Travels in Death Valley: An Island of a Different Kind in Ash Meadows

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. 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 also attract 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, 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 Other California: A Chance to See a Unique Piece of our State, our local Galapagos Island

Santa Cruz Island in Southern California. Here is your chance to explore this dynamic and unique ecosystem! Source National Park Service

I work with some pretty incredible people. Modesto may be not be the most exciting place to live, a Central Valley town with a depressed economy and limited opportunities, but the professors and teachers I work with are fighting to provide our students a chance to reach their dreams (and even to give them an idea of what to dream about). Many of our faculty are doing world class research, and we have nationally known poets and writers. They could live anywhere, but they've chosen to live here and work to build their community

It's also important to know that despite our limited resources, our administration recognizes the value of field experience not just in geology, but also biology, archaeology, and anthropology. Students who have pursued their education at our school have had opportunities to explore far-flung parts of our world, including Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Baja California, and all eleven western states. It is a challenge to put such trips together, and they can be expensive, but the experience and knowledge gained is priceless.

Which brings us to today's topic. Early on in my blogging career (in the Pre-Pleistocene year of 2008), I had a regular feature called the "Other California" which describes those parts of our fair state that don't always show up on the postcards and travel brochures, but which display incredible geology and natural history. Our state is rich with landscapes and species that are found nowhere else. And so today I want to let you know about a marvelous opportunity to see one of our most unique landscapes, the Channel Islands.

The Channel Islands are the oceanic extension of the Transverse Ranges in Southern California. Structually, they've had a strange history that includes being a part of the Earth's crust that has rotated more than 90 degrees from their original orientation. They have been compressed and faulted, and isolated from the mainland for several million years. That means that fauna and flora have been isolated as well, and they have undergone selective pressure in order to survive. There are more endemic species here than anywhere else in the state. There is a species of bird, the Island Scrub Jay, that is found nowhere else, as well as a canine, the Santa Cruz Island Fox. As recently as 10,000 years ago there was a race of Pygmy Mammoths who survived on the islands for some time after their relatives had died out on the mainland. And...humans lived with and occasionally hunted them! The islands have a rich archaeological heritage of the Chumash people that goes back thousands of years. 

You have a chance to explore Santa Cruz Island with an archaeologist, Professor Susan Kerr, and a biologist, Professor Teri Curtis through the auspices of Modesto Junior College. The class is Archaeological and Biological Field Studies of the Channel Islands (Anthropology 155 and Biology 155 for a total of 2 semester units) and it will take place on August 7-12 on Santa Cruz Island. Cost includes registration fees for the class and $480 for housing, transportation, meals and activities, including kayaking and hiking. There is an information meeting on May 19th for those of you who live in the Modesto region, at 6 PM in Science Community Center room 212 on the west campus of MJC. If you can't make it to the meeting, contact Susan Kerr (kerrs -at- yosemite.edu) or Teri Curtis (curtist -at- yosemite.edu). I hope you can join them!

There are Islands in the Desert: A Look at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge

There are islands in the desert. One might argue that islands are supposed to be surrounded by water, and water is in short supply in the driest corner of North America's Basin and Range province. But islands can take many forms, and in this region there are extremely high mountains and deep fault valleys that cross so many life zones that the "island" can be defined as an isolated ecosystem atop a high mountain. There are relict forests in the Mojave Desert of fir trees that survived the end of the ice ages in their cool mountain redoubts, for instance. On our way to Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, we could see a mountain island rising out the Amargosa River plain. Eagle Mountain is an isolated fault block that rises above the blowing dust of the afternoon.

Desert surrounds Ash Meadows, an unlikely oasis in western Nevada

There are of course islands of civilization that persist in the desert, maintained by the importation of energy and supplies. These outposts actually make the exploration of this desert possible, one of the most isolated regions in the lower forty-eight states. In the end though, it is water that makes the islands. In this case an "island" of water surrounded by barren desert. It is the largest island of endemic species in the lower 48 states.

Endemic species are those that occur nowhere else on the planet. The boundaries of endemism are usually the shorelines of islands, because new species arise from isolation. Hawai'i is the absolute leader in endemic species in the United States, being one of the most remote islands on the planet. There are literally thousands of endemic plants and animals on the islands that are found nowhere else in the world. The Galapagos Islands are another famous example of numerous endemic species. There are lots of endemic species within the boundaries of the lower 48 states, but there are relatively few found in any specific area. There are simply too many pathways for species to spread out over a wide region.

