Next leg of the journey I finally catch up to Dutcher again late one night after she’s returned from a trek, recreational this time, to the hot springs. The season is over. They each hiked 500 kilometers in eight weeks. Laterally, anyway — vertical distance doesn’t count. The
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52 D e s e r t C o m pa n i o n o c to b e r 2 0 1 1
"It's shocking to me sometimes that I got paid to walk around a forest and look for something amazing," says Kirsten Dutcher.
“Knight Viper” truck spotted 57 torts in all. It’s not for them to say if that’s good or not; it will take months to sift the data and years to interpret it. “(We’re looking for) gradual change, which is about what a tortoise does — change gradually,” says U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Allison. Some indicators do suggest, though, that the population — estimated around 100,000 in the monitored area — remains in decline. Over in the Rosewood Apartments, nearly two dozen young scientists are clearing out of the three apartments they’d been crammed into for months and begin to scatter to new projects across the country. Dutcher doesn’t live in the Rosewood Apartments, not anymore. And she’s not leaving this time. She’s decided to stay in Vegas, an ideal habitat for a herpetologist, and just took out a mortgage on a rancher near Paradise Park. Granted, she still has a half-dozen biologists bivouacking in her living room and plans to spend time each year on projects elsewhere, but a permanent address is a big step for someone who has worked more than 30 jobs on three continents over the last decade. “I got tired of living out of my truck,” she explains. “Last summer in California I caught myself dreaming about a couch. This is the first sofa I’ve had since college.” Setting roots isn’t easy in this line of work,
K I r s t e n D u Tch e r : J o s e ph L a n g d o n
broken glass. Sparks points out what was, until recently, “Osama’s fridge.” “They put Bin Laden’s face on it and shot it up pretty good,” he says. The low hills, though, are clean, and the tortoise population seems to be adapting well to the rugged terrain — a promising sign for tortoises threatened by development. Sparks, 37, has been observing them for three years, a rare long-term gig for a field guy. A West Virginian, he did a lot of work with bats back east before moving to Vegas. “I really like bat work,” he says. “Of course, you got to work nights. You don’t really have a normal social life when you’re working with bats.” He hopes to stay on in the Mojave when his project ends this year. I track a tortoise with an antenna that looks like a homemade lightning rod. Louder blips mean we’re on target. “Think of yourself as a radarguided missile,” Sparks says. “That’s all it is.” I get a lock on #132, a young male Sparks calls “Sleepy.” After this long, Sparks identifies them by their habits — like “Dr. Evil,” who seems to delight in forcing his trackers along steep precipices, or “Mama,” whom he has caught more than once in flagrante delicto. On this afternoon Sleepy betrays his moniker and emerges from his burrow to investigate us. He looks like a gentle creature, wizened, as if each specimen somehow bears the collective weight of the species’ paleogenic age. But Sleepy is a young buck, somewhere in his teens. With a full life, he could see the year 2075. The question is whether his habitat, this edge of living desert abutting the developed world, will last that long. Tortoise #132 turns around and, with striking ferocity, flings up clouds of dust and stone as he claws his way back underground.