The Spanish Mission is not far from the banks of the Santa Cruz River, where I came upon this beautiful spot. The trail near here has more hoof prints than footprints and is supported by the active local equestrians. A lovely broad-billed hummingbird swooped down to see what I was doing, but I almost never have time to take decent wildlife photos.
The church grounds are impressive, with a large orchard cultivated with help from a local university, a courtyard garden, a small museum with a long pair of moccasins, and the old church in an evocative state of decay. But, in a sign of our ecologically vulnerable times, the most rare part of the park is the lush riparian area pictured.
Flooding has always been an issue here. French traders established the first trading post near here in 1686, buying pelts from the Quapaw and shipping them down the Mississippi. They build a fort, which is abandoned due to flooding. Then they build another nearby and again move due to flood. After the French and Indian War, the Spanish take over the fur trade and reestablish a fort on the original location. The French get it back and then sell the whole “Louisiana” territory to the US. The post is briefly an important territorial capital, but the Union shells the confederates here during the Civil War destroying much of the town. And what’s left over becomes a backwater as the Arkansas River shifts away in 1912 and the remnants slowly erode into the bayous.
The photo shows the Little Post Bayou in the foreground and the Arkansas River in the background. With climate change increasing flooding broadly, the River has now risen again, reconnecting with the Post. Most of the history is now underwater, including French, Spanish, British, Native American and Civil War battlegrounds. But some foundations remain, along with subtle signs of confederate trenches in the woods. The post is a wonderful place to view wildlife, with many geese, a few deer, a red headed woodpecker, alligators, and a snowy egret on a tiny island in a little lake. The ranger, who loves wildlife, repeatedly assured me that the alligators here were adorable loving creatures and perfectly safe for people. I kept my distance from the large one I spotted.
Like much of the west, wildfires have burned large areas in and near the preserve. I didn’t see any wildlife, so we’re obviously failing at the “preserve”. As we irreparably damage the environment with climate pollution, the snowpack diminishes and living things die. Many people enjoy seeing national parks that focus on geologic wonders, culture and historic sites. But it is the wildlife that draws me most. Even besides the massive carbon burning that dooms most life on earth, we destroy habitats and hunt species to extinction.
As I drive across the country, I pass through forests I know will burn, I cross rivers and valleys that have been sucked dry, and I know that no matter how unseasonably hot it is, it will only get worse for the rest of my life. Once maybe we could have pretended that we wanted to live in harmony with nature, but now that the climate crisis is upon us and we’re still not doing anything about it, we should at least be honest enough to admit what we’ve done wrong and that collectively we’re too short-sighted, corrupt, selfish, ignorant and stupid to do anything about it in time. What makes me most sad is to listen to people who claim to care about nature, while they drive around in a big rig that is contributing to mass extinctions.
The skinny shrub reaching up in front of the cactus is Ocotillo, just beginning to bloom.
The ranger asked good questions. Given that we live in the Anthropocene or Human epoch, what exactly does wilderness mean to us now? This was one of my favorite ranger talks.
There’s a tiny endemic fish living in a corner of this park near the Mexican border. But because groundwater levels are now dropping sharply, the Quitobaquito pupfish’s natural habitat could disappear within a few years.
Some local school kids helped build a pond behind the visitor center to try to save the pupfish. The park service is re-lining the original Quitobaquito Springs to try to retain more water, but the springs are shrinking. People have been impacting the environment here for over 10,000 years, and, whether we like it or not, the little fish is now dependent on whether we choose to save it.
Ranger Kate asked the campers what we should do. The most common questions were about whether the Mexicans were at fault by siphoning off “our” water. They are actually on a different aquifer south of the Sonoyta River. And that jingoistic attitude really misses the point of being in an International Biosphere, next to the Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve in Mexico. We’re supposed to be sister parks working together to save an internationally important natural area.
One suggestion was to “relocate the fish to a more viable habitat”. But if you take the pupfish out of Quitobaquito, are they still really Quitobaquito pupfish? Zoos don’t really prevent extinction in the wild.
I voted to add water to maintain the habitat. People think nothing of draining a river for a new golf course community and destroying ecosystems by burning fossil fuels. So why not reverse that destructive and short-sighted attitude and take this one chance to spend a few dollars to save a species?
Zero Carbon Travel 