They Were Looking for Endangered Tortoises. They Found Human Bones Instead.

In the summer of 1991, Mical Garcia was 19 years old, taking classes at a cosmetology school in the farm town of Manteca, California, when she got an alarming call from her stepdad in Las Vegas. Her mother had run off. He came home from work to find her possessions gone, and a note explaining that she’d been leading a double life and did not want to be contacted.

Mical, who helps people pronounce her name by saying “like ‘me call you,’” was surprised but not overly concerned at the time. Her mother, Linda Sue Anderson, was carefree and a bit wild. “We’d play that song ‘Delta Dawn’ really loud, sing at the top of our lungs even though we didn’t have great voices, and dance,” Mical told me recently. Her mom once took her to see the Vegas crooner Engelbert Humperdinck in concert. Linda was beautiful, always had her long blond hair done, her nails and makeup just so. “She was never a Betty Crocker stay-at-home mom.”

The flip side was mood swings, which Mical, who is now a nurse, thinks could have been diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Linda would lock herself in her room, leaving Mical to babysit her sister, Dulcenea, and her brother, Ethan, who everyone called Petey. “I was in first or second grade, and I was cooking for them. My dad was traveling. She wouldn’t open the door.” Other times Linda, who worked as a travel agent, would disappear for days.

The family moved around a lot. When their parents divorced, they were living near Lake Tahoe. Their father won full custody and took the family to Manteca. Linda remarried and settled in Nevada. Her new husband was a pit boss at Caesars Palace with a degree from Stanford University. “He worshipped the ground she walked on,” Mical said. “I never heard they were having problems.”

So when Linda ran off, the Garcia children figured she’d come back eventually—just like she always had.

I was pulled into this story after writing an Outside article two years ago about dead bodies discovered in Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, as the megadrought across the West caused the water level to drop. When an old friend named Paul Frank read it, he texted me:

You might recall that I have been working on desert tortoise stuff since the late 1980’s. Since then myself and the several hundred people that do that sort of work have walked over the whole Mojave, Colorado, and much of the Sonoran deserts. We pretty much walk the whole damn desert and collectively we have found countless bodies.

I’d known Paul since I guided the canyons around Moab, Utah. We’d run in the same circle of river guides, rock climbers, park rangers, school-bus dwellers, and other pilgrims who settled there in the 1990s. Paul still lived in Moab, and he’d been counting turtles for about 35 years. Seventy now—and known widely in “tort world,” as it’s referred to, as Uncle Paul—he had been kicking around the West, working at a Coors six-pack carton factory, starting a native-seed business, rock climbing, and mountaineering, until the tortoise offered what would become a legit career. “I figured I’m not going to go to grad school, but what I can do is walk across the desert with the best of them,” he said. “I can camp anytime, anyplace. I don’t give a shit.”

In 1990, the desert tortoise was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The listing required scientists to ramp up tracking the animal’s population, spawning a small industry of field techs who crisscrossed the desert to study the slow-moving reptiles.

Some of these folks had biology degrees; many did not. One primary qualification was the ability to walk vast distances alone and camp out of the back of a truck for weeks at a time in the middle of nowhere. Desert tortoises have survived for 20 million years partly by making themselves hard to see. They spend winters underground when the desert freezes, and summers in those same burrows when it bakes above 100 degrees. Their shells have evolved to a mosaic of drab brown and olive green—perfect camouflage for the beige expanses. The reptile makes its home amid the shrubs and cacti of the Mojave, in the empty spaces of Southern California and Nevada, a region that for millennia supported the sparsest of human populations. The tortoises had the run of the place. (The animals and their counters also roam the Colorado and Sonoran Deserts, though the majority of tracking takes place in the Mojave.)

In a happy accident for humans like Paul, the time to reliably see tortoises is spring and fall, when a march across the desert is tolerable—even pleasant. Teams of sharp-eyed vagabonds have been poring over this landscape, staring at the ground, for more than four decades, perhaps distinguishing the Mojave as the most closely examined patch of open dirt in all of human history.

Even as the American desert has become a sort of seeker’s paradise for its windswept beauty, the Mojave, with its vast emptiness so close to the shadows of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, turns out to be the ideal place for ditching evidence, whether that be junk cars or toxic waste or the freshly murdered. I spoke to half a dozen turtle counters who had found human remains.

This struck me as profoundly weird. Here were these nomads eking out a peripatetic existence in service of a threatened species, and no matter how hard they tried to escape civilization, they found themselves digging in its darkest corners, unearthing things civilization had discarded.

While they rarely learned the identities of the deceased, it was evident that the desert is not where we dump the powerful and the privileged. The victims appeared to dwell on the margins: disenfranchised young women, low-level gangsters dispatched with a bullet in the skull, border crossers holding Latin American paperwork. One grizzled vagrant was found beside his cart clutching a Big Gulp in his death grip. You got the sense that society had not looked very hard to find them.

