The Pupfish Wars of Death Valley IILake Manly rises again, and the fight over a one-inch fish returns. Part II of III.
This is part II of a story I first wrote 28 years ago. What follows is a complete revision, expanded and reshaped into a three-part series. If you prefer to read it all at once, the full story is available here. Cappaert v. United StatesOut at Ash Meadows in the 1960s, ranchers started pulling groundwater for alfalfa — big pumps, running steady. It’s the kind of extraction that looks like nothing if you’re standing next to the well. The water comes up clear and cold. What’s the harm. But that water came from the same buried system that feeds Devil’s Hole. And slowly, the level began to fall. An inch. Another inch.
Down in the cave, that shallow shelf started to dry. That was the spawning ground—the only one. The place where the fish laid their eggs, where the algae grew, where the whole fragile cycle held together. Take away the water, and the shelf disappears. Take away the shelf, and the fish disappear. It was that simple. By the late 1960s, scientists were sounding alarms. The fish weren’t declining in some abstract way. You could measure it—in exposed rock, in falling water, in the shrinking distance between life and nothing. The government stepped in. The National Park Service argued that Devil’s Hole was more than rock. Rather, it was a place where inches of water, a narrow band of sunlight, and the timing of the seasons determined whether the fish lived or died. The ranchers saw something else entirely: land, wells, water that had always been there. Water they believed was theirs. And now they were being told that somewhere out in the desert, in a crack in the ground that went down without end, a fish they’d never seen was more important than their fields. That’s where Robert Rudd came in—sunburned, practical, rooted in a landscape where water, when you found it, meant everything. In places like Pahrump and the Amargosa Valley, a county commissioner carried real weight, tied to roads, wells, access—the thin threads that made settlement possible. The pumps ran long hours, lifting ancient water into irrigation ditches. The desert went briefly green. That green meant cattle feed, income, a reason for families to stay in a place that would otherwise push them out. The margins were never wide. Equipment broke. Heat warped metal. Wells had to go deeper. Every season a negotiation with the land. This is a landscape shaped by a particular kind of frontier libertarianism—one that resists intrusion, regulation, and distant authority. Legal brothels operate here. The Chicken Ranch and others sit within the same cultural geography as the water wars. Ranchers, sex workers, developers, federal scientists, endangered fish—all overlapping in a single desert basin. The presence of the pupfish—and the federal power required to protect it—felt like an imposition from an entirely different world. The water level in Devils Hole began to drop. Just inches. But those inches were enough—enough to expose the shallow limestone shelf where the pupfish spawned, enough for biologists to say: this is the line. Cross it, and the species goes. From Rudd’s side of the valley, it looked like something else: a boundary drawn underground across land that people had worked for years. A line you couldn’t see, but suddenly couldn’t cross. Pumps that had always run now had limits. Water that had always come up now came with conditions. The case moved toward the Supreme Court, but out here it never stopped being local. It was about whether someone standing on their own land could be told that the water beneath it belonged, in part, to a fish they had never seen. Rudd didn’t argue this in the language of environmental ethics. He argued it in the language people around him understood. Conservationists had their slogan—Save the Pupfish—and he answered with one that cut just as clean: Kill the pupfish. In a place where water is the limiting factor in everything, restricting access to groundwater is a structural change. Fields go fallow. Herds shrink. Loans tighten. And so the rhetoric sharpened. In the 1970s, the conflict turned openly hostile. A newspaper editor in Pahrump publicly threatened to dump rotenone into Devils Hole — to kill the pupfish and make it, as he put it, a moot point. Rotenone works by shutting down a fish’s ability to use oxygen, suffocating it at the gills. The logic was simple: if the fish is the reason the water is restricted, remove the fish. Bumper stickers reading “KILL THE PUPFISH” appeared across the region. Some locals joked—only half-jokingly—that there were now two endangered species in Nevada: the pupfish and the American rancher. In 1973, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, formally recognizing extinction as a national concern and placing responsibility for preventing it at