Posted on 07/27/2003 2:25:35 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Three miles south of Mina -- itself a played-out mining town two-thirds of the way to nowhere between Las Vegas and Reno, where 300 brave souls still hang on, making such living as they can off U.S. Highway 95 speed trap revenues -- sits the ghost town of Sodaville at the foot of the Excelsior Mountains on the Nevada-California border.
Founded as the Soda Springs ranch and stage coach stop in the late 1800s, the little high desert settlement became a busy train depot for the Carson & Colorado railroad in the winter of 1901 -- a watering stop for trains hauling ore out of the mines of Goldfield and Tonopah to the south.
But like the mines it served, little Soda Springs' heyday was short-lived. Durk Pearson, who along with his partner Sandy Shaw is current owner of the 200-acre property, says the owners a century ago were asking too high a price for land for a railroad switching yard. So in 1904, when the Tonopah Railroad opened its own rail service, it bypassed Sodaville. In 1905, the Carson & Colorado ended its service, and little Sodaville passed quietly back into sagebrush.
Today, the sun-bleached skeletons of a few buildings from the early 1900s remain, along with the foundation of the Silver Dyke Tungsten Mill.
And the springs, of course.
And near that water is where this tale of bureaucratic arrogance played out.
"The date was 1947. This is from the Railroad Valley Spring Fish Recovery Plan, available from the Region 1 office in Portland, Oregon, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of the Interior," Durk reads to me over the phone. "It says, `In 1947 the Nevada state Fish and Game Commission personnel released Railroad Valley Spring fish into private property at Soda Springs, to create a reserve population against the possibility that largemouth bass might be released into the historic habitats at Railroad Springs,' " 200 miles to the east. ..
"Back before the Endangered Species Act they were quite harmless, there would have been no reason to object to having them there."
Durk and Sandy came to Nevada about a dozen years back, fleeing California. Durk holds a biology/physics degree (with a minor in geology) from MIT. Sandy's is in chemistry, from UCLA. They hold profitable patents for various formulations of nutritional supplements, and spend a lot of their time battling the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
Over the years, Durk and Sandy took to using some of their supplement royalties to buy up any rural Nevada hot spring that come on the market, both because they like to swim in them, and because they figure water rights in a parched desert could prove a good long-term investment.
"First off we use them ourselves, but when the Baby Boomers retire, we're gonna have a lot more people out here with RVs, and the ones close to U.S. 95 like this one in Sodaville, may be worth developing."
But the problem with these warm springs -- except for the very largest ones -- is they have a tendency to silt up. A few years back, Durk says, two of the three springs (at Soda Springs) got completely clogged up. But U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials told him that digging them out would violate the Endangered Species Act -- the planted Railroad Valley Spring fish was now a protected species.
That's not a problem anymore, however.
"Now that they've killed all the spring fish I'll be able to clean that spring out and set up an RV park there," Durk said.
What? Whoa there. Someone killed off all the spring fish?
Why yes. Right here is where our tale starts to get interesting. Listen up:
`They killed everything with chlorine bleach'
Go to the "Wild Nevada" Web site, at www.knpb.org/WildNevada/Trip110.asp.
Touring the Soda Springs Valley, where "copper and lead mining were common in the early 1900s ... we pass through the main section of Mina and for a moment it looks like there's nothing out there," the hosts of the KNPB-TV, Channel 5 (Reno public broadcasting) Web site inform us. "But the signs direct us to a very unusual point of interest -- Desert Lobster. Bob Eddy is the man responsible for bringing fresh water Australian lobsters into this most unlikely place. He sells them to locals and passing motorists that stop to investigate the 'Desert Lobster' signs. He has plans to open a restaurant in Mina with a menu featuring his lobsters."
Or he did, until July 10, that is.
Sixty-year-old Bob Eddy has been leasing Durk and Sandy's land around the Soda Springs for the past eight years as he worked to realize his dream, learning how to raise half a million Australian red claw crawfish -- they grow to a pound in size and can start to look more like small lobsters -- to the tourists who drive by and stop at his roadside stand. The tourists then cook them for supper.
The government left him alone from 1995 till early 2002. But then the Review-Journal ran a big feature about this very unusual lobster farm in the desert, complete with photos.
The curse of doom, as it turned out. Drove the state bureaucrats into a frenzy of officious activity, you see.
On July 10, two state biologists, backed up by 10 armed goons in SWAT gear, raided the only remaining profitable business in Soda Springs, Bob Eddy's desert crawfish farm. They spent about seven hours systematically, purposely, killing all the half million crawfish he'd spent eight years learning how to raise -- in warm water tanks fed by the warm water of the Soda Springs.
