Joshua Tree National Park | How does anything survive in a desert this dry?

Summary

A short written summary of the episode — not the full transcript. Press play above for the whole thing.

Twenty minutes out of the car and Big’s lips were already cracked. You can feel the air pulling water out of your arms here. Joshua Tree gets four to seven inches of rain a year, because the mountains to the west wring the ocean clouds out before they ever arrive. Everything alive here has solved the same one problem. The kangaroo rat solved it by never taking a drink of water in its life.

The oasis of Mara is a stand of palms with springs under it, and for thousands of years it was the most important address in this desert. Two peoples lived there together: the Chemehuevi, led by Jim Mike, and the Serrano, led by Jim Pine. They did not fight over the water. They married each other, gardened together, and irrigated from the same springs for decades. If you are greedy in a dry year, you have nobody left to ask in the drier one.

In 1875 the state of California filed a claim on the whole oasis and sold it to the Southern Pacific Railroad. Surveyors had already written down, twenty years earlier, that the land should be reservation. One signature, and the most reliable water for a hundred miles belonged to a railroad. Big wanted to know how that was legal. It was legal because nobody outside the desert was paying attention.

Somebody eventually did. Minerva Hamilton Hoyt of South Pasadena was wealthy and liked formal gardens with roses in them. After her husband died she came to the desert and stayed. She watched people drive out from Los Angeles with shovels to dig up Joshua trees for their yards, and burn cacti for entertainment. Then she loaded railroad cars with desert plants, rock, and sand and shipped them east so that people who had never seen a desert would have to look at one. In 1936 Roosevelt signed the monument, 825,340 acres of it.

The fight is not filed away. In 2022 rangers reading GPS collar data found bighorn sheep leaving the high rocks, walking into Twentynine Palms, drinking out of swimming pools and a fountain. The springs they use are drying. So the rangers closed Barker Dam Trail and let the sheep drink alone.

Little wanted to know who tells the sheep the trail is closed.