Death Valley Is A Place About Life
- Lorraine Boissoneault
- 49 minutes ago
- 13 min read
At Devils Hole in Death Valley National Park, extreme heat, chronic illness, and conservation crises collide.
Death Valley, California, has the hottest recorded air temperature of any place on Earth; it reached 134 F (57 C) at Furnace Creek in 1913.
In known history, it has twice gone an entire year without any rain; the average high temperature is above 100 F for five months of the year. Today a National Park, red signs at trailheads admonish visitors that “Heat Kills!” Others warn of “Extreme Heat Danger.”
But some 170 years ago, when the earliest gold rush settlers were traveling overland from the east, the desert had yet to earn its ominous name or reputation. It was, in fact, home to the Timbisha Shoshones, a tribe that had lived on and understood the landscape for at least one thousand years, who called the land tüpippüh. They hunted wildlife, like bighorn sheep and mule deer, and relied on honey mesquite plants for their pods and pinyon pines for their seeds. Family groups moved around the landscape, leaving the hot valley floor in the summer for seasonal camps in the cool mountains. As Timbisha elder Pauline Esteves would write more than a century into the colonization and displacement process, “The term ‘Death Valley’ is unfortunate… This is a place about life.”
Even though Euroamerican settlers certainly came across these groups of Timbisha Shoshone, that didn’t prevent them from characterizing the landscape as empty. The government denied Indigenous people’s connection to the land and allowed prospectors and speculators to make use of water and other resources without regard to the Indigenous people. In 1933, President Hoover established Death Valley National Monument without recognizing tribal rights to the land.
In 1849, around the start of the California Gold Rush, fur trader William Lewis Manly was among those settlers in a wagon train that became low on food while attempting to cross the desert in winter. He and another young man were sent ahead to scout for a settlement and food while the other members of the party waited at a spring. As they trekked through canyons and up mountains, they came across the body of a traveler from a different wagon train.
“Our mouths became so dry we had to put a bullet or small smooth stone in and chew it and turn it around with the tongue to induce a flow of saliva. If we saw a spear of green grass on the north side of a rock, it was quickly pulled and eaten to obtain the little moisture it contained,” Manly wrote in his autobiography.
Though Manly and his partner had provisions, including meat, their mouths were too dry to swallow the food. Their one saving grace after multiple days without water was walking along a mountain ridge at night and discovering a frozen puddle of water; by sunrise, it would’ve melted into the dry earth. At many moments, the only thing keeping the two men moving forward was the thought of the party they’d left behind, which included women and children. “No one who has ever felt the extreme of thirst can imagine the distress, the despair which it brings,” Manly says. “I can find no words, no way to express it so others can understand.”
Despite their extreme suffering, Manly and his partner found shelter, food, and water after days of walking. They ultimately rescued the members of their wagon train who were left behind. Their party gave Death Valley its name, but their survival is what allowed them to do so.
The heat may exert an equal force on all bodies, but not all bodies respond with the same physiological response. The very old and the very young are at higher risk of heat-related illnesses, as are those with any form of dementia. Certain medications affect thermoregulation, sweating, and electrolyte balance, predisposing people to heat exhaustion. Then there are diseases that directly impact how the body generates and interacts with heat — some of them so subtle that it may be years after their onset that the effects are detected.
My hyperthyroid symptoms improved slightly after a few weeks of taking a beta blocker to lower my heart rate and the foul anti-thyroid medication, propylthiouracil. I was still walking around with my shirt half off, still shaking. In advance of my ultrasound appointment with the endocrinologist, I feared she might discover a mass of nodules growing across my thyroid or some cancerous tumor. The day of the appointment, I prepared myself for that outcome.
This time, the ultrasound wand pressing against my throat was almost painful. My thyroid had felt sore for weeks, occasionally sending discomfort radiating up my neck. The doctor didn’t show me the screen like the first endocrinologist all those years ago, nor did she offer any commentary during the exam. Instead, she waited till she finished shining sound waves on my thyroid gland and passed me a tissue to wipe gel off my neck.
“There are no tissues or holes,” she said at last. “It is a solid thyroid that is highly vascularized. You have Graves’ disease.” What she didn’t say (but I discovered later in my own research) is that this classic appearance of Graves’ is sometimes called a ‘thyroid inferno.’ How had I gone from black holes to an out-of-control fire in the span of a decade?
Everything I read suggested it’s rare to switch from Hashimoto’s to Graves’, but nothing I found explains why it happens. I felt a bit like the NASA scientist whose name has appeared in recent articles, grappling with the extreme heat of 2023 and 2024. In an article for Nature, climatologist Gavin Schmidt writes, “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.” In an interview with journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, he’s even more blunt.
“People started using adjectives that scientists don’t generally tend to use [for the 2023 heat],” Schmidt said. “Our eyebrows at this point were rolling over the top of our heads.”
In other words, something is wrong with the models, hindering their ability to forecast what comes next.
