The Islands of Interior California (and Nevada): The Endemics of Ash Meadows

Many months ago I was working on a mini-series of blogs about the Islands of Interior California when I was rudely interrupted by a COVID pandemic, and almost all blog writing ceased while I struggled with the transition to teaching online. The next installment was to be about one of the strangest places in the biological sense in all of North America: Ash Meadows. To get this series moving again, I have adapted some previous posts from 2017.

Welcome to one of the most remarkable places in the United States. It's a large island in the middle of the hottest and driest desert in the country. I freely admit that the unprepossessing photograph above is one of the least likely real estate ads ever, but it reveals the landscape of one of the most biologically unique spots in the continental United States, and this picture could have been a real estate ad in the early 1980s.

Crystal Spring at Ash Meadows

Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is not in Death Valley proper, but instead lies about 30 miles east of Death Valley National Park. It is administered not by the National Park Service, but by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But it does enclose an outlier of Death Valley National Park, and it preserves critical habitat and nearly 30 endemic animal and plant species that were nearly extirpated in the 1970s and 1980s. The fact that it exists at all is entirely due to geology.

During the Pleistocene ice ages during the last two million years, the climate in this dry desert was often cooler and wetter. Rain and snow fell on the high mountain ranges to the north and east and soaked into the ground. Over the millennia the groundwater flowed slowly to the southwest, along river valleys and even through fissures right through mountain ranges. Bedrock ridges and gouge-filled fault lines forced the "fossil water" to the surface as a series of 30 or so seeps and springs. The amount of water flowing here is tremendous; some of the springs have flows measured in thousands of gallons per minute. For example, Crystal Springs in the pictures above and below has a flow of 2,800 gallons per minute. The presence of so much water in the desert makes Ash Meadows an island, but in this case it is an island of water in a landscape of dryness. It is one of the few oases left in the American desert, and has the highest concentration of endemic species in a small area anywhere on the continent.

Water in the desert attracts (and isolates) many kinds of plants and animals (including more than 215 species of birds). Many are survivors, relics of wetter times who could not otherwise live in the desert. That would include the four native species of fish (a fifth is already extinct), and ten species of water snail (an eleventh is also extinct).

The proposed Calvada Lakes development from the 1980s

Water in the desert can be home to invasive species which can do great damage to the fragile ecosystem. Mosquito Fish, which are an important species in other settings, can upset the life balance in the pools and springs. So can abandoned aquarium fish. But the worst invasive species of all, Homo sapiens, nearly destroyed the entire complex.

It happened first when farmers began to manipulate the springs into irrigation systems. They piped the water flows and started pumping groundwater so intensely that the water table started to drop, threatening the species that lived in the ponds. Lawsuits ensued and one eventually reached the Supreme Court. In 1976, the court ruled that pumping had to be limited to the extent that water tables would not drop. The farming corporation sold the properties to a land developer, which led to an even greater threat to Ash Meadows.

The real estate development is in retrospect nearly unbelievable: more than 30,000 homes, along with shopping centers, casinos, theatres, and industrial parks. An instant city in the midst of barren desert. Even today, I can't imagine 50,000 people or more simply deciding to move out to the middle of nowhere. "But Las Vegas!" is an obvious response, but other desert town developments have faltered and disappeared when people realized how truly miserable the summer temperatures could be (and that's not to mention the winter winds and dust storms). Calvada Lakes would have been a disaster on so many levels.

Luckily, Congress stepped in and established the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in 1984, and most of the developer's lands were purchased by the Nature Conservancy in 1986. The lands were then re-sold to the federal government, and the refuge became a reality. Today, there is a marvelous new visitor center and three handicapped accessible boardwalks that explore some of the most interesting springs.

Devil's Hole Pupfish

The rain was still falling when we arrived at the refuge during our recent Bombogenesis trip to the Death Valley region. It had indeed been falling all night, so I should have known what was going to befall us when we tried to drive the gravel-clay road to Devil's Hole to see the most restricted vertebrate habitat on the planet. The vans very nearly got stuck in the slick mud, and we only made it out by getting out and pushing the van back onto semi-solid ground. We didn't make it, in other words. But we have in the past, and I'm providing a few pictures of the event.

The entire race of the Devil's Hole Pupfish lives in the shallow cavern opening on the side of a limestone hill. The water is constantly warm, almost 90 degrees, is oxygen poor, and the food supply for the fish is extremely limited. But somehow the fish have survived, and have diverged from their relatives who live in pools just a few miles away. They are thought to have been isolated for a minimum of 20,000 years, but some studies suggest as much as 60,000 years (an outlier study takes a different position, suggesting only a few centuries of isolation).