the federal level. The Devils Hole fight preceded that law, but unfolded in its shadow. The conflict now widened past being just local. It was structural—one way of measuring water in inches on a spawning shelf, another in acres, yield, and whether a place remains inhabited at all. For all the talk of killing the pupfish, there were also people who wanted to take them. There were attempts—documented and suspected—to remove pupfish from protected sites. Not for science. For possession. The black market for rare fish is real. A species like the Devils Hole Pupfish — isolated, famous, legally protected — would be a singular prize. The same fish that inspired calls for eradication were, to someone else, worth stealing. There were confrontations. Threats. Real anger—building slowly and then arriving all at once, directed at something so small it feels absurd. A fish. A one-inch fish. The whole thing went to the Supreme Court. The case was called Cappaert v. United States. The Court held that when the federal government reserved Devils Hole, it also reserved the water necessary to protect the habitat. The shelf, the algae, the water level, and the fish could not be separated. The Court recognized that the pool in Devils Hole is the sole habitat of the endangered pupfish, and that its continued existence depends on maintaining the water level in that pool. The margin was measured in inches. That was enough. They ruled that the United States could protect not just the land, but the water beneath it—the exact level needed to keep that shelf submerged, to keep the algae growing, to keep the fish alive. Out here, that decision hardened into something else—a disbelief that it had come to this, that a window in the earth, a ledge no bigger than a room, and a handful of fish could dictate what people could and couldn’t do with their own water. You can stand in Devil’s Hole today and understand the science of that decision. You can look down at the shelf and see how little separates survival from extinction. But if you stand instead in a field in the Amargosa Valley, watching water come up through a pipe into a ditch that keeps everything alive, you can also understand how someone like Robert Rudd arrived exactly where he did. You start to understand where the bumper stickers came from. Kill the pupfish. Not as a joke. As a man standing on one side of a line that had suddenly, and irrevocably, been redrawn. The AquiferWhat made the conflict feel absurd was also what made it real. A one-inch fish, a limestone shelf, a few inches of water—it didn’t seem like enough to justify everything that followed: court cases, threats, decades of argument. The fight was about water. In the Amargosa Valley, water is already overdrawn. Every well, every pump, every field runs on groundwater — and groundwater only works as long as it keeps coming up. For a long time it did. Long enough that people built their lives around it. That water moves slowly through rock. It is being pulled faster than it returns. Heat tightens it further. Longer droughts mean less reliable recharge. Uncertainty is increasingly the norm. The question shifts to how much water there is, and who gets it. In that context, the pupfish becomes a limit—a visible boundary placed on something people assumed had none. It marks a line underground that no one can see, but everyone is forced to feel. As that line tightens, the pressure moves. It lands on the fish. So the question keeps coming back, in bars and courtrooms and desert conversations that never quite end: Why not kill the pupfish?
Pister’s Buckets and the Desert’s PupfishThe decision didn’t end anything. It exposed the pattern. Once you start looking, pupfish are everywhere — scattered across the desert like fragments of something older, each one holding on in its own small improbable pocket. Left behind as the lakes shrank and the rivers went dry. Each population a leftover sentence from a much longer story. The Ash Meadows Amargosa Pupfish lives in warm spring outflows — water that rises clear and constant, then loses itself back into the desert. Its full name is Cyprinodon nevadensis mionectes. Nearby is a ghost: the Ash Meadows poolfish, Empetrichthys merriami, gone by the mid-20th century once the springs were altered and the water table dropped. The Owens Pupfish, Cyprinodon radiosus, survives because it was carried. In the Owens Valley, biologist Phil Pister once carried an entire species in two buckets. The Owens pupfish were on the brink, their habitat collapsed, their numbers reduced to almost nothing. Pister gathered the remaining fish and walked them to safety. Two buckets filled with sloshing water. A desert landscape that offered no forgiveness. He later described it as the loneliest walk of his life, because he understood what those buckets contained—an entire evolutionary lineage. For a brief, completely