Lithium Valley unseats Silicon Valley
Uber and Lyft are offering free rides to vaccination sites, applications open for climbing stewards, and Bearsun lands in Joshua Tree
Hello from California’s high desert. With the warmer nights, I spent a lot of time outside this past week and caught a Starlink sighting! The train of satellites all blinking in a perfectly straight line is a very weird sight to behold.
I came across a big feature story about the future of the Salton Sea this week that, in addition to the regular summaries of all its problems, highlighted what might be a promising future for Imperial County. Turns out, the land surrounding the Salton Sea has high concentrations of lithium, a crucial material for electric car batteries and electric grids.
That’s an extremely big deal. California’s pledge to only sell electric vehicles by 2035 will require massive amounts of lithium, and other sites across the world are already struggling to meet the demand from car manufacturers. Lithium prices are skyrocketing, and the government is investing heavily in creating renewable extraction sites like the ones in Imperial Valley.
Residents, however, aren’t so optimistic. Like Silicon Valley, which is so named because of the natural reserves of silicon in the area which were used to make computer chips way back when, this new Lithium Valley could be just another empty promise from big corporations and local politicians that either price out long-time residents or leave town with unfinished business.
“I feel like a small piece of this game that everyone has been playing. You just feel like a pawn in this bigger picture, and you’re just trying to survive,” resident Darlene Barber told the Tortoise. “It’s always a money move. Where’s the money at?”
The irony of the situation is almost painful in its relevancy. The drying Salton Sea, which is a slow-moving environmental disaster leading to high asthma rates and other awful side effects for those that live there, could be the key to the state’s sustainable energy commitments made to combat climate change. Hopefully this time around, the people who’ve stuck it out won’t be left behind.
Now, onto this week’s news:
The Biden Administration announced Tuesday that it had partnered with Uber and Lyft to provide free transportation to roughly 80,000 vaccination sites across the US.
The program will be promoted in both companies’ apps starting May 24 and will continue until July 4.
Wednesday afternoon, CVS announced that it was opening appointments for Pfizer vaccinations to adolescents age 12 to 15 in accordance with updated CDC guidelines.
In related news, the Palm Springs Convention Center vaccination site announced Tuesday it was expanding its hours. It will now be open until 7 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday. Hours of operation on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday remain 8 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.
Appointments are not required at the Riverside County site, which is open to all residents or people who work in the county and are at least 16 years of age.
The convention center is located at 277 N Avenida Caballeros in Palm Springs and is currently offering the Pfizer vaccine.
Joshua Tree National Park is currently accepting applications for climber stewards for next season.
Applications are now open for climber stewards in Joshua Tree National Park. The volunteer position lasts for 10 weeks and includes a campsite in Hidden Valley for the duration of the program.
National Park Service staff plan to conduct interviews and make a hiring decision in May and June of this year. The program begins in November or January.
Candidates can be climbers, boulders, or highliners with previous experience recreating in Joshua Tree National Park. Responsibilities include maintaining fixed gear in the park and educating climbers on how to responsibly climb within park boundaries. Stewards will work closely with certified guiding companies and climbing rangers in their day-to-day work.
Prospective candidates can email climbing ranger Bernadette Regan at bernadette_regan@nps.gov for more information.
Low desert commuters were greeted by Bearsun, also known as 33-year-old Jessy Larios, coming up the Morongo and Yucca grades on Monday. By Tuesday, Larios had made it through Joshua Tree and into Wonder Valley.
Larios is a statewide celebrity after walking from Los Angeles to San Francisco dressed in his hallmark anime-inspired Bearsun costume earlier this year to bring awareness to mental health conditions.
Now, he is walking nearly 500 miles from San Diego to Las Vegas, including our stretch of Route 62, this time for Autism awareness.
He’s doing the walk to raise money via GoFundMe for San Diego’s National Foundation for Autism Research. His earlier walk to San Francisco generated roughly $17,000 for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Pupdate of the week: Alice is going through a rebellious phase and no one is sleeping well. Oliver has coopted not one, but three pillows for napping on the couch whenever there’s a break.
Trail tip of the week: We’re in the final days of spring, which means the cactus blooms and other desert flowers will soon disappear. Until then, make sure to never travel off-trail to take photos (zoom with your lens and not your feet!) to make sure we keep our wonderful desert ecosystem intact and undisturbed. It may not seem like a huge impact, but over time, these social trails can have major negative impacts on the environment!
Book of the week: I read Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino last year during the first major lockdown, and I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since. The collection of essays looks at our relationship with social media and the internet, and how our online personalities are funhouse mirror versions of ourselves. I found it insightful, especially during a time when my only interactions with other folks were mostly virtual.
Show of the week: It’s been a busy week, so I ended up tuning into Unsellable Houses on HGTV more often than I’d like to admit. When I absentmindedly tune in (or out, I guess) on home renovation shows, I can’t help but think of an interview I read a few years back about the network. In it, an HGTV exec said the network’s shows are designed to be calming background noise “like Xanax,” and apparently that’s exactly what I needed.
Small business of the week
We have our first crowdsourced entry for small business of the week! Several readers suggested Kama Connection, a gift shop and boutique in Joshua Tree.
“It is a joy to source quality collections from many places that serve a need beyond buying and selling. It is my great pleasure to offer a place where connections of all kinds can happen. Your presence here is a vital connection . . . to me, to the community of Joshua Tree, to the universe,” shop owner Mindy Kittay wrote on her website.
Kama Connection also hosts Mercado, a craft and artisan fair, each Saturday and Sunday with a fantastic group of local artists and makers. It also hosts live music from time to time, and the schedule is posted on its website.
Kama Connection is located at 61884 Twentynine Palms Highway in Joshua Tree.
That’s it for this week! As always, please let me know what you’d like to read about in future editions. Have a great weekend, and get outside!
- Megan
Wow thank you so much! I'd just like to add that locals get 10% off on everything all the time at Kama Connection.