Access to the cave opening is for obvious reasons highly restricted. There is a caged platform from which the pool can be viewed from about 80 feet away. It's clearly hard to see the individual fish, but my camera has a great zoom lens. I'm not sure why they were there (to catch eggs?), but the white tiles in the pool allowed me to catch some video of the rarest fish in the world (below).

The cavern opening where the entire population of Devil's Hole Pupfish lives

The Islands of Interior California: There's a Reason I Don't Hug Ducks

There are islands in the interior of California. They aren't islands in the normal sense of the word, and are actually pretty much exactly the opposite. In the great California Desert, consisting of the Colorado (Sonoran; also the Lower) Desert, the somewhat higher Mojave Desert (the "High" Desert), and the Basin and Range, there are islands of water. And it is water, of course, that makes life possible in these harshest of climates.

Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley National Park is one of these islands. Tucked along the base of Tucki Mountain at the north end of the Panamint Range, Stovepipe Wells is a small resort complex consisting of a hotel/restaurant, bar, store, gas station, and campground. The resort is not actually at the location of the original Stovepipe Wells. That locality was located several miles to the northeast on the other side of the Mesquite Dunes.

Death Valley is the driest place in North America and the hottest place in the world. It is also the lowest region in North America, and this leads to some unexpected discrepant facts. There is actually lots of water in Death Valley. It doesn't come from the rainfall, but instead it comes from the ground. Water underground tends to flow downhill from higher elevations, and Death Valley is the lowest place there is, so springs flow in unexpected places. And even if there are no springs, the water may still be only a short distance beneath the surface.

That was the case for the Old Stovepipe Wells. At the edge of the sand dunes, there was a low spot where a bit of digging and scraping could cause fresh water to flow to the surface. The spot was utilized in ancient times apparently, but it was more developed in the mining days of the late 1800s. It was the only water source on the floor of Death Valley between Furnace Creek and the mining towns of Skidoo and Rhyolite. Dunes sometimes obscured the site, so it was marked with an old stovepipe, hence the name.

The water at Old Stovepipe Wells was of variable quality and could apparently be dangerous at times. According to one account, "...the water is very low in the spring, is of a yellowish appearance and intensely nauseating in taste. Its odor is very disagreeable, and it can be smelled for half a mile away." The man went on to describe getting very sick and nearly dying before reaching his destination fourteen miles away. One of the problems is that the water became stagnant quickly and that it was important to drain away the fetid water so that fresher water could flow into the hole. Although there were efforts to develop the site, it was clear that Old Stovepipe Wells was not going to become a permanent resort.

There is no information that I could uncover regarding natural flora and fauna around the original Stovepipe Wells. There no doubt was life of some kind, but none is recorded. During my stays at Stovepipe, I've wandered the dunes and found plenty of evidence of life in the early morning sun. Tracks of insects, reptiles and mammals cover the rippled sands. But for the most part the life remains hidden during the day, burrowing underground to escape the harsh surface conditions. It's a little trickier for birds, and they are not often seen in the dune environment. Despite decades of observations, birdwatchers have reported a mere fourteen species at Mesquite Dunes.

But the modern resort of Stovepipe Wells a mere two miles from the dunes? The total number is species reported there is 197! How in the world is such diversity possible? It's the water of course, but perhaps not in the way that you might think. Fresh water is now pumped from deep underground, providing plentiful clean water for the resort. They don't waste the water (aside from the swimming pool perhaps) having little in the way of landscaping (just a few tamarisk trees around the property). There are no open water sources for birds. For years I've camped at Stovepipe, and I've seen only Common Ravens and the invasive and ubiquitous House Sparrow that seems to follow humans wherever they go. I was intensely curious where all the other birds must be hiding, and this year it finally occurred to me.

One of the things they never tell novice birders like myself is about the absolute best place to see birds. It's not, as one would imagine, standing at the edge of a beautiful meadow with the forest and dramatic snowy peaks in the distance. And it isn't necessarily along the crashing surf near coastal estuaries. It's sewage treatment lagoons...really. Back home, the sewage treatment ponds at Modesto host 234 species. The nearby National Wildlife Refuge has fewer than 200.

Consider. A resort, even a modest one like Stovepipe, produces thousands of gallons of liquid waste and sewage every day, and by law the water must be treated. One of the best ways is to use settling ponds and bacteria that consume the worst of the waste material. The treated water can then be allowed to soak back into the ground where the sand and silt provide a natural filtering effect. The sewage lagoons have to have open ponds, and these are the "islands" that attract the multitudes of bird species that have been spotted here over the years. One can imagine that some birds memorize the localities and return during migrations, while other are desperately lost and find the settling lagoons entirely by lucky chance. Some species can be seen daily, while many others were one-time "accidents" and haven't been seen in decades.

Once I figured this out, I made sure to explore the vicinity of the sewage ponds at sunrise before most of my students were up and preparing for the day. For the record they did not smell terrible as one might think. But they finally provided me with some interesting bird species, including the Red-winged Blackbird (above), dozens of American Coots, a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (below), the ever-present Common Ravens, a Say's Phoebe, a Great-tailed Grackle, and a Black-throated Sparrow, a species I never see back home in Modesto.

On the final morning of the trip, I saw the birds that inspired the title of today's post. There were four Cinnamon Teals in the pond. They are among my favorite ducks, given their unique coloration. But despite knowing that the water is not necessarily putrid, I still would not be thrilled with grabbing them close and hugging them. That's just asking for trouble in many ways...

The Islands of Interior California: The Pygmy Mammoths and the Doomed Sky Islands

An 80,000-year-old pygmy mammoth tusk discovered on Santa Rosa Island. (Image credit: Daniel Muhs, USGS.)

The waves crash against the cliff, tearing at the rock on Santa Rosa Island off of Southern California. The face of the cliff is in constant retreat, changing yearly, and sometimes daily as more of the rock disappears into the surf. In one brief moment, a visitor notices a strange object exposed in the cliff. Is it a tree trunk? No, that white stuff is ivory...it's a tusk! There were elephants on the island! How in the world did that happen?

The presence of fossils of elephantine species on the island has been known since the late 1800s, and a survey in the late 1990s discovered at least 150 sites with remains of the creatures, now called the Pygmy Mammoth (Mammuthus exilis). There is little doubt that these creatures were descended from the mainland's Columbian Mammoth, but as their name suggests, they were small. A full-sized Columbian Mammoth stood 14 feet high, but the Pygmy Mammoth was only half as high at most, and perhaps a quarter the weight. A nearly complete skeleton discovered and excavated in 1994, and the adult was only 5.5 feet tall (below).

Pygmy mammoth skeleton found on Santa Rosa Island in 1994. It was 5.5 feet tall (Image: © Bill Faulkner, NPS)

It seems impossible that mammoths could have made it out to the islands, and under current conditions it probably would be. The nearest island is more than 20 miles away from the mainland. But things were much different 150,000 years ago. A phase of the ice ages was ongoing, and when a vast ice sheet covered Canada and 30% of the United States, sea level was around 300-400 feet lower than today. The four main Channel Islands (San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa) would have been a single large island, which has been given the name Santarosae. The open water gap between the island and the mainland was only about 4.5 miles.

Elephants actually are excellent swimmers, what with having a natural snorkel and all. Present-day elephants have been documented as have swam more than 20 miles. So it is not hard to imagine mammoths on the mainland, perhaps suffering food shortages because of drought or wildfires, catching the scent of fresh vegetation on the islands and swimming out to investigate. A population was established, but then things began to change. The ice age was ending and the globe was warming up. The ice melted and sea rose to near today's level. The single large island was inundated, forming the four islands of today, and the total area was reduced by 76%. For the mammoths, this was a crisis. The islands were no longer big enough to support the mammoth population.

Outline of Santarosae and the present-day Channel Islands (Image credit: U. S. Geological Survey)

The outcome might come as a surprise because the cliché about evolution is sometimes misstated as "survival of the strongest". It is actually the survival of the best adapted. Although the biggest mammoths may have been able to consume much of the decreasing food supply, their dietary needs were also much higher. The evolutionary lottery favors those individuals who have the best adaptations for the specific environment, and it was the runts of the litter who could survive on less food. Over time the size of the adults decreased until they constituted a new species, the Mammuthus exilis. They survived on the islands for tens of thousands of years (from at least 80,000 years before present).

In the end, the Pygmy Mammoths also succumbed to extinction sometime around 12,000 years ago. Their disappearance coincided with the extinction of numerous other large mammals in North America, the "megafauna". Many reasons have been offered as hypotheses, but the cause (or causes) remain elusive. It needs to be noted that humans arrived on the islands around 11,000 years ago, and the small mammoths would have had few defenses against armed human beings.