For Mical, Dulcenea, and Petey Garcia, the months after their mother’s disappearance stretched into years. They felt abandoned. “I was the one closest to her,” Mical told me. “She was my everything. It broke my world.” Petey, who was too young to have many memories of his mom, took it the hardest. A decade after her disappearance, he reached out to his stepdad, but a new wife asked that he not call back. Petey hired a private investigator, which yielded nothing.

The children grew up and married. Both sisters became nurses, and their brother was an EMT. Petey and Dulcenea each had children. But Petey died of liver disease at age 43.

When Mical joined Facebook, she couldn’t help but search for her mother there. Once, she came across an elderly woman cradling a baby—perhaps a grandson? The woman looked how Mical imagined Linda would look after 25 years. “I messaged her and said I think you’re our mom and I hope you’re well, and told her how the kids were doing. It’s OK if you don’t want to be in touch.”

Mical got blocked.

After enough years wandering in desert solitude, then crawling under their own shells at night, many turtle counters develop an affinity for their quarry. “They possess wisdom without a very large brain,” Paul told me. “They live to be a hundred. When you pick one up, they look you right in the eye, and it’s obvious they are wondering what you’re doing and why you’re bothering them.”

A desert tortoise grows a thin, narrow bone called a gular horn that extends from its shell beneath its neck. When battling over territory or a female, the males use their gular horns like jousters and can flip their rivals onto their backs, a situation that can end in death. Paul recalled gluing a data logger onto a turtle’s carapace (the top of the shell) that was wired to a piece on its plastron (the bottom of the shell), very close to its cloaca (which in layman’s terms might be called its butthole).

“This guy was so angry,” said Paul, “and he looked at me fuming, and he gets that horn under my knee, so I let him flip me over. Yeah, motherfucker, yeah!”

Another desert tortoise conservationist, Tim Shields, who estimated that he’d logged 35,000 miles on foot in more than 45 years, felt a sort of spiritual apprenticeship with the animal. “My career has been the discovery of this earthling that has figured out how to survive,” he said, noting that the species has been around for as long as 20 million years. “I mean, a desert tortoise has seven ways to drink rainwater that I’ve witnessed in the field. We have this lesson to learn, that we can give to other earthlings.” (For the record, those seven ways include snorting up drops that they collect on their shells, snorting water off their forelegs, and eating wet mud.)

The foes of the tortoise have shifted over the decades. In the 1970s, the reptiles were literally being run over, says wildlife biologist Kristin Berry of the U.S. Geological Survey. “You couldn’t go anywhere in the spring without seeing crushed tortoises,” she said. “Out on the dirt roads, there was deliberate killing. People would swerve in order to hit them.” Motorcyclists also denuded the tortoise’s food supply of native grasses, doing particular damage once a year during the Barstow to Las Vegas race, when more than a thousand dirt bikers rip willy-nilly across 180 miles of desert.

In the eighties, the enemy was a bacterial infection called upper respiratory tract disease, which killed turtles by the thousands. Counters found more dead shells than living tortoises. The nineties brought sprawl: Las Vegas was the country’s fastest-growing city, its population doubling from 700,000 in 1990 to 1.4 million in 2002. Its outlying areas included some of the best tortoise habitat. Biologists recalled finding 250 tortoises in two square miles out by the Henderson airport—land that is now paved over. Today the chief threat is global warming, as the Mojave becomes too hot and dry even for this tenacious survivor.

By 1984, some tortoise populations had already dropped a staggering 90 percent, and they have declined steadily since, to an estimated total of just 200,000. Despite 35 years of federal protection, the desert tortoise is barreling at a hare’s pace toward extinction.

Still the turtle counters keep walking, looking, tabulating.

In March of 2024, I flew to Los Angeles to see a pair of turtle counters at work in the high desert. I drove east, stop-and-go through my hometown grid, till I climbed up the eight swooping lanes of Cajon Pass and emerged in the Mojave, or what’s left of it. The windblown towns of Victorville, Hesperia, Adelanto, and Apple Valley have become L.A.’s most distant exurbs, and as I cruised the sprawl it resembled Anywhere, America, with some California spice: Home Depot, Walmart, and Lowe’s, alongside spiked yuccas and strip-mall dives like Pho Kobe and Mariscos El Chaka.

I was looking for Mike Bassett, another Moab friend I hadn’t seen in a decade. Mike had been doing tortoise work for 17 years, joined for the past ten by his wife Kristen Hayes. Mike dropped a pin and texted:

We have an easy peasy spot to meet us just a little north of the town of Lucerne Valley.

