Organ Pipe Cactus NM, Arizona - May 6, 2007

It had seemed like a good idea in the beginning. The water level in Quitobaquito pond (home to an endangered species of pupfish) had been slowly dropping for months, and given the low levels the pond had reached last summer, it was predicted that this summer would be even worse. Granted, most of the drop could be attributed to the 11-year drought we're in the middle of, but one of the springs feeding the pond had dropped relative to all the others, and given the complicated collection system of pipes and filters, and the mass of roots believed to be clogging all of this, it had seemed like a reasonable thing to do, to replace the whole system. After all, back in the 80's, when they had done the same thing before, the water output had doubled. Unfortunately, from the very start the project was plagued with problems, which can be summed up as follows:

Problem 1: Ethics. Quitobaquito is in a wilderness area, which means that motor vehicle and equipment use around it is restricted by law to the minimum necessary to complete the job. We knew that back in the '80's, 'minimum equipment necessary' was interpreted to mean 'tractors and dump trucks,' but we were hoping to complete the work this time without resorting to such measures, to reduce the impact on a sensitive environment. This might have been doable, if not for...

Problem 2: Ignorance. When the work had been done last, back in the 80's, it hadn't been fully documented (or else we'd lost the documents somehow), which meant that we weren't sure, going in, exactly what the scale of the project was going to be. Thus, when we thought that we were going to be digging 10 yards of material out of a 31-inch ditch, the decision to use shovels and hand tools and wheelbarrows to remove all the soil made perfect sense. When we found out that we were instead digging 80 yards of material out of a 9-foot-maximum pit, and that the whole first day of working had barely made a dent in it, it was clear that more effort was going to be necessary. It might have still been possible to do so in a manner minimizing the impact to the area around the pond, but we were also hindered by...

Problem 3: Time. We had only 9 full days to complete all the work at the spring. The first two days had been spent without using any mechanization, which meant that we had only 7 days left to finish. For this reason, it was decided to broaden, slightly, our definition of 'minimum equipment necessary,' to include a trail cart and Kubota (light tractor), and then, one day later, a Caterpillar heavy tractor ('just for today') and a dump truck ('just for one trip'), all of which were soon tearing a new road into the ground from the parking lot to the spring. There were a number of possible dangers to bringing in all this heavy equipment, from dumping gravel on and contaminating the nearby archeaological sites to poisoning the pond and killing all the fish, and when one adds those to all the additional complications brought on by an 8-fold increase in the scale of the project, it seems clear that we should have just called the whole thing off, until we'd had time to plan adequately. This was made impossible, however, by...

Problem 4: Head-cut-off chicken-running. The division chief, a visiting Tucson-based hydrologist, and a volunteer with construction experience all held different ideas about how to proceed. This led to heated arguments on questions like 'should we dig down to bedrock or stop where we are now?,' 'what's the best way of moving the gravel?' and 'what time should we have our Gatorade break?'

And, after all of this, the total increase in water flow from the spring to the pond: 0.00 gallons per minute.

I don't want to give the impression, here, that the project was an unmitigated disaster. We did finish replacing the pipe on schedule, which might eventually be helpful (though we couldn't finish all of the other proposed improvements to the spring), we didn't drive the pupfish to extinction (though we did kill a lot of plants, and scar the landscape pretty badly), the Kubota didn't spring a toxic hydraulic fluid leak into the spring water (its hydraulic fluid is soy-based, biodegradable, and non-toxic), and we didn't leave any archeaological sites permanently contaminated with foreign gravel (we picked it all out). And, most importantly, while the rate of flow to the pond didn't go up, at least it didn't go down (actually, it did. But not by much). All in all, it could have been much worse. And, you never know, in the long term the work could still help.

Anyway, I'm going back to Oregon tomorrow, and then I'll be moving on to a new job, in Michigan. I've had a fun last couple of weeks, doing bird surveys and hiking a lot in the desert for work. I went on a camping trip with Ben, Ernie, Ami, and Charles last weekend, and we went on an awesome hike through the mountains at the U.S.-Mexican border. We also did a snake survey at night, which was very interesting ("Here, Nathan, hold this sidewinder for me"). Last night, for Cinco de Mayo, I got some fried chicken in Mexico. It was good. I hope you're all doing well.

Ciao!
Nathan