As we can see, islands are places of refuge, but they can also be a prison of no escape. Which brings us to the doomed sky islands of the Mojave Desert.

The New York Mountains in the Mojave National Preserve (image credit: Garry Hayes)

People may envision a number of stereotypes of what constitutes a desert. Many people see vast seas of sand dunes, while others may see mesas and spires inspired by childhood memories of Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons. Others might see a landscape of huge saguaro cacti. These kinds of deserts exist of course, but except for several dune fields here and there, they don't exist in California. The deserts of eastern California (along with parts of Arizona and Utah, and all of Nevada) are within the Basin and Range Province, a region of the Earth's crust that has been stretched and broken into hundreds of high mountain ranges and deep faulted basins.

The Clark Mountains as seen from Kokoweef (image credit Garry Hayes)

Because the relief (the difference between the highest and lowest points) can range up to two miles, these mountain ranges encompass numerous life zones or ecosystems, from the hottest barren salt flat to alpine peaks. These mountains constitute rich biologic islands that are analogous to the Channel Islands off the coast of California. And like the Channel Islands, some of the inhabitants are ultimately doomed.

Because the mountain peaks are so isolated, one might not expect much diversity, but these environments are not static nor were they always isolated. They were influenced by the ice ages, even though the ice fields never reached the arid region. The climate was cooler and wetter so trees more characteristic of the Rocky Mountains or the Sierra Nevada were able to migrate into the region, including the Rocky Mountain White Fir. But as the ice age waned, the rising temperatures and growing aridity caused the trees to retreat higher and higher into the mountains. If the mountains weren't high enough, the trees were extinguished. In the present day, only three islands remain that possess the Rocky Mountain White Fir: the New York Mountains, Clark Mountain, and Kingston Peak.

Scene from the Kingston Peak area (Image credit: Bureau of Land Management)

None of these relict forests are easy to get to, and I have never had the privilege. And unfortunately I may never have the chance because these trees are ultimately doomed. They are at the very edge of survival, clinging to the cooler north-facing slopes in a micro-climate that is just wet enough to allow the trees to cling to life. As the world continues to warm up, the dry desert will continue creep up the mountain slopes, ultimately "flooding" the last trees in hot dry air.

Image credit: https://www.amargosaconservancy.org/native-plants-wildlife/

We will never fully comprehend the full effects the changes on our planet brought about by global warming and climate change. In the mountains of the Mojave Desert, the "islands" are not occupied just by fir trees. There are dozens of species that shelter within these small forests and they will disappear too. It's a small corner of the world rarely visited by humans, but climate change is global, and there are literally millions of micro-environments like these that will disappear without ever being studied or appreciated. It's a crying shame and all the more tragic considering we've lost three decades of time that we could have acted on behalf of our planet.

Image credit: https://www.amargosaconservancy.org/native-plants-wildlife/

The Islands of Interior California: The Littlest Islands of All

Red Hill with the southern Sierra Nevada in the distance

How often in life have you stepped back from the rat race and considered your life and your place in the cosmos? Wondered why you are here and what does it all mean? Do your conclusions and philosophy change over time? Or is life just such a rush that you deal with it, and look back and wonder where all the time went?

If there is one thing we learn as we delve into geology, it is that time is a relative thing. We look at someone a hundred years old, and we think of a century as a very long time. And yet a human lifetime is miniscule in the face of geologic time on earth. The world has existed for 45 million centuries. Whatever his other failings, Richard Dawkins put our existence into perspective nicely:

"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings." 

With that idea in mind, can you imagine how ancient we humans would look to a creature that lives an entire life within maybe three or four weeks? That's where we find ourselves today, within the smallest of California's "islands". By "islands", I'm referring to the isolated sources of water within one of the harshest deserts in the world, Death Valley and the surrounding Basin and Range Province.

Red Hill (top picture) is a cinder cone and associated basaltic lava flow situated between the Sierra Nevada and the Coso Range south of Owens Lake. The lavas are tens of thousands of years old, maybe even several hundred thousand. This area is desert today, but several times in the last two million years global cooling radically changed the climate in the region. Meltwater from the Sierra Nevada glaciers filled Mono Lake Basin and Owens Lake to overflowing, and the resulting river flowed south towards China Lake and ultimately to Death Valley.

Water is a rare phenomenon at Fossil Falls. This is a shot from several years ago on a very wet trip.