I followed the directions into the open desert of San Bernardino County, past dog pens and motor homes stripped of their wheels, onto a dirt road under steel-lattice electrical towers. I veered onto sandy two-track toward a jumble of granite globs till I saw a white pickup outfitted for armageddon: jacked suspension, a hand-welded aluminum camper shell, and tires big enough to win a blue ribbon at the county fair. Mike, bearded in a hoodie and sunglasses, and palming a brown bottle of beer, let himself out, leaned into the wind, and bent to my open window.

“So this is easy peasy?” I said.

“Follow us.”

Two months earlier, 911 dispatchers in San Bernardino County received a call from a man speaking Spanish who’d been shot. Police found their way down a dirt track called Shadow Mountain Road, about 50 miles northwest of where I met Mike, and discovered a scene of mayhem ripped from the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel: late-model Chevy Trailblazer spun out at the sandy crossroads, doors flung open, riddled with bullets. Six men shot dead, some of them set on fire.

Reporters struggled to describe just how quickly an L.A. metro area of more than 20 million souls could turn to nothing out here. “It is incredibly desolate. I cannot bring home that point enough,” said one TV correspondent, while another remarked, “We are quite literally in the middle of nowhere. This area is so remote, the roads here are not paved.”

This is precisely where desert tortoises—and the people who count them—tend to roam. I followed Mike and Kristen a few more miles, the ruts in the track deepening and the occasional stone whacking underneath my seat. A Joshua tree danced in the gale like Medusa with her finger in a light socket. I lurched around heaps of boulders, up a dry wash with no sign of the human experiment but tire tracks and power lines. We stopped and my hosts emerged from their truck into the whipping wind.

“This is camp,” said Mike.

I climbed out into the cold desert gale. I put on every layer I brought, including sweatpants under my jeans. Mike took pity and handed me a down vest.

Like sailors of yore, Mike and Kristen had figured out how to live tidily in a space too cramped for standing. Theirs is a Dodge Ram diesel, kitted out with a shell meant for a carpet-cleaning business but customized by the couple into a bedroom-kitchen. As Kristen sat on the futon chopping veggies on the counter just opposite her, Mike stood in the sand beneath the raised side hatch and cooked a curried coconut lentil soup. He and I ate on cold lawn chairs in the sand.

After dinner I was handed a plastic spray bottle filled with water. “That’s F. Scott Spritzgerald,” said Kristen. They demonstrated a dishwashing technique they’d developed over the years that minimized time and water use. Mike held the bowl with one hand, sprayed it with the other, then wiped it clean with half a paper towel. There was nowhere to escape the cold wind. Finally I said, “Can I get in your truck?”

Kristen spread her maps on the counter. The surveying technique was called line distance sampling, and the plan was simple: we’d walk three kilometers east in a straight line, then three clicks north, then three clicks west, then three clicks south, arriving back where we’d started. These perfect squares, called transects, were randomly generated by computer. The purpose was not to count all the tortoises in the square but only those visible from the line. Scientists would use this data to extrapolate overall numbers.

Meanwhile, four other teams would walk different transects in the region. The teams worked five days on, one day off—during which they’d hightail it to some outpost like the closest KOA campground for a shower, laundry, and groceries. This hitch would last six weeks.

As the teams’ supervisors, Mike and Kristen studied the maps to assign the next set of transects, which would include a stretch along Shadow Mountain Road—the location of the bullet-riddled car and the six homicides. Kristen wondered aloud, “Who’s going to walk the murder transect?”

The wind blew all night and into the morning. Under cold cloudy skies, I crawled from the back of my rented Explorer and we set out into the desert, Mike in front and Kristen and me trailing 30 yards behind.

The Mojave that appears so barren from a windshield bursts to life once you start walking it. Barrel cacti stretched their pink quills toward the sky. I rubbed the tiny green leaves and yellow flowers of a creosote bush between my fingers, releasing that exquisite tannic scent of the desert after a hard rain. Kristen reflected a beam of sunlight off a mirror and into a burrow, but no one was home. I told her that in all my years of desert rambling, I’d never seen a tortoise.

“We haven’t seen one for the past three days,” she said.

We walked in deafening wind, up and over jagged rock piles, across sandy bajadas. Every 500 meters, Mike and Kristen  logged a waypoint.

“Two at 8:50, zero, no, observer one,” said Kristen.

Mike began to read from his GPS: “Five one three, nine six four, three eight three….”

Kristen repeated back the digits. “Good grab.”

As they walked, they didn’t stare at the ground beneath them so much as they scanned it. On this six-week hitch, they were averaging 1.37 tortoises per transect, but we hadn’t seen any today.

“Never before have so many walked so far and looked so hard to see so little,” said Mike.