One such island is the oasis of Ash Meadows in western Nevada. Within the 37 square miles of the National Wildlife Refuge are (or were) nearly three dozen endemic species of plants and animals, species found nowhere else on the planet. They exist in this one isolated location because of the geology, which has funneled the groundwater of a vast region into a series of three or four dozen springs that emit tens of thousands of gallons per minute. Water in the desert is life. Lots of water in one spot of the desert is almost miraculous, and that is the situation at Ash Meadows.

The creek that flows from Crystal Spring. An ADA accessible boardwalk provides access

The unique lifeforms found here include four living species of fish (along with one extinct species), eleven species of snails, three aquatic bugs, two species of bee, one extinct mammal (the Ash Meadows Montane Vole), and nine plant species.

"Ash" Meadows seems a particularly apt description of the region in winter

The desert that surrounds Ash Meadows is every bit as much a barrier to species travel as the open seas that surround Hawaii or the Galapagos. The meadows are only a few miles from Death Valley, the hottest place on the planet. So how did these water species come to be here in these springs and pools? Much of the explanation lies with the Pleistocene Ice Ages. A dozen or more times in the last 1.8 million years, the climate cooled and glaciers developed in the Sierra Nevada mountains off to the west. Meltwater from the glaciers filled the intermontane valleys of the Great Basin, forming a series of huge lakes and connecting rivers. These precious tendrils of water allowed fish and other aquatic species to invade the former deserts, but as each ice age stage ended, the dry conditions returned, and a few survivor species found safe harbor in isolated springs and pools like those found at Ash Meadows.

Devil's Hole, home of the extremely endangered Devil's Hole Pupfish. The pool in the cavern opening is their only home.

The refuge at Ash Meadows includes a single pool of water called Devil's Hole that contains the rarest fish species on the planet, the Devil's Hole Pupfish. The pool is an outlier of Death Valley National Park. Two other species of pupfish are found at Ash Meadows, the Ash Meadows Amargosa and the Warm Springs Pupfish. The Ash Meadows Speckled Dace is also found here. The Ash Meadows Killifish was driven to extinction in the 1950s as a result of spring alteration and agricultural development.

King's Spring can also be visited by an ADA accessible boardwalk.

It is remarkable that Ash Meadows ever came to be a protected ecosystem because water in the desert attracts another species, one capable of altering the landscape and erasing from existence the other species that have survived in isolation for tens of thousands of years. The water at Ash Meadows caught the attention of desert travelers more than a century ago, and the water was used to irrigate alfalfa fields and other crops. Many of the springs were put into piping systems and numerous invasive species arrived to compete with the native ones. It's hard to believe, but as recently as the 1980s, a proposal to build casinos, strip malls, and 30,000 houses almost became a reality.

If you have visited Ash Meadows in the past, you will find some major changes. A marvelous new visitor center opened only a few months ago. There was plenty of excellent information about the geology and biology of the refuge, but I was especially impressed with the paleontology exhibits. Entire walls are devoted to a creative diorama of the fossil species found in the region, including the ancient billion year old animals as well as the various waves of Homo sapiens throughout time.

Western Kingbird at Point of Rocks in Ash Meadows

Death Valley National Park is one of the greatest national parks in our country, and if you visit, you will find more than enough to keep you busy for many days. But if you find you have a day to spare, drive on over to Ash Meadows. Closed roads (flood damage) convinced us to pay a visit in February.

To wrap up, have a look at an Ash Meadows Amargosa Pupfish defending its territory at Longstreet Spring. These are fascinating creatures, and true survivors. In our next post we'll drive through a mountain range. Not over, but through...

This is a highly abridged version of a blog I did on Ash Meadows last year. I've included pictures of our latest trip.

A Bird Shangri-La No More: The Moas of New Zealand

Blogging always involves a little bit of free association, where inspiration comes from numerous unrelated events over the course of a few days. I've started my fall semester, and I've met 170 new people over the last week. I've given introductory presentations that describe the reasons a person might want to pursue studies in geology and the earth sciences including a rundown of some of the interesting fossils that have been found in the region. So, I've been thinking about the past, the very deep past of millions of years ago.

Then, I've been blogging over at Geotripper's California Birds about some birding adventures overseas including trips in Switzerland, Italy, and Australia. While looking for bird pics, I came across the picture below of some Moa replicas that we saw at a New Zealand wildlife park. Replicas, because Moas no longer exist in our world. But once there was a Shangri-La for the birds, a paradise on Earth, in New Zealand.

