be they just didn't catch the William Butler Yates reference. Anyway, when we're talking about monsoonal rainstorms, there are a couple of things that bear repeating no matter how often we say them, and they involve your staying alive. First off, people die when they try to drive through a flash flood crossing a road. If they're lucky, they survive, but they destroy their vehicles.

0:18:36 - (Chris Clarke): That happens often enough that there are places like Arizona that have passed laws saying that people that drive into flooded roadways can be charged for any expenses related to their rescue, and that law is locally known as the Stupid Motorist Law. I'm not as big a fan of calling people stupid as a lot of people on the Internet are, but I suppose this one is more like don't be stupid rather than you are stupid. At any rate, you might be surprised how little water it takes to sweep a vehicle, even if it's a lifted Jeep wrangler with plenty of clearance to sweep it off the road.

0:19:14 - (Chris Clarke): Takes very little water to do that. Desert writer Craig Childs, who we need to get on this podcast at some point, once wrote that two easy ways to die in the desert are thirst and drowning, and flash floods are what he was talking about. The other safety note, you don't need to be in your car in order to heed this safety warning. You just need to be hiking in the desert or hanging out in the desert.

0:19:46 - (Chris Clarke): Pay attention to the sky. Pay attention to the weather forecast. Now, assuming that the powers that be are unsuccessful in their attempt to completely dismantle the National Weather Service, which it looks like they very much want to do if you're hiking in canyon country, anywhere in the desert, anywhere where there's a deep wash that you might have trouble climbing out of in a big hurry, or a slot canyon or fill in the blanks Pay attention to the sky.

0:20:20 - (Chris Clarke): Pay attention to the weather. For 20 or 30 miles around, you look at a map and look at drainage patterns, and that will help you focus on the most threatening areas of sky. Because one tiny little rainstorm too far away for you to really see, especially if you're down in a slot canyon, depending on how the landscape tilts and where the drainage patterns run, that rainstorm 30 miles away could fill up your slot canyon or your wash.

0:20:52 - (Chris Clarke): And even if you have the good sense to escape, you know, if you're hiking up a wash that's a mile wide or so, the temptation is going to be to park where you start as opposed to parking outside the wash. You might come back to no car or a car that's filled to the headliner with mud and grit and dead scorpions or live scorpions. A few weeks ago I wrote in my substack at lettersfromthedesert.substack.com

0:21:22 - (Chris Clarke): that we desert dwellers can't help but celebrate the monsoon storms, even though they occasionally strip us of everything we own, or they strip everyone we love of us. After several weeks of nighttime temperatures staying above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it's hard not to revel in a monsoon storm. One must run out into the rain and get drenched trying to stay mindful enough not to drive through underpasses or go frolicking in slot canyons.

0:21:52 - (Chris Clarke): Monsoon days are bacchanals in the original sense of the word revelry, that occasionally has a body count. Fortunately, at least in 29 palms this past week, the bodies are limited to torn up fences and other casualties of the microburst. We have a 30-foot palo verde tree in our yard, half of which broke off and landed on our roof during the storm. Landed right on our solar panels. We are very fortunate that the tree fell slowly. I spent a lot of time up on the roof the last couple of days, which is probably the safest place to be in flash flood weather, though definitely not in lightning strike weather.

0:22:41 - (Chris Clarke): But I picked my moments carefully, went up and had the singular experience of using my old Japanese pruning saws to cut huge pieces of beautiful palo verde off and throw them off the roof. And not quite done yet. No damage to the solar panels or to the roof. We were very lucky in that regard and that is how living in the desert should be in flash flood season. Stay safe, watch the sky, watch the forecasts, celebrate the storms, but stay alive to enjoy them because when the monsoon comes, it's hard not to celebrate.

0:23:24 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll be right back.

0:23:28 - (Chris Clarke): For today's sampling of the nature sounds of nature sound recordist Fred Bell. We're going to Fletcher Canyon in the spring mountains outside Las Vegas to listen to honestly, my all time favorite desert bird singing. See if you can guess what it is. 

0:25:04 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Don't take your dog on a desert hike in summer.

0:25:13 - (Chris Clarke): And that's it for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I want to thank our newest donors, Patrick Donnelly who tossed us a donation to congratulate us for getting to 100 episodes. Pamela Lemke, who sent us a very nice note that read, thank you. I live in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. There's very little meaningful coverage of the threats to our desert communities. Thank you, Pamela. We do our best.

0:25:42 - (Chris Clarke): And please let us know if there's something specific to Santa Cruz county that you want us to cover. We're always looking for new stories from places we haven't really been. Louise Mathias and Michael Stillman, both good friends in the Joshua Tree area, donated to our Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund. Louise has actually read some of her work on this podcast, though it's been almost two years at this point.

0:26:07 - (Chris Clarke): Louise, we need you back on. And then, just as we were about to hit save on this and upload this episode to the Internets, Cameron Mayer came in with yet another donation to the Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund. Cameron, Louise, Michael, Pamela, Patrick, thank you so much. You guys rock. I will definitely find a cheap bowl of red or green when I'm in the Chihuahuan Desert and raise a fork in your honor.

0:26:35 - (Chris Clarke): Speaking of Cameron Mayer, you can hear his writing in our 100th episode, which is spread out over six episodes. Go to 90 miles from needles.com to hear that. I also wanted to thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, our podcast artwork creator. Our Nature Sounds recordist is Fred Bell. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode is by Pure Music.

0:27:01 - (Chris Clarke): We are very much looking forward to seeing you all in Tucson and El Paso. Let me know if you're going to be at the El paso Zoo on September 27 for the Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta. Should be a good time. Lots of great groups there, not just us. And as soon as we get details nailed down for Tucson, we will let you know all about them. Until next week, this is Chris Clarke saying, keep smelling that creosote.

0:27:26 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now.

0:27:30 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.