Hiking through Joshua Tree

thinking about 2024, and a new story

Hey friends,

Writing to you from a balmy stretch of Joshua Tree. I’ve been here a few weeks. Most mornings, I’ve driven into the national park for a two or four mile hike just after sunrise. I love the gradient of sunrise here, how the monzogranite rocks turn pink and orange for a few minutes before the sun moves higher into the sky. The trails I’ve been walking are quiet, except for a flock of mourning doves that I always encounter in the same gnarled tree. I startle them each time I come trudging through the canyon. I’ve been telling myself if I hike there often enough, maybe they’ll get used to me, but I don’t actually believe that.

I felt moved to email because I wanted to write out 2024. More than any other year in recent memory (in my life, at least), last year felt so bizarrely cohesive, like I was meant to meet everyone I met and see everything I saw. Most new people in my life were writing about the environment, or advocating for the environment, or spending their free time in the environment. Journalists, activists, botanists, surfers, climbers. It all started last January when and I was messaging with Nick Bowlin, a wonderful energy and environment reporter based in the Rockies, on Twitter, and that correspondence turned into an assignment for him in Elko, and then a couple of months later he was crashing on my couch in Vegas. Then I met Patrick Donnelly, an environmental activist in the Amargosa, and a hike last January turned into a story that occupied me for all of 2024 (more on that below). For another story, we went kayaking in the ephemeral Lake Manly, in Death Valley — a truly surreal experience to float in North America’s driest place. After that I drove out to Bishop for the first time, to hike in the Alabama Hills and swim at Keough's Hot Springs, and I’ve never fallen faster for a place than I have for the Eastern Sierras. For the rest of the spring, I meandered all around the Amargosa and Fish Lake Valley with Patrick and his partner, the scientist Naomi Fraga. I saw dunes, marshes, and salt flats. I lost a hubcap driving down a washboard road. I drove to Texas to see the eclipse and made friends with a group of molecular biologists in a Dallas park. We all cried when the sun turned off. I swam in a spring-fed pool in West Texas and ate a home cooked meal at a friend’s house in Marfa. A month later I was slipping on muddy trails in Kauai for a journalists’ workshop about declining biodiversity on the Hawaiian islands. Swam there too.

I left Las Vegas. I wasn’t sure if I’d come back. I’m still not sure. A lot of my friends left Vegas too. I read to my grandmother all summer, and I saw my brother and sister and parents more than I have in years. My cousin from Colorado was at my parents’ a lot last summer, and I met her kids for the first time. Her daughter and I wandered around the yard picking flowers and eucalyptus leaves. It almost felt like I was an aunt. I summited a monster peak in the Eastern Sierras and was more afraid than I’d ever been hiking. It was the most dazzling hike I’ve ever done, a hard scramble in thin air with views of the Palisade glacier. I stayed with some friends in Bishop, where I tried to climb outdoors but was too fresh off that monster hike and was terrified of unstable rocks. (And indeed, a few holds broke off while a friend was leading the climb. I think I’m quitting climbing for now.)

I moved to Davis. Camped in Yosemite for the first time since I was a kid. Swam in an icy lake. I saw Daniel Rothberg, one of the best writers on water in the American West, pretty much every day. One of my closest friends visited from New York and we hiked to the north fork of the American River. My college roommate moved to San Francisco and we ate oysters in Point Reyes. I spent a week with a bus full of environmental journalists. We traveled through the deserts of Arizona and California and learned about all sorts of mining — copper, manganese, lithium. I’m now writing my second mining story in a year, somehow. (As mining reporters and environmentalists have told me, it sucks you in.) During a stop in Tucson, I invited Caroline Tracey, a writer I’ve long admired but had never met in person, to hang out at the hotel pool, and we spent the night swimming and talking about the southwest. I love how small this world is. I made even more journalist friends at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference. I’ve met more Coloradans this year than any other year of my life. I feel like the universe is telling me something. I let my heart get hurt a couple of times, but what’s the point of living if there’s not a little texture? We lost my grandmother, and I swear she’s saying hello whenever I see a shooting star or hear a screech owl. I miss her. We sat in the backyard many afternoons over the summer, looking at the trees. I’m grateful we spent all that time outside. And I’m grateful for all the people of 2024 — for my oldest friends and my Vegas friends and my new friends from around the west. I’m grateful for all the places I saw, and all that water.

This story just published in the New York Times Magazine. It’s about lithium and the green energy transition in Nevada’s deserts, and the hard choices we have to make as a country when confronting climate change. The story focuses on Patrick and Naomi, and one of my favorite places in the west: the Amargosa Basin. The editing of the story took many twists and turns; I’d envisioned it as a love story and it morphed into a bigger story about the future of the west (though, in some way, it is a love story — a story about what loving a place looks like). I wish I had many more words to tell you about the two of them, their personalities and obsessions and the way they are with each other, and the complexities and heartbreaks of their work, but I guess you’ll just have to read my eventual desert book.

What a year. Here we are, in 2025. Trump again. I’m sad for my friends in Los Angeles. I miss my friends in New York. I want you all to tell me where to live. Kidding. I’m craving a long-term place, somewhere with job prospects in case I need to quit freelancing, somewhere in the west with mountains and people who like to read books. Tucson? Denver? SLC? Looking back at the many years and versions of this occasional newsletter, it appears I have been asking that question for a long time… eight years now?? I’m getting too old for this. I’ve actually started paying for hotels instead of crashing on couches (though, there is still a lot of couch crashing in my life).

In the meantime, I have more work coming out eventually. Magazine world has been so slow lately. Would love to hear where you are, how you’re doing, what you’re feeling.

Love,

Meg