Lava spilled out across the valley floor and blocked the flow of the ancestral Owens River, and the river formed a 40 foot tall waterfall. Over time erosion attacked the lava, causing the lip of the fall to migrate upstream. Pebbles rolling in the current started grinding out potholes in the lava, some small, and some more than ten feet deep. When the climate warmed up during the last 10,000 years, the river dried up and only the potholes and abandoned waterfall remain. It's a fascinating place to explore.

But islands? The small potholes have their own kind of story, one of the persistence of life in the face of the harshest conditions imaginable. The potholes are natural collection sites, capturing windblown dust and silt as well as seeds and most importantly to this story, the eggs of small creatures, possibly carried in the mud adhering to the feet of birds. During storms water collects in some of the potholes (very small islands of water in the midst of a desert). I can imagine the birds finding water in the potholes and stopping for a drink, with the eggs washing off in the water...and eventually hatching.

Within these pools are complete ecosystems of creatures who must live their entire lives on a scale of a few weeks. It begins with birth when a pothole is filled with water and ends in death when the water evaporates. The creatures include small fairy shrimp and what I assume are ostracods, small bivalved crustaceans. These animals are the distant and yet direct descendants of the first complex forms of life that evolved on this planet some 500 million years ago, creatures like trilobites and sea scorpions. Their original ancestors were creatures of the sea, requiring water to survive. They still require water today, but water is a precious and rare commodity in the desert environment. To survive, these descendants evolved eggs that could survive years of desiccation in a harsh desert environment.

One could speculate in a slightly humorous vein that these creatures don't have a whole lot of time to consider their place in the cosmos, and don't have much of a chance to ask themselves why they exist when life is compressed to a few weeks at best. But consider how short our lives are in the face of vast time across the Universe. Are we all that much more aware of ourselves?

A Fairy Shrimp (carrying an egg sac). The "sesame seeds" are Ostracods, very small bivalved crustaceans who were in constant motion.

This is the first installment of a mini-blog series about the biological islands of interior California, an exploration of the geological conditions that allow life to survive in the harsh deserts in the vicinity of Death Valley National Park. Fossil Falls is readily accessible to travelers on Highway 395 between Ridgecrest/Inyokern and Lone Pine. The one mile gravel road is a few miles south of the rest area at Coso Junction and just north of Little Lake. The falls themselves are at the end of a quarter mile walk across the lava flow. A small and decidedly barren campground is nearby. In addition to the potholes and falls, explorers can also find petroglyphs and small shelters where Native Americans carved arrowheads and spear points from obsidian.

The Islands of Interior California: A New Geotripper Series

I've always been fascinated by islands. I visit the Hawaiian Islands every chance I get, and I am literally haunted by the vast expanses of open ocean that separate the islands from any other landmasses. It's an odd combination of loneliness and wonder. It's not something you ever feel when you are staying in Waikiki hotels and sunning yourself on a crowded beach. The sense of isolation comes when you spend time in the rainforests, the alpine deserts, and the barren volcano slopes. When you read about and experience the incredible biological isolation, it becomes an incredible story of survival and adaptation that has produced hundreds of unique endemic species found nowhere else in the world.

Which leads to a question: what does that have to do with a bunch of pictures of localities in the California desert?

I was in Death Valley National Park for much of the past week, and while I was teaching a field course, I also had a few moments of observation and reflection about life in the desert. I was watching for bird species in particular, and I was struck by an odd contradiction: Death Valley (Furnace Creek specifically) has more bird species (339) than my county in California's Great Valley (315). It doesn't seem possible, since conditions are far more benign at home, and in fact the Great Valley can support vastly greater numbers of birds. But Death Valley has a way of forcing more species together in one place where they can be seen and recorded...it is a system of biological islands. The islands are made of water, and the intervening space is largely barren land.

The concept of biologic islands in a landscape is not a new concept at all, so I am not introducing any kind of new idea here. It's just that I sensed the concept more than usual during the recent trip. So in the next few posts I want to describe some of the unique and different "islands" that exist in the California desert, and the geological conditions that caused them. Some of these we explored last week, but as I considered the idea of a series, I thought of a few unique spots I've visited in earlier journeys, so I will include a few of them as well.

Coming up in the next post: the spot that made me think of islands in the first place...

Part 1: The Littlest Islands of All
Part 2: The Pygmy Mammoths and the Doomed Sky Islands
Part 3: There's a Reason Why I Don't Hug Ducks