The scientist’s shock and confusion mirrored my own when I faced an unexpected change in my thyroid disease. No doctor ever warned me that this might happen. I hadn’t known it was a possibility, even though it always was. We all want warnings, predictions, ways to penetrate the future, because being prepared offers a sense of control. But even if some endocrinologist early in my time with thyroid disease had said, “Someday you might switch to hyperthyroidism and Graves’ disease,” that knowledge wouldn’t have saved me from the discomfort of hyperthyroid symptoms.
The unexpected rapidity of climate change doesn’t offer any comfort, but the knowledge that even the best researchers can be stumped is a useful reminder: we’re nowhere near an endpoint in understanding the weather or the human body.
When Manly and his party passed through the Mojave Desert, toward the terrain that would be renamed “Death Valley” thanks to their experiences, several members of another wagon group that met with Manly’s found a narrow strip of water surrounded by rocky cave walls. German immigrant Louis Nusbaumer wrote in his journal, “The temperature of the water is about 24-26 C and the saline cavity itself presents a magical appearance.” Did he or any others notice the little blue fish flitting around the pool? They make no mention of aquatic life. In any case, they can’t possibly have imagined the strange future of this magical spring: that it would become a bathing site for miners, then have its water levels lowered by people pumping wells for the irrigation of a ranch, and then ignite a Supreme Court case over the water rights of fish versus farmers. Nusbaumer and his friend didn’t even have a name for the little pool. But today, we call it Devils Hole.
Me and my partner crossed into the desert in an air-conditioned SUV rather than a wagon, our backseat loaded with a gallon jug of water, plus water bottles, plus electrolyte tablets and powders. We carried jerky and salted pistachios and chips and cookies in hopes of staving off the sodium imbalances that can happen with excessive sweating. I’d been taking anti-thyroid medication for five weeks at that point and no longer experienced extreme heat intolerance, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Even knowing the risk of visiting the desert after months of hyperthyroidism, I was desperate to see these fish. I wanted to understand how anything could survive in an environment that seemed inimical to life.
We followed a dusty road through Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge till we came to a rolling hill surrounded by barbed wire fences and security cameras. Home of the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis), a critically endangered fish living in the smallest territory of any vertebrate. The only people who swim in this pool now are the specially trained divers wearing gear used only at this site. They enter the 92-degree F water twice a year to count fish.
A crowd just shy of two dozen people gathered near the fenced entrance for the late-September event, some pulling on wetsuits while others erected shade canopies. Biologists from the National Park Service, the Nevada Department of Wildlife, the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — plus some volunteer divers and a couple of journalists. Kevin Wilson, a supervisor biologist for the National Park Service and lead organizer, started the day with the temperature. “We’re projecting over 100 degrees today,” he said as a bighorn sheep meandered down the hill alongside the fence. “Typically, we’re in the nice 80s or so, maybe low 90s, so we really have to pay attention to staying hydrated. My motto is clear, copious, and often, and that’s when we should be peeing.”
“If you are feeling remotely ill, I just want to point out quickly what heat stress feels like,” added Amy Fowler, safety manager for Death Valley National Park.
She’d brought multiple hats, coolers full of ice water, and misting fans. “If you are starting to get remotely like a headache, you’re probably starting to have heat stress. If you are starting to feel a little nauseous, that’s another sign that your body is trying to get rid of heat, so it doesn’t want to hold on to food in your stomach,” Fowler said. “Be mindful of what your body is doing and listen to it and don’t try to power through.”
That the pupfish even made it to Devils Hole is a fluke of geology. Around 60,000 years ago, a rock ceiling collapsed into a crevice that opens into the Amargosa Valley aquifer. Not only did those chunks of stone create an opening to the sky that allowed a new ecosystem to form, but they also got stuck at various depths in the water. At the water’s shallowest, rocks created a ledge which receives sunlight in the spring and summer, thus creating a food chain that begins with photosynthesis. In the winter, the fish have to rely on whatever comes from outside: bugs, leaves, dead birds, owl pellets. It’s this tiny shallow shelf that gives the pupfish virtually all of the requirements for continuing their population. It’s where they forage, it’s where they spawn. Even though the temperature on the shelf fluctuates dramatically, the warmth that builds up on hot days barely spreads. This strange shelf allows the fish to live in an environment that hovers around 92 F year-round, with about 2 milligrams of dissolved oxygen per liter.
As fish biologist Mike Schwemm explained while divers glided through the cave, “This is not a good environment for fish. They barely survive. The temperature is right up knocking at the door of what’s too hot, oxygen is right at that limit, they’re barely hanging on. And that’s what makes it really interesting and such a novelty to preserve, in that it is something quite astonishing and you would think that under these conditions over a long period of time that you would have an extinction event naturally.”
Yet somehow, Cyprinodon diabolis have lived in this tiny pool of water for a long time — though the timing and circumstances of their arrival is still debated. They may have been there for hundreds of years, or tens of thousands of years. At some point, they were isolated from other species of pupfish in the region, whether because a shallow lake dried up or because they were transported by something else, and they had to adapt. Imagine being suddenly transported to a world similar to the one you’ve always known, but with subtle differences. Harder to breathe, harder to feed. Maybe it’s not so bad in the first years, and each new generation adapts just a little more than the last one. It’s not comfortable, but it’s survivable. And then the water level suddenly drops, and the feeding grounds are gone. The things that made this hole in the rocks livable are almost entirely removed.