12 foot fiberglass Moas lurking in a Gondwana forest in New Zealand

New Zealand was a paradise for birds because the island mass separated from other continents prior to the mass extinctions of the late Cretaceous. Small mammals were present, but on the islands they were never much of a threat to the birds, and eventually they went extinct, except for some bat species. With the loss of the dinosaurs and the mammals, the only vertebrates in position to dominate the terrestrial ecosystems were the, uh, dinosaurs. The avian dinosaurs. With no reptilian or mammalian predators, the birds were able to evolve a flightless lifestyle (flight is an expensive energy proposition if it is not necessary for survival). Eventually a number of very large birds evolved, including eleven species of Moas. The largest stood over 12 feet tall (3.6 meters). The Moas were mainly plant-eaters but predators existed on the islands as well, including the extremely large Haast's Eagle (Harpagornis moorei) with a wingspan of nearly 10 feet (3.3 meters).

The Moas in the picture above aren't real. I've added a shot of an Emu from the wildlife park we visited as a stand-in for the large, flightless birds

The trees on the island provide another link to the past. Some of the huge tree ferns in New Zealand evoke Jurassic forests of the long-sundered Gondwana supercontinent. The ferns in the photo below line the opening of a 75-foot deep explosion pit at Orakei Korako Geothermal Area on the North Island. I've never such huge ferns before.

The ancient tree that captured my imagination the most was the Kauri tree (below), one of the bulkiest trees on the planet, rivaling even the Sequoia trees in my own backyard of the Sierra Nevada. The most mature trees are not quite 200 feet high, but their trunks remain thick practically to the crown. Their history extends back into Jurassic time. They once covered large portions of the islands, but unfortunately their wood is strong, mostly knot-free, and attractive. Something like 95% of the original forests have been cut down, and old-growth forests are exceedingly rare and precious. The trees are now protected by law, but ironically, dead trees in swamps are not, and the wood is durable enough that some of the trees from the swamps are still utilized legally, despite having been dead for hundreds or thousands of years.

Unfortunately, the arrival of humans on the islands around 700 years ago spelled doom for the avain Shangri-La. Slow-moving, with no defensive instincts, they were hunted to extinction in just a few decades after the human invasion. When they were gone the large raptors lost their primary food source and went extinct as well. Of the flightless birds, only a few species of the Kiwi, the threatened small forest dwelling bird, survives today.

A New Zealand Fan-tail, one of dozens of endemic bird species found in Kiwi land

Geology and paleontology are disciplines for creative and imaginative people. They recreate for us past worlds full of strange and wondrous creatures that are long gone from today's world. There are enough samples of DNA from the extinct Moas that there is a slight hope of bringing them back as living species, but that's probably a long time in the future, if ever. We must live instead with their echoes and the cultural memories and stories of the descendants of the people who once lived among them.

Note: cross-posted on my bird blog at http://geotripperbirds.blogspot.com/

An "Island" of Endemic Species: Not Hawaii, not the Galapagos, but Ash Meadows in Nevada

Desert surrounds Ash Meadows, an unlikely oasis in western Nevada

The formations are described as two coiled rattlesnakes, although to the geologist, this is a trick of erosion. The barren limestone layers overlook one of the most unlikely ecosystems in the United States. It is the largest "island" of endemic species in the lower 48 states.

Crystal Springs at Ash Meadows. More than 15 feet deep, the springs put out 2,600 gallons of warm water each minute.

Endemic species are those that occur nowhere else on the planet. The boundaries of endemism are usually the shorelines of islands, because new species arise from isolation. Hawai'i is the absolute leader in endemic species in the United States, being one of the most remote islands on the planet. There are literally thousands of endemic plants and animals on the islands that are found nowhere else in the world. The Galapagos Islands are a famous example of numerous endemic species. There are lots of endemic species within the boundaries of the lower 48 states, but there are relatively few found in any specific area. There are simply too many pathways for species to spread out over a wide region.

"Meadow" is sometimes a strong term for the scrubby vegetation found in parts of the refuge. The alkalai soils are unique.

But there are "islands" in the lower 48. They are the opposite of Hawaii or Galapagos in the sense that these are islands of water in an ocean of dry barren desert. One such island is the oasis of Ash Meadows in western Nevada. Within the 37 square miles of the National Wildlife Refuge are (or were) nearly three dozen endemic species of plants and animals, species found nowhere else on the planet. They exist in this one isolated location because of the geology, which has funneled the groundwater of a vast region into a series of three or four dozen springs that emit tens of thousands of gallons per minute. Water in the desert is life. Lots of water in one spot of the desert is almost miraculous, and that is the situation at Ash Meadows.

The creek that flows from Crystal Spring. An ADA accessible boardwalk provides access

The unique lifeforms found here include four living species of fish (along with one extinct species), eleven species of snails, three aquatic bugs, two species of bee, one extinct mammal (the Ash Meadows Montane Vole), and nine plant species.

