Mojave Green

September 11, 2025 - Join us for a celebration of desert literature, and enjoy this piece by Shannon Salter, poet, student of literature, and desert activist from southern Nevada.

Originally published in The Desert Superbloom 2024 issue of Las Vegas Writes.

Tecopa Road

By Shannon Salter

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding

to the spiritual energy of wind.

—Annie Dillard

When I first came upon the giant yucca off of Tecopa Road, I was walking between Rabbit Camp and the chain-link fence that surrounds the Yellow Pine Solar facility. The solar facility is being built by a company called Nextera, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire

Hathaway and one of the biggest energy conglomerates in the world. The Rabbit Camp was in protest of this godforsaken thing. For nine months in 2021 and 2022, I lived out there. Every day, I went to the fence, I walked the perimeter, I watched them tear the life from one of

our last great American frontiers. I was a wild and free person. I walked in a big wash where no one could see me. I sat listening to the diggers and bulldozers and levelers and water trucks. I never felt as free as I did then, in that wash. I never felt as close to America.

Last night, I saw the moon come up over the Spring Mountains, just a little west of Mount Charleston, over Bonanza peak. The snow moon. The silver light illuminated the mountain ridge. It was like a lake up there, and the water bled into the sky so that the sky was silver

too. The moon was still behind the mountain, and when it humped up it was a whale, bulbous immortal, God's blubber full of barnacles. I took a picture and it burst into a thousand blurry streams.

When I resided at the Rabbit Camp, I used to wake up in the morning, snug in my bed made of cotton and wool inside my tiny blue camper. I viewed the moon from my little window, making its way around the Earth. I watched the stars and the sky full of darkness. I had that valley all to myself. Can you imagine? In the morning, I mixed instant coffee in a plastic bottle, then I took a walk in one of two directions. The first was across Tecopa Road, where the Bureau of Land Management wants the whole place torn out and replaced with more solar facilities, and then on up to the Yellow Pine Solar fence a mile or so away. Or I walked the other direction, out into the sweetness of my own universe. There was an exquisite barrel cactus, round like the Garden of Eden. When it rains, she turns blistering red. And this direction, too, would loop me out onto Tecopa Road, and then I'd be in the arms of one gentle and gracious mesquite.

I believe in you, my soul.

You are sitting beside the pond at Mountain Springs. The pond is frozen on its surface. The large orange and silver koi are hibernating for winter, burrowed into watery clay. As the crow flies, you are about twelve miles from Rabbit Camp, on a summit of 5,500 feet. The pass

was paved through the Spring Mountains in 1929, and before that it was known as the Old Spanish Trail, ever since Antonio Armijo discovered it in 1830 on his first trek between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. It was the Mormon trail for wagon trains between Salt Lake City and California. And for thousands of years before it was an Indian footpath. That's what is meant by the Old Spanish Trail getting "discovered." Antonio saw the path used by the Paiute. Just down the hill towards Las Vegas, you can see caves high up in the red rock, big mystical caves that I can imagine inhabiting even now.

Mother of God. You see her in the air. You hear her

in a dog barking, in a pigeon warbling, in the stillness of

trees. Yes, she is the snow on the mountain. Her body is a

bridge. Her body is a footpath.

At Mountain Springs, it has started to snow. Rabbit Camp is on the Old Spanish Trail, too. People followed the water from one stop to another. Stump Springs is just down the way, so named for the cottonwood trees that died as the town of Pahrump drew down the aquifer. Mesquite trees grow, or used to grow, in smaller springs all around. You can see some next to

the giant yucca. The Paiute gather mesquite pods from these trees and grind them into an extraordinary flour, full of protein and minerals. The trail went through here and up over the pass at Mountain Springs and descended down into the Las Vegas Valley. There was an excellent spring in what is now the village of Blue Diamond at the mouth of Red Rock Canyon, and that spring is still running today. And then there was Las Vegas, with springs all over. That's why the Spanish called it Las Vegas—the Meadows.

There are certain places you're just sure are at the center of things.

Today is an absolutely hellacious wind. You know what they say: The wind is the desert's

voice.

Who says that?

Everybody.