This is what happened shortly after the pupfish found their way onto the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1967. Cattle ranchers pumped water from the same aquifer that feeds Devils Hole, using it to irrigate their property. They pumped to such an extent that the water level in Devils Hole dropped multiple feet, drying out a significant portion of the shallow shelf. While litigation stretched on for years, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the fish in 1976, since Devils Hole was a non-contiguous part of Death Valley National Monument and had prior rights to the water.
But the water level never recovered to its pre-pumping levels, and since 2000, the entire population has dropped below 40 individuals twice. The fish are so inbred that geneticists believe it’s the equivalent of five to six generations of brother-sister breeding. At a certain point, the fish biologists agreed to start feeding them supplemental food and adding cover packets to the water — essentially balls of sticks and twigs from the surrounding area.
“They would put those in so the larvae would have some places to hide from the adults, because they’re just awful parents. Their favorite snack are baby pupfish and pupfish eggs,” said Olin Feuerbacher, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who manages the only captive population of the fish. “The strategy may work when you have a few thousand in there, but when you’re down to thirty-five fish, you’re eating your own kids. C’mere, Billy.”
The work done by Feuerbacher and his colleagues has created something of a buffer for the wild population. They’ve filled a 100,000-gallon refuge tank with Devils Hole pupfish, meticulously learning how to raise them from eggs, then getting them to reproduce on their own. It hasn’t been an easy process. When Feuerbacher took me to see the refuge tank, it was nothing like visiting an aquarium at a zoo. It was industrial, with tools hanging on the wall and steel railings around the edge of the platform, with a grated walkway a few feet down hovering above the water. A scuzz of algae covered the water, which extends into darkness, out to the parking lot. Like their brethren in Devil’s Hole, the pupfish here were given only a meager sliver of sunlight. They’re also dosed with antibiotics, antifungals, and antiparasitics as eggs, which kills off a lot of the diseases they carry in the wild, including the fish version of tuberculosis. The water temperature is just a touch cooler, and the dissolved oxygen is a tiny bit higher, meaning they have it easier than the wild population.
But not by much. Their parents will still try to eat them. Predaceous diving beetles tear them apart as larval fish. They’re 25 percent more inbred than the wild ones, which has led to an increased incidence of lethal heart defects. They never develop pelvic fins (used by other pupfish species to make rapid turns) because the high temperatures suppress their thyroid hormones, preventing their development.
As Feuerbacher told me, “Unlike most pupfish species that can adapt to very extreme environments at least for short periods, these, you basically look at them wrong and they’re like, ‘Well, I didn’t like that. I think I’m gonna die now.’”
Which is why it took more than fifty years of trying just to establish this refuge population. And why divers have been going down 100 feet into Devils Hole multiple times a year for decades in order to count the whole pupfish population.
Despite the unusual heat the day of the fall count, the majority of Devils Hole was still in shade as we clambered down the uneven rocks. I watched the divers disappear underwater, then slowly come back to the surface, presaged by a wave of bubbles and the blue glow of their flashlights. At the surface, biologists leaned over the metal railing to count those visible around the shelf. All around, people talked about recent papers, and their own experiences diving, and other strange organisms they’d studied, like the Texas blind salamander. There was jockeying and joking between members of different departments as people volunteered for the surface count. It felt like a social gathering, a strange sort of party where the only drinking game was regular reminders to sip water and the main entertainment was tiny blue fish.
Let's Dig Deep Together.
Subscribe to The Xylom’s free weekly newsletter to get more collaborative, in-depth coverage of the most pressing global health and environmental disparities.
At the end of the second dive, once everyone was out of the water, I climbed down to the walkway above the shallow shelf. I crouched down above the open aquifer, trying to catch a glimpse of a fish. Shadowed by the rocks, I couldn’t make out anything. I crawled from one corner of the platform to another, caught a glimpse of movement, and felt a burst of admiration for the surface counters who’d glimpsed so many. It was hot even down here, and I was starting to feel the slightest touch of headache.
I thought about what Feuerbacher told me when we visited the refuge, how he feels humans have a responsibility for protecting these fish because we’re the ones who screwed up their environment. But in addition to that, there’s so much we still don’t know about them. We don’t understand what triggers spawning, or how they’ve managed to avoid extinction, or how their microbiomes impact their ability to survive in this environment.
“If we lose the species, we lose the ability to learn from it,” Feuerbacher said. “It might just be a really cute fish, but there also might be some really important things that we can learn from it. And if it’s gone, we don’t get to find out.”
The Devils Hole pupfish are stressed and struggling, and they’re also the canary in the coalmine. They’re living at the highest elevation of any pupfish in the region, and whatever happens to them will eventually affect the other species.
The Earth is indisputably getting warmer. The Devils Hole pupfish live in a precarious environment. Only a few degrees warmer, and they won’t be able to survive — and then where will the refuge population go? Where does anyone go when conditions are too extreme for life?
The Xylom has a relationship with Bookshop.org. If you make a purchase through the Bookshop links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
