Tortoise Blog

I crawl out of my sleeping bag and into the bright white moonlight.  It’s 3.30am, and I am in my knit hat and down jacket in the southern California desert.  I made my coffee last night on the tailgate of my truck with a Coleman stove and a Melitta drip cup so I could silently eat breakfast and slip out of the campground.  I drive 20 miles down a dirt road to the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park Wilderness Area, where our surveys for desert tortoises take us today.  My partner Danny and I have to start our 12 km transect between 7 and 7:30 am, and we know we have about a 15 km hike to the start point over unknown terrain.  We park our trucks in a wash at the end of a fading Jeep trail, and with the almost fun moon setting at our backs behind Pinto Mountain, we start hiking into the Mojave desert.  The moon lights up the creosote bushes with long shadows, but we have to use our headlamps to see the rubble, sand, and plants at our feet.  I wear an ankle brace on my left ankle for an old injury; I have brought a second pair of shoes to give my feet a break in the middle of the day; I carry 200 ounces of water.

Along with eight other two-biologist teams, Danny and I are out in the Mojave desert conducting Line Distance Surveys, a population sampling process designed to show any changes in the desert tortoise population over 25 years.  If the population shows improvement, the tortoise can be delisted as a Threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  Already 7 years into the study, the Fish and Wildlife Service conducts these surveys over the entire expanse of the Mojave desert every spring, tweaking the survey methods every year in an attempt to eliminate bias and retain statistical viability.  The rubber meets the road in this study like this: we are given UTM coordinates for the southwest corner of a 12 km square, and our job is to walk as straight as possible from one corner to another, searching each step for a tortoise, mostly within 4 meters of the line.  One surveyor walks 25 meters in front of the other, literally dragging a line behind him or her.  When we find tortoises, we weigh, measure, and tag them.  When we find mountains, we scramble through them.  When we find teddy bear cholla forests and 50 mph winds on sidehills, we use pliers and combs to pull spines out of our shoes, hands, and calves.  When we find shade, we eat lunch in it.  When we find chuckwallas, swarms of bees, brass shells from WWII, and fields of lupine, Chia, and desert dandelions, we admire them.

We did not find any tortoises that day we walked in to the wilderness area.  The toughest part of the long day was the last kilometer; I sat down three times in that last ‘k’, once within sight of the trucks.  I developed a blister on the ball of my left foot that plagued me for a week.  Without days off, just gobs of tape and strategic limping carried me through to the callus stage.  We have a limited amount of time to survey for tortoises before the desert starts to bake, the flowers on which they depend for their entire year’s worth of food and water dry and crumble, and all the tortoises retreat to their burrows for the summer and its 120 degree heat.

Needless to say, preserving one’s feet is the key to Line Distance.  As well as the ability to avoid meltdowns when, at the end of the day, after 26 miles, you return to your partner’s truck with a flat tire.  And a flat spare.

Knowledge of the closest milkshake helps in these circumstances.  I highly recommend the date malts at truck stop cafe at Chiriaco Summit.