Our camp is among a grove of little hills. The land isn't flat like at my mobile home in Pahrump. The hills break the wind, so it might be howling out on Tecopa Road, but at the campground it's just a gentle breeze. On warm nights, I loved to feel the breeze through the window of my camper. I loved getting up at night. There were a lot of shooting stars in that valley. Why so

many stars were falling is beyond me.

Rabbit Camp is a warm, sunny place.

When I wanted to get as close as possible to the construction zone at Yellow Pine Solar, I went into the big wash off of Highway 160. Because distance and time are strange in the desert, this wash crosses into the Kiewet Construction Company's fence line undetected. There are actually four separate arms of the Yellow Pine Solar Project, because they have to avoid certain deep washes, and this is one of them. Most other places they are filling the washes in with gravel or just flattening out the whole thing. They had to build an enormous culvert,

a giant ditch eight feet deep with white rock piled all round. Because the water has to go somewhere, there's no getting around that.

In the wash, I was a pirate. I traveled freely. There are pine logs washed down after a fire and a flood on Mount Charleston, some of them nearly petrified. Oh, dear reader, if you could smell the creosote after a rain! In the spring, there are bees and moths and butterflies everywhere, and in the fall and winter there are foxes, dragonflies, the tarantula migration. The bulldozers are just taking out everything. Can you imagine? They dug up 136 desert tortoises from their burrows and put them on the other side of Tecopa Road. They employ young people to stand watch for the tortoises trying to come back, because that is what tortoises do—they go back

to their burrows. Some of these creatures are eighty years old and look like small dinosaurs. The reptilian kingdom. In stories about desert solar projects, the media loves to publish photos of the tortoise—its face and eyes—body grey with the fine dust of ages, its shell.

One afternoon, I climbed up out of the wash and onto the mound of white gravel. The earth movers and earth flatteners and water sprayers were all up there working. Huge machines, like in a children's book I read to my little nephew about a construction site. I started filming with my iPhone, zooming in. You could see the soil churning and the water truck spraying all over to try and keep the dust down. Out there in the open desert, out there in the wilderness. It's an absurdity! But everything about the Industrial Order and Suburbia and Consumerism is an absurdity. Most of it we just don't see, because we are living in it. Out here in the open valley, out here in the desert, everything is clear as day.

Follow the water. 

The discussion around Pahrump is Water Basin 162. There are a dozen solar companies

that all want to replace this desert with a solar zone, like Yellow Pine. But they all need to use groundwater to spray the dust down, up to 300,000 gallons per day. It's a constant battle. Once you scrape off the topsoil and a million rooted plants, you get a fine dust that flies off

into the air and makes people sick. Would you believe, the soils themselves are actually alive. They're cryptobiotic—full of bacteria and fungi, lichen, moss. A network of mycelium. And would you believe, these soils and root systems are known as carbon sinks, because they

keep the carbon sealed up inside. A special compound forms around root systems over thousands of years. Can you imagine? Until the soils are ruined. Then they let it go.

When the security car came over, they said they were going to get the supervisor. Good, get the supervisor. For the love of God, somebody get the supervisor. And when the truck pulled around, who came out but Chris. I had talked to this fellow many times and he knew me. To him, I was the protest lady, and we always talked outside the fence, but today I had let myself in. I wasn't just in the area around Tecopa Road; I was way out on the northwest side. I had walked a long way.

Chris is the Yellow Pine Solar site manager for Kiewet Construction. They're contracted by the project developer, Nextera. The construction workers have a good job here. They have healthcare. Chris has got his RV parked at the Lakeside Resort in Pahrump, a beautiful

place. His wife exercises in their gym.

"Well, hi there," he called out to me. He is down below on the flat ground and I am eight feet up on the culvert's gravel. All the earth movers and bulldozers and water sprayers have stopped working.

"Christ! I'm so glad to see you." In my bewilderment I called out the name Christ. I didn't correct myself and I don't know if anyone heard. If people are expecting to hear one word, and you say something similar, they likely just go ahead and hear the word they were expecting.

I really was glad to see him. For one, I thought some macho security team might have come around and tried to scare me. And for another, I just really like Chris.