A few hours in, crossing the sandy flats, Mike called out in front of us, “Tort!” He had spotted a mottled brown shell tucked into a burrow beneath a creosote bush. Freshly dug sand had compelled him to crouch down and shine a flashlight inside. Donning rubber gloves, Kristen pulled the reptile from its hole, and I got my first look. The tortoise—about the size of my kid’s bike helmet—was perfectly still and kept its head buried in its shell. Let’s face it: it’s not as thrilling as glimpsing a wolf in the wild. And yet to actually see a desert tortoise with its prehistoric armor was a reminder of how many millions of years longer than us these things have been walking the earth.

Mike and Kristen measured the tortoise and epoxied a tiny numbered tag to its shell. Although the disease that killed so many turtles had peaked, handlers still treated them like COVID patients, careful not to pass anything to the next specimen they touched. “He’s missing a foot,” Kristen noted. They speculated that it might have been chewed off by a coyote or a feral dog. I had an urge to lay my palms over its shell but suddenly worried that I’d somehow kill the animal, or at least badly disturb it. Kristen gently placed it back in the hole.

An hour later, she found a second tortoise—this one much larger—tucked into a tiny cave on a steep, rocky slope. What I’d like to impress upon you is that both these tortoises had been invisible to the naked eye, not merely camouflaged but underground, detectable only by skilled counters, who’d learned to read fresh disturbance in the sand. When I pointed hopefully to a hole I’d seen, Mike took a quick glance. “Nah, that’s just a fox.”

Mike and Kristen love this work and the freedom it affords them. They earn a good living doing this and similar fieldwork just six months a year. The rest of the time they tool all around the west, as well as Baja and Alaska, in their truck. “I always sleep better with wheels under me,” Mike said. “With a home on your back, you can crawl into your shell. When I’m at my house, I’m overwhelmed by all the things I have to do.”

In the spring of 1993, tortoise biologists Pam and Craig Knowles parked their motor home in the lot at Circus Circus, on the Vegas Strip. Unlike most of their colleagues, Pam and Craig had children, a toddler and an infant, who traveled with them. That morning, before their ten-hour trek, the couple had dropped the kids off with a babysitter. Then they set out on a dirt road west of the city that led past bulldozers and into creosote flats where a new freeway would be built. The two were with their colleague and friend Sally Olson, and all three were in the vicinity of their forties then. They wore thrift-store trousers and dress shirts to protect against the sun. Pam and Sally carried umbrellas. “I don’t like the desert heat,” Pam said recently.

Shortly after noon that day, Sally made an odd discovery: a wad of cash that appeared to be stained with dried blood. She unrolled the paper. Thirty-eight dollars.

They smelled decaying flesh. Partly covered by sand, wrapped in some sort of bedspread, was—something. “At first we thought it was dead dogs,” Craig said, noting that locals sometimes buried their pets there. Then Craig found a clump of long blond hair.

The coyotes had discovered the body first. Craig pulled back the quilt to reveal human bones and a woman’s clothing. “There were two spent shotgun shells,” he told me.

It was clear that the woman had been dead for some time, so the trio finished their survey. Then they trekked back to the car, drove to a pay phone, and led the police back to the site. The cops located a skull not far from the quilt. “She’d been shot through the temple,” Craig said.

Pam and Craig checked in with the detectives after two months, six months, a year. Thirty years passed. No one claimed the woman they’d found.

Several of the Shadow Mountain victims were not immediately identified. The local newspaper published a drawing of a dead man’s face not unlike the coffin portraits of Wild West gunslingers. Beside it was a photo of his chest tattoo, which said “Gia” or maybe “Gio.” There was an entreaty to help identify him. All six victims were Latino men.

The police did not take long to arrest five suspects, finding them nearby at a pot-farm compound five days later. The sheriff said that marijuana was the driving force behind the killings. In a bizarre unintended consequence of California’s 2016 decriminalization of cannabis, unlicensed weed operations have flourished in the Mojave, and alongside them violence. The amount of cash saved from avoiding licenses and regulations is massive, while the misdemeanor consequences of getting caught growing illegally can be as minimal as a $500 ticket. The desert’s isolation and year-round sunshine offer ideal conditions for growing. All that’s needed is water, which can be taken from an abandoned well or stolen from a city hydrant, along with protection against rival gangs.

As I followed Mike and Kristen toward civilization the next morning, we saw abandoned farms: fences made of particleboard and metal stakes, shreds of plastic sheets rippling in the wind and strewn across the brush. Speedboats baked on trailers with deflated tires, graffiti was scrawled on boarded-up houses and broken-down RVs. We found the contents of someone’s home dumped onto a two-track road, a gun safe cut from the floor and pried open.

We drove south toward Joshua Tree. The desert gentrified. The hardscrabble ranchettes I remember from my teenage years spent rock-climbing out here sat beside new homes—brutalist rectangles of concrete, glass, and corrugated steel, as if Frank Lloyd Wