LA Weekly

Photos by Debra DiPaolo (left) and Sara Munro

It was, we all agreed, a beautiful fire. Five years ago, during the last week of May, a few friends and I hiked into Joshua Tree National Park just after sunset, intending to spend most of the night exploring its washes and climbing its soft granite boulders under a bright full moon. We convened at the Beatnik Café in downtown Joshua Tree, then a rundown serve-yourself coffee shop that offered magazine-strewn black tables and the rare twin luxuries of an Internet connection and espresso. From there, we drove to the Quail Springs Road backcountry trailhead, made camp at a flattish cluster of rocks three miles from the road and then set out to enjoy the night.

We were reckless, but not alarmingly so. Two of our six slipped after they trusted their hands to unstable rocks; I fell butt first on a cholla cactus. But the full-moon expedition — the first of many on different trails in other wilderness areas — would remain forever memorable, not simply for its thrills but for a scene we interpreted as exquisite: Just inside the park’s West Entrance, to the west of Quail Springs Road, a fire simmered on the rocky hillside, turning the moon blood-orange and filling the skies with spectacular light.

We didn’t lament that fire; we thought we knew enough about environmental cycles to assure ourselves that fire is a necessary event in the wildest places: In many northern and mountain woods, for instance, pines can’t germinate unless their cones explode, which only happens at the kinds of high temperatures that occur in a fire. Later we’d find out that lightning caused the blaze, which comforted us all the more — this wasn’t arson at work, but nature. But all our previous Outward Bound sojourns and minimum-impact backpacking seminars had taught us not a thing about the strange ecosystem of the desert, or about how succulents were not meant to burn.

In the morning, after watching the sun push through the smoky sky to a near-psychedelic dawn, we were greeted at the trailhead by a ranger, who had spotted our cars. The fire had jumped the road, and the park had been evacuated the night before. “Who let you in?” the ranger wanted to know. We looked at him quizzically: The park entrance had been open and unmanned the night before, as it always is after business hours. A better question might have been: Why wasn’t there anyone around to stop us?

Survivor: Joshua trees can live for hundreds of years, but take a century to replace. (Photo by Debra DiPaolo)

Last January, I returned to the scene of the Juniper Complex Fire, as the 1999 fire was named, in the company of Howard Gross, the California Desert Field Representative for the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). I was shocked at what I saw. A pine forest by now would have turned green and purple with lodgepole pine seedlings pushing through opportunistic fireweed; it might look more like a bucolic meadow than a fire-ravaged forest. But this was barren ground, with only charred stumps of black brush and cat’s claw left to punctuate the sandy desert floor.

Earlier in the day, Gross, a tall, slow-talking man not given to hyperbole, held a press conference for a tiny gathering of journalists to announce that Joshua Tree National Park had been listed for the second consecutive year as one of the 10 most endangered national parks in the U.S. Most of Gross’ evidence turned out to be at the burn site: acres and acres of nothing.

“We think we’ve lost 40 percent of the black brush in the last 30 years,” Gross said as he kicked a blackened stub, “and about a fifth of the Joshua trees,” all of it to fire — fires that should have ignited only a small area and died fast for lack of fuel.

What caused the fires to be so destructive? Los Angeles smog, for one thing. Arriving at that conclusion, however, requires a substantial detour through desert ecology, a minor chemistry lesson and a mind-bending understanding of the interconnectedness of everything in nature.

The problem begins with nitrogen, which along with sulfur dioxide and ground-level ozone, is one of the components of air pollution produced by internal-combustion engines in the form of nitric oxide (NO) and the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (NO₂). Having blown in through the mountains, NO and NO₂ bind to airborne dust particles and settle on the naturally nitrogen-poor desert floor.

Burned: Nearly a fifth of the park’s Joshua trees have been lost to fire. (Photo by Howard Gross/NPCA)

“It’s called ‘fertilizing the desert,’” says Gross. Plants that belong in the desert don’t need nitrogen, but non-native grasses, such as red brome and cheatgrass, thrive like backyard tomato plants on it, even in the absence of water. The grass grows tall and spreads in the winter, dries out in the spring, and efficiently conducts fire from plant to plant in the summer and fall.

Nearly three-fourths of desert fires are caused by lightning, and there was a time when they did little damage: Desert plants normally grow far enough from one another that fire doesn’t spread fast among them. Had the desert been in the same condition it was 50 years ago, the 1999 lightning strike should have left behind nothing more than a small scorched patch. Instead, its spark caught a field full of tinder-dry grass parched from a hot spring and a yearlong drought, and the flame tore through the desert with unprecedented speed, destroying nearly 14,000 acres in just under three days. The Juniper Complex fire was the worst fire in Joshua Tree’s recorded history, which dates back to 1945.

Nitrogen has been falling on the desert for more than a generation. The South Coast Air Quality Management District began issuing health warnings to residents of Southern California in the late 1960s, and in recent years, after a short period of improvement in the ’80s, the district’s air quality has taken a turn for the worse. Longtime visitors to Joshua Tree have been dismayed by the park’s deteriorating views, some of which have become so smog-choked that the surrounding San Gorgonios disappear in the summer. (“You call that a view?” one recent visitor complained up at Keys’ View, a 5,000-foot-high overlook from which, on a clear day, the Salton Sea should glitter in the distance.) This spring, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an interoffice communiqué declaring that the park’s air had fallen short of national standards 38 days last summer, ranking among the worst in the National Park System and rivaling the Great Smoky Mountains, which is cloaked in the discharge of coal-burning factories and industrial pollution from the cities of Atlanta and Detroit.

I expected Gross to be happy about the EPA’s announcement — especially since it was based on a new, stricter eight-hour standard of measuring air quality (instead of one-hour increments that don’t always catch the cumulative effects of smog), a change environmentalists had been lobbying for. Recently, Gross and park superintendent Curt Sauer celebrated a small victory when they got the South Coast Air Quality Management District to team up with them on a new monitoring station in the park. But the longer I talked to Gross, the more the EPA’s announcement began to look like the Bush administration’s customary environmental doublespeak: “Healthy Forests” for more logging, “Clear Skies” for fewer restrictions on coal-fired power plants. The EPA’s new alarm about National Park air pollution obscures the fact that surrounding industries and communities now have more time to fix their toxic problems.

“The eight-hour standard recognizes that long-term, low-level exposure to ozone is detrimental to people’s health,” Gross said, “and that’s positive — that’s very good that they did that. But when they announced the details of the eight-hour standard, they also extended the deadline for when these areas had to come into compliance. For the South Coast AQMD, the deadline went from 2010 to 2021. For portions of the park it went from 2007 to 2013. The extension of those deadlines is really, really unfortunate. It removes the sense of urgency that more meaningful measures need to be taken.”

For the park’s ecosystem, there may not be that much time left. Since 1970, 40 percent of the park’s piñon and juniper habitat has been destroyed by wildfires fueled by smog-fertilized grass, a disaster from which the slow-growing desert evergreens have so far been unable to recover. The park’s chief naturalist, Joe Zarki, adds that the park’s piñon and black brush seem poised to disappear by the middle of the century. Mojave creosote, a bush so aggressively specific in its adaptive skills that it contains three times the chromosomes found in West Texas creosote, takes a decade to re-establish itself in the desert; a small shrub like black brush takes five times that long. A Joshua tree, which can live for hundreds of years, takes a century to be replaced. It’s not hard to understand, then, that within a few decades, if Angelenos stick to their SUVs and the federal government neglects to enforce restrictions on industrial pollution, this unique landscape at the confluence of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, where species of bighorn sheep and desert tortoise thrive like nowhere else on Earth, with its ocotillo and cholla gardens perfectly manicured by evolution and trees that looked to the Mormons like supplicants, will be stripped of its native plants. Wildlife will die off. Only the rocks will remain.