Longstreet Spring at Ash Meadows

The desert that surrounds Ash Meadows is every bit as much a barrier to species travel as the open seas that surround Hawaii or the Galapagos. The meadows are only a few miles from Death Valley, the hottest place on the planet. So how did these water species come to be here in these springs and pools? Much of the explanation lies with the Pleistocene Ice Ages. A dozen or more times in the last 1.8 million years, the climate cooled and glaciers developed in the Sierra Nevada mountains off to the west. Meltwater from the glaciers filled the intermontane valleys of the Great Basin, forming a series of huge lakes and connecting rivers. These precious tendrils of water allowed fish and other aquatic species to invade the former deserts, but as each ice age stage ended, the dry conditions returned, and a few survivor species found safe harbor in isolated springs and pools like those found at Ash Meadows.

Devil's Hole, home of the extremely endangered Devil's Hole Pupfish. The pool in the cavern opening is their only home.

The refuge at Ash Meadows includes a single pool of water called Devil's Hole that contains the rarest fish species on the planet, the Devil's Hole Pupfish. The pool is an outlier of Death Valley National Park. Two other species of pupfish are found at Ash Meadows, the Ash Meadows Amargosa and the Warm Springs Pupfish. The Ash Meadows Speckled Dace is also found here. The Ash Meadows Killifish was driven to extinction in the 1950s as a result of spring alteration and agricultural development.

King's Spring can also be visited by an ADA accessible boardwalk.

It is remarkable that Ash Meadows ever came to be a protected ecosystem because water in the desert attracts another species, one capable of altering the landscape and erasing from existence the other species that have survived in isolation for tens of thousands of years. The water at Ash Meadows caught the attention of desert travelers more than a century ago, and the water was used to irrigate alfalfa fields and other crops. Many of the springs were put into piping systems and numerous invasive species arrived to compete with the native ones. It's hard to believe, but as recently as the 1980s, a proposal to build casinos, strip malls, and 30,000 houses almost became reality.

If you have visited Ash Meadows in the past, you will find some major changes. A marvelous new visitor center opened only a few months ago. There was plenty of excellent information about the geology and biology of the refuge, but I was especially impressed with the paleontology exhibits. We spent an entire day visiting and could have spent more.

Western Kingbird at Point of Rocks in Ash Meadows

Death Valley National Park is one of the greatest national parks in our country, and if you visit, you will find more than enough to keep you busy for many days. But if you find you have a day to spare, drive on over to Ash Meadows. It's only forty or so miles away from Furnace Creek.

To wrap up, have a look at an Ash Meadows Amargosa Pupfish defending its territory at Longstreet Spring. These are fascinating creatures, and true survivors.

How Did Fish Get into the Desert of the Basin and Range Province?

Source: "Pleistocene Lakes and Rivers of Mojave" by Philip Stoffer (14 January 2004). Changing Climates and Ancient Lakes (.html). Desert Landforms and Surface Processes in the Mojave National Preserve and Vicinity. USGS, US Department of the Interior. Retrieved on 2009-09-12. - http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1007/images/glaciallakes.gif.

Following a pair of posts that mention fish in the desert (here and here), I received a comment asking where the connections were that allowed fish to make the journey from the Colorado River system into areas as isolated at the Owens Valley and Death Valley. Courtesy of Philip Stoffer of the U.S. Geological Survey, here is the map. The drainage through Danby, Cadiz, and Bristol Lakes is the probably route of numerous fish species during the ice ages. From there, they were able to move through Soda and Silver Lakes into the Death Valley-Owens River system.

It is an unexpectedly diverse group of fish. According to this report, there were 56 species and 75 subspecies of fish living in the Basin and Range/Mojave Desert provinces. Ten of these historically known species/subspecies are extinct. Another 75 are listed, are candidates for federal listing, or are species of concern. 9 out of 10 of the subspecies are endemic, meaning they are found nowhere else in the world. The fish include the highly endangered Devils Hole Pupfish, the popular Lahontan cutthroat trout, as well as a variety of dace, chubs and suckers.

The story of why they are endangered is easy to summarize. They need water to survive, and so do humans. It is the choices that humans make that will determine the future of this fascinating group of fish. The Owens pupfish (Cyprinodon radiosus) would be extinct today but for the intervention of a Fish and Wildlife officer who carried the worlds entire population (800 individuals) out of a drying pond in two buckets, and established the fish in six other localities (four of these remain). The Devils Hole Pupfish in Death Valley National Park exist today because of a Supreme Court decision halting the drilling of groundwater near the only pool in which they exist.

A Death Valley Pupfish, found in Salt Creek on the floor of Death Valley.