real moment, the continued existence of a species depended on whether a man could walk carefully enough not to spill water. That moment has a name now: Pister’s Buckets. What does it mean for one person to carry the fate of a species? And what obligation follows from that knowledge? The Shoshone Pupfish, Cyprinodon nevadensis shoshone, lives in a spring small enough to take in at a glance. It’s still there — but barely. Less a stable population than an ongoing negotiation with disappearance. Cyprinodon nevadensis calidae is gone. The Tecopa springs were channelized sometime in the mid-20th century, altered enough that the fish couldn’t hold on. By 1970 they were extinct — early enough in the era of official listings to be among the first vertebrates the United States formally acknowledged losing. The water is still there. The fish are not. There is also the Quitobaquito Pupfish, or Rio Sonoyta Pupfish, Cyprinodon eremus, living at Quitobaquito Springs on the Arizona–Sonora border. Cottonwoods, shade, water, dragonflies—a small oasis tucked into a landscape that should otherwise be empty. The fish have their version too: groundwater drawn down by nearby agriculture, long droughts, and then — abruptly — the border wall. I was there in 2021 with my son, standing in the shade of those cottonwoods, looking out across water that has been rising here for thousands of years. And just beyond it, the wall—steel rising out of the desert, less than two hundred feet from the pond, thirty feet high, built just yesterday. It is hard to describe what that feels like if you haven’t stood there. The spring is quiet. Insects move across the surface. Birds come and go. The fish hold in the shallows. And behind it, something much louder: the policies of the Trump administration, which pushed construction here under the excuse of “national security,” waiving dozens of environmental laws—more than forty in total, including the very reviews that would have studied what this might do to the water. No assessment. No pause. No requirement to measure impact. To build the wall, contractors pumped groundwater out of an already overdrawn basin—millions of gallons a month for concrete in a place where every inch of water matters. At the same time, the region was in deep drought. By 2020, the pond dropped to record lows, in places shrinking toward mud. For a fish that lives only here, there is no fallback—no second spring, no migration. If this water fails, the species goes with it. The wall itself cuts across what little continuity remains between these springs and the Rio Sonoyta drainage. Whatever connection existed is now fragmented by steel and patrol roads. What stands out is not just the damage, but the absence of concern. The priority was speed. Everything else was secondary. In New Mexico, the White Sands Pupfish, Cyprinodon tularosa, persists in isolated waters, some of them inside restricted military land. In Mexico, the pattern repeats. At Cuatro Ciénegas, the Cuatro Ciénegas Pupfish, Cyprinodon bifasciatus, lives among blue pools and gypsum dunes in a system shaped over millennia. Agriculture arrived. Water declined. What remains is still alive, but diminished. Other species did not hold. The Potosí Pupfish, Cyprinodon alvarezi, the La Palma Pupfish, Cyprinodon longidorsalis, and the Charco Palma Pupfish, Cyprinodon veronicae, are now extinct in the wild—surviving only in captivity, if at all. And then there is the Pahrump Poolfish, Empetrichthys latos, the last of its kind. It once lived in the springs of the Pahrump Valley, until groundwater pumping dried those springs completely. The species went extinct in the wild in the 1950s, saved only because a few individuals had been moved into refuge pools. It is the last of its genus. And even its second life has not been simple. At Corn Creek, populations have crashed when nonnative species were introduced—mosquitofish, aquarium fish, things people released without thinking. It is almost hard to accept that after everything—after ancient water systems and Supreme Court cases and careful recovery efforts—the fate of a species can still be undone by something that small. I think about Pahrump Poolfish all the time, because I often visit Corn Creek, north of North Las Vegas. There’s a dark building there, set back among the trees, and it’s something like a giant aquarium. Tanks of water filled with algae, shaded by the building and its eaves. I stand there and stare into the glass, my eyes pressed up against it, trying to find them. The Pahrump Poolfish. I never see them. I have not seen them after visiting the refugium for 25 years. Maybe they are there, moving somewhere in the shadows. Or maybe that’s part of it. Once a species is reduced to a few managed tanks, it begins to disappear in a different way. Not gone. But removed. Something you have to be told is still alive.