"Now whatcha doin' up there? And how'd you get out here anyway?" Chris looked around and he gazed out to the west behind me where it was all still Mojave wilderness. There was not a fleck of wind.

"I walked."

"Well, why don't I give you a ride back. Come on, I'll

drive you."

Now I'm not sure why—I suppose I was just being obstinate—but I said no, I wanted to walk back. I knew they wouldn't like that because I would still be there in that wash. As far as I can tell, the wash is still public land and any member of the American public can be in it

at any time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Technically you can only be in a spot for 14 days at a time and then you need to leave for 14 before you can come back, but that isn't often enforced. The Bureau of Land Management doesn't have many rangers, because they have to spend most of their energy leasing large swaths of the public land out to energy developers, so that those companies can drill for oil or bulldoze entire valleys for solar.

Don't resist the wind.

How 'bout a hayride? I'd take a hayride.

I ate once at the Lakeside RV Resort restaurant, and it was great. I had the chicken fried steak with country gravy. It came with a side of homemade soup.

I believe in you, my soul.

You've walked about a quarter of the way down from Mountain Springs. You feel the pull of Tecopa Road. You are the big fish. Tecopa Road is a little boy. He's fishing with such a small pole. And when he finally pulls you out of the lake he's going to scream. He's going to drop

the pole on the grass. You're such a big fish; you'll scare the boy. Don't worry, if there is any piece of you left over, the boy's father will put it out on the field. The crows will carry you into sky.

Last night, I drove out to Tecopa Road. The sky was so black and everything was dark as it's ever been. I couldn't see where the road began and the sky ended. I couldn't see the fence around Yellow Pine Solar. I wanted to get to the rock Mizpah we made outside, a symbol of protection and beauty. The word comes from the Old Testament, but I first learned it in Tonopah, an old mining town about three hours north of Pahrump. Both those towns have "pah," because that's the Paiute word for water. Mizpah has it, too, and this is just a coincidence.

The Mizpah Hotel goes back to 1907. It's an ornate building with a ballroom and a wooden bar. The hotel is named for the Mizpah mine, staked in 1900 by Isabelle—"Belle"—Butler and called Mizpah after her friend. Why Belle Butler's friend used the nickname Mizpah is a thing obscured by the tide of history. It's not lost, we just can't see it. Somehow that name got onto Belle's friend, and then it went from Belle to the mine and from the mine to the hotel, and now it is here, in the Pahrump Valley, a monument for beauty.

In the Old Testament, the Mizpah was a rock pile used to mark the boundary between two properties. It marked a place at the edge of places where everyone could see everything and God could see too. A place of watching, a presence.

I had wrapped this rock stack with a strand of white lights that charge all day in the sun and come on at night. The problem with solar lights is you don't know if they are on or not until it's night. There's a button on the back of each solar charger to turn them on and off and I wasn't sure that they were on. Knowing there was no way to see the Mizpah if it wasn't lit up, and being too disoriented to try to distinguish the dirt trail leading in from the road, I thought I would drive on to where I knew Rabbit Camp is, because I would recognize the clay hills. Then I'd drive back slowly to find the trail. Then, all at once, I saw them. My lights are on. The Mizpah. Sweet, glorious thing. I live for beauty, by God, I live for beauty!

It was standing so big and small against the darkness, like all of us are. Star light, star bright. I parked my car on the side of Tecopa Road. Being in the desert at night is like being on the ocean, or being out on a big lake. Last night, the darkness was a blanket wrapped around me and, although it was cold, it kept me warm. When I got to the Mizpah I said a prayer. I prayed for you walking down the mountain. I prayed for the hawk at the center of our lives, for the raven. Oh wild blue fire, icy hot rage that fills the sun.

I believe in you, my soul.

She feels it like a skin.

Do you want to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway? One minute you are alive. The frontier between time and space is becoming thin. Lie down in green pasture, beneath a creosote. There's nothing like reclining in a desert wash, having a nap, making love. Just rolling in the soft, cool dirt. Dear valley, when they pulled and scraped your creosote,

your Mojave yucca, I heard the whispered I love you, I love you, I love you, a million billion times I love you. Because that's all you ever say.

~~~