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Travel Photography > Desert Southwest > Death Valley
Death Valley is often described as being an ancient place, frozen in its quiet and dry state throughout eternity. Recently though, it was really quite wet. Go back 10,000 years. A speck on the timeline of Earth life and Death Valley was fed by three Ice age rivers. The rivers filled the valley up to six hundred feet deep. This lake - Lake Manly - was connected to other lakes of the time. The Desert Southwest was the dumping grounds for melted ice, and all this water made vast thoroughfares for a bounty of fish.
As these desert lakes began to dry up at the end of the ice age, a lot of things simply died. But not the fish. The desert pupfish was prone to mutation, and speciated into the twenty known species and subspecies that exist today in the various small ponds, pools, springs and holes of the American and Mexican deserts.
This creek - such a meager thing, really just springs out of the ground for a few hundred yards. Imagining the extinction of these fellas is easy to do - furious soldiers at their last stand.
The ecosystem of Salt Creek - three inches of water for 200 yards, seems tiny. But one species of pupfish has it worse, and that fact caused quite a raucous. It's called the Devil's Hole pupfish, and the species exists only in one small hole in the Nevada desert. It's in a place called Ash Meadows - a series of spring-fed pools east of Death Valley.
Because of the Devil's Hole Pupfish's isolation, it has grown quite genetically distinct from other pupfishes.
It's unlikely that anybody beyond a handful of scientists would care much about this tiny fish, except for the fact that farmers were keen to use this same series of springs for their crops. In the desert, water is always at a premium. In the late 1960's, at the same time these farmers were eyeing the Ash Meadows land, the Devil's Hole Pupfish was given the endangered species designation. And with only 400 living fish all smaller than an inch long, they in fact are rather endangered.
To deny the land developers and farmers on behalf of a damned fish seemed absurd, and they began a movement. 'Kill the Pupfish' bumperstickers and all. The local newspaper went a step farther, suggesting an efficient poison to end the matter right there.
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