The Yamaha RhinoIt was April 2016, right between the takeover of the Malheur Refuge in Oregon and the election of Donald Trump. A moment when the popularity of frontier justice was accelerating. They started out driving in the long emptiness of the Amargosa Valley, skirting the edges of Ash Meadows. Three men on ATVs—Trenton Sargent, Edgar Reyes, Steven Schwinkendorf—cutting across desert. The headlights made narrow corridors in the dark — hard-edged, temporary, nothing beyond them but black space. They had been drinking, enough that it would later show in the footage, in the way they moved and the decisions that followed. Malibu rum—sweet, artificial, out of place. At some point the chemical taste took over. The shotgun came out. It was time to shoot some shit up. The desert took the noise and gave nothing back. They zigzagged through Ash Meadows, past water that had been isolated for thousands of years, past fragile systems reduced, in that moment, to background. They blasted holes in signs and hollered at the night. By the time they reached Devils Hole, the shotgun smoking, the decision was already made. There was a fence, a gate, posted warnings. They drove into it anyway, ramming the enclosure with the ATV until the metal bent. When it didn’t open, Sargent took out his Mossberg 500 and fired at the padlock. The shot rang out. The lock held. So they climbed over. Once inside, they moved through the enclosure as if it were abandoned—tearing into equipment, destroying a sensor center, smashing a surveillance camera that was still recording. They were American Ninja. Dolph Lundgren in their own minds. The footage would later show them entering, one of them struggling at the fence, then the others following. Then, minutes later, the camera inside the hole itself picked up movement. Devil’s Hole drops straight down into darkness, but near the surface there is a shallow limestone shelf, a narrow ledge that holds everything. That is where the pupfish spawn—late April, eggs laid directly on that rock. Sargent, totally wasted, stepped down into the pool and onto the shelf, his weight moving across it. He crushed eggs and larvae underfoot, the next generation reduced by inches and pressure in the dark. They drank and partied, and at some point someone vomited. The smell would still be there in the morning. When scientists arrived, they found beer cans scattered around, clothing left behind, equipment broken, the water disturbed. The place smelled of vomit. A pair of underwear floated in the pool. Weeks earlier, the population had been counted at roughly a hundred and fifteen individuals—all of them confined to that one shelf, that one opening in the rock. The cameras had captured everything: the entry, the movement, the moment a foot entered the water, a body crossing the algae shelf—the only breeding ground in the world—during peak spawning season. There was no statement attached to it, no explanation that matched the scale of what happened. Just a Malibu Rum night—boys gone wild. They knew what it was. Everyone out there does. And in the pool, at the surface, there was a single bright blue pupfish. Dead. No one could say whether it had been crushed, stressed, or knocked from the shelf at the worst possible moment. It was dead. That was enough. There aren’t enough of them for any loss to be incidental. That’s just the math of small populations. What’s different this time is that someone caught it on video — the trespass, the disturbance, whatever it was. It happened on record, which is rarer than it should be. The Park Service assembled what was known as the Scorpion Task Force—federal investigators, local law enforcement, wildlife officials. They collected everything: beer cans for DNA, spent shotgun shells, live rounds, even the underwear left behind at the scene. The key turned out to be the vehicle. A customized Yamaha Rhino—distinctive, modified, impossible to miss. Investigators found it listed for sale on Craigslist the very next day. That single detail unraveled the entire case. Within days, they had names. Within weeks, confessions. Sargent admitted he had entered the water. He said he had been drinking, said he was showing off, said he wanted to see how deep it was. He also admitted something else. He knew what Devils Hole was. He knew about the pupfish. The next morning, still hungover, he went back. He had left behind his wallet and his phone. He broke in again to retrieve them. The beer cans were still there. His underwear still floating in the water. The damage already done. The case moved quickly after that. Sargent pleaded guilty. Twelve months and one day in federal prison, sentenced in October 2018. Nine months of that for harming an endangered species. Nearly $14,000 in restitution. A $1,000 fine. And a lifetime ban from all federal public lands. A lifetime ban. This is what it leads to. Devils Hole is now a cage. It is surrounded by high fencing topped with barbed wire. Cameras watch every angle. Motion sensors track movement. The public can no longer approach the water. Visitors stand more than 20 feet above it, looking down from a distance. People ask why. Why does this place look like a prison? Because without it, the species disappears. Biologists monitor the fish constantly. They clean the site. They supplement food when necessary. Nearby, a climate-controlled facility holds a backup population—an artificial refuge in case the wild population collapses entirely. The entire system begins to resemble something else. An aquarium. Part III on Thursday. Notes from the Road is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Notes from the Road that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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