12-9 Ash Meadows Wilflife Refuge

About 50 miles east of Death Valley, in some of the driest desert in the country, there is an amazing place.  In the 70s, the area was privately owned and farmed, using the water from the many springs to grow crops.  In the 80s, it was purchased by a land developer to build into a town with houses, apartments, condos, and stores.  After a hue and cry from environmentalists who wanted this unique place preserved, the development was stopped and the land purchased by the Nature Conservancy, which donated it to the federal government.  

There are two roads into the sanctuary.  The southern entrance is 7 miles long and entirely dirt.  The western entrance is paved a couple of miles, and then dirt for the next four miles.  Internal roads are entirely dirt and very narrow, so it is not recommended to take something like my motorhome on several of the internal roads.  However, even though I hate dirt roads, it is completely worth the drive.  The paved part of the western entrance looks like this.

Only two inches of rain does not produce what most of us think of as a "meadows."

Just past the entrance sign, the road becomes entirely dirt.  At least, there is not much traffic, although two really irritating off-road vehicles went roaring past, kicking up a huge dust cloud!  

Since I was last here, they have finished the new visitor center. The previous one was in a double-wide trailer, so this is very nice. 

This map shows the location of the several springs in the area of the refuge. 

This shows how the springs ended up in this desert, a long way from the mountains where they originated. 

Not only is the springs fossil water, but so was the terrific water at my campground, about 15 miles away, behind a gas station in the middle of nowhere.  It tasted great, so I filled a couple of jugs. 

Detail of the water explanation.

Nice RV and bus parking. 

Behind the visitor center is the boardwalk to Crystal Springs. 

There are no leaves on the trees because it is December, but the hanging plants are mistletoe, and become green later in the winter. 

This looks more like a meadow, but it is an alkaline meadow.  It will be green in the spring. 

And here is Crystal Springs.  It produces about 10 million gallons of water per day, running off in a couple of creeks.  Living in the spring are endangered pupfish and some crayfish. Various ducks and waterfowl also stop at this area as they fly over.  

The white areas are bare sand.  The darker areas are algae that the pupfish eat.  I could see fish swimming around, but they are tiny and territorial, so they do not swim in schools.

Because they is seldom rain, footprints stay a long time.  There was a lot of action going on around the boardwalk.  Most of the prints looked the size of rabbits, but I did notice some bighorn sheep prints.

Most of these trees were screwbean mesquite.  They produce a screw-shaped bean that the Native Americans pounded into a flour and cooked.

More footprints.

The boardwalk follows the stream that flows out of the spring.

To provide better habitat for the pupfish, they manually cut the cat-tails back each year.

And I finally got a good photo of these two little fish.  The males turn bright blue in the late spring during the mating season, but they are pretty dull-looking now.

The visitor center in the distance. The boardwalk is 1.5 miles long, so it was a nice walk, especially since they place a lot of shaded benches along the way.  The weather was cook and breezy this day, so no real need to escape any desert heat!