"He had originally agreed to abide by regulations of aquaculture that are established by our wildlife commission -- he had said he would not sell them live," argued Department of Wildlife spokesman Chris Healy, when I called him in Carson City the day of the Great Crawfish Raid.
"They are a prohibited species because they have a propensity for dominating warm water springs. In some of our sensitive areas where we have warm water spring fish they could do considerable damage if they were to get into them, alive," Mr. Healy insisted.
Funny thing is, Bob Eddy and Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw all agree there aren't any of the Railroad Valley Spring fish -- crenichthys nevadae -- left in the Soda Springs themselves.
The last and largest spring that held any of the fish is now finally too silted up to support fish life -- thanks to federal field agents who told Pearson he'd be in violation of federal law if he tried to clean out the spring while it held any of the "threatened" fish the government planted there without the property owner's permission in 1947.
"So the fish population in the springs had dwindled to the point where in 1991 there were 250, based on visual observations," Durk Pearson explains. "Then by June of 1996 there were 27 individuals, and a couple years after that there were 17, and the last time they tried to put in a trap a couple of years ago there wasn't enough water to put a trap into.
"In that report on the Railroad Valley Spring fish, it says explicitly the reason the number of fish in the springs has been going down is the encroaching reeds. But the federal field people have their own ideas, they have their own agenda, they don't give a shit if the fish actually die, they just tell me I could go to jail if I try to clean out the springs. ...
"The only place the fish were was in the lobster tanks. There were hundreds of them in the tanks with several hundred thousands lobsters. If the lobsters ate the fish there wouldn't have been any fish. So what were they doing living happily in the same tanks? I don't know if the fish were eating algae, or lobster food, or what. But they were all doing fine till NDOW came along and poured chlorine bleach in the tanks and killed everything."
'There were no fish to be killed'
I called Chris Healy at the Nevada Department of Wildlife to ask if his guys had killed all the crenichthys nevadae in Bob Eddy's "tanks," tubs, and ponds, with their chlorine bleach on July 10, and if so whether they'd acquired proper federal permits in advance to "take" this threatened species. I asked also whether the NDOW guys had any kind of environmental permits for subsequently dumping their chlorine bleach residue in the adjoining creek.
"I checked with Mike Sevon, our regional supervising fisheries biologist for the western region, based in Fallon, who was our guy leading the raid that day," Mr. Healy said when he called back July 18. "He was one of the guys wearing a bulletproof vest out there in that 100-degree heat.
"And when he went out there, those guys surveyed the spring, and no Railroad Valley Spring fish were sighted at all. So the answer to your question is that no fish were killed because there were no fish to be killed."
And the chlorine bleach?
"The answer to our best knowledge is that there was no waiver or permit needed on either the state or federal level, and that the amount of chlorine used was so small, that once it had done its job of disinfecting, once chlorine hits the water and air and once it's used in 100 degree heat like we had out there that day it would dissipate rather quickly."
I called back Bob Eddy, who used a barnyard epithet to describe Mr. Healy's estimate of the strength of the chlorine bleach. "That creek flows under Route 95, and this is an area where even the highway department can't do anything on their right of way," such as spraying weed-killer, apparently, "without a permit."
Furthermore, Eddy says, the court order allowing the destruction of the crawfish did not authorize the use of chlorine. "The court order said they could not put anything in the (lobster tank) water other than to cool it; the court gave them permission to cool my tanks (to kill the crawfish). If it goes below 50 degrees they die. ... And you're supposed to adhere pretty close to what these court orders say."
And the little crenichthys nevadae?
"They knew there were spring fish (in the tanks). That's why they put in my original permit that I had to create a habitat for them. ... I asked them how many they killed (by dumping chlorine in the tanks) and they said there weren't any. So I went down there and looked and I found at least 30 dead in the bushes. I spread out a dozen of those dead spring fish on a board and took a picture of them."
While we were speaking on the phone on July 18 Bob's wife, Pam Eddy, went out back to a pond used by the family as a swimming pool and also fed from the warm springs, which remains unbleached, since it's upstream from where the crayfish were. "I just now caught some of them in a net," she said. "There are a lot of them left in there."
The Eddys mailed me photos -- of a live fish captured in a bucket from their swimming hole out back, and of 42 dead little fish spread out on a white board.
How would he respond if shown the photos of those dead fish -- or even live fish -- I asked Mr. Healy.
"I'd have to see it first to identify and see whether they were in fact Railroad Valley Spring fish. I'd have to see the picture," he replied. "But in our discussions we have talked to the folks at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service who were aware of this operation, and we can comfortably say we had the support of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife as to what we were doing with these crayfish.
"Apparently, the spring itself has been so degraded over the years by siltation that its value has been degraded as a fisheries habitat. The Railroad Valley Spring fish, if they did exist, they've been knocked down there so much, and that may be further evidence of what we're saying, that the crayfish tend to damage these native fish populations."
But Eddy and Pearson both say the fish were coexisting with the crawfish in the tanks just fine.
"I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. That's why our commission put 'em on the list as a prohibited species."
But aren't some of Nevada's warm waters already infested with these Australian crawfish, like Hot Creek between Tonopah and Ely?
"No. The reason we did this was to stop that from happening," Mr. Healy replied.
`For state management of a species'
Finally, I rang up Randi Thompson at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Reno.
"The state operates under a rule that allows them to partake of certain activities that may allow a take of a species, meaning they might kill the species, but it's for the greater good, for lack of a better word," Ms. Thompson explained.
"And this is one of those cases, because it (the crawfish) is a very invasive non-native species. He was violating his permit by selling them live and we were much more concerned about the ramifications of this species being allowed to be set free versus the take of this planted population (of spring fish), although yes, they are threatened."
The federal Endangered Species Act grants state wildlife officials the authority to kill an endangered or threatened species if this occurs in the process of managing their game species, Ms. Thompson explained.
And are private landowners given similar leeway?
"It's for state management of a species. ... We have offered Mr. Eddy different cooperative agreements and grants that would allow him more flexibility. ... We've been trying to work with Mr. Eddy for a long time, and he has not been cooperative."
But even if the state is sometimes allowed to kill threatened critters, doesn't it still need a federal permit to do so?
"Mike Sevon had surveyed the area and had not found any spring fish," Ms. Thompson explained.
"They were going to remove them before they put anything in the water, a chlorine base in the water, so they went out to the springs themselves, and they were going to remove any fish that they had found. ... That's the area where they were naturally living. In the tanks and stuff we would consider that an artificial population at that point, because he (Eddy) was feeding them."
But even in artificial tanks, I thought I'd heard of land owners being told it was illegal for them to do anything that would kill an endangered snail or bug, that the ESA doesn't allow that.
"That's right, we don't. ... Still we would not support their killing any fish in that particular mechanism, but it was probably not feasible for them to get the fish out of their cooling ponds and so forth.
"But we would have been more concerned with the fish in their native habitat of the springs themselves, and they did check those habitats before they did any eradication. ... This was a planted population of fish so this wasn't a native population; this wasn't really a native historic habitat," Ms. Thompson said. "We still have good population of the spring fish in native habitat. But yes, they still are considered to be threatened, so NDOW cannot kill those fish without a permit, but they did not find any in the spring."
Durk Pearson is a bit of an expert on Nevada hot springs. So I had to ask: He doesn't see any validity in the supposed concern of Chris Healy and the state Wildlife boys -- not to mention the feds -- that the Australian crawdads could have gotten loose and infested Nevada's natural hot springs?
"There's no way for lobsters to take 200-mile walks through the desert to the Railroad Valley hot springs," he replies. "Their scenario was someone could get them in an aerated bucket and drive them 200 miles and put them in the spring, at which point the lobsters would eat up the spring fish. But if they were going to eat up all the spring fish there wouldn't have been hundreds of the fish living in Bob Eddy's tanks with them."
And now that all the pesky spring fish have died under federal supervision, Pearson can dig out his springs. "When the two smaller springs dried out, we were able to dig them out with a backhoe and now they're flowing just fine," he explains. "The trick is not to allow them to put the fish back in, and they have no legal authority to do so.
"The spring fish are intriguing, actually. They have intriguing behaviors. So if the Endangered Species Act didn't apply to private property I'd put them in all my hot springs. But since it does, good riddance."
Figures.
Aaah, unintended consequences!
FMCDH
You said it pal. I'm really starting to laugh at some of these.
Besides that, they were a non-native, invasive species, kind of like starlings and danderlions, neither of which the fish and game guys are trying to eradicate.
I think good, red-blooded 'Muricans should eat good, red-blooded crawdads taken from their castles in the bottoms anyway. That's what my grandparents did, and if they did it, it's good enough for me!
Me too. I tried to find some info on them several years ago.
I have 2 of their books around here somewhere."Life Extension" and a sequel.
Much in those books was way ahead of its time.(Anti-oxidants , minoxidil, for instance)
He used to guest on the Merv Griffin Show I believe. Very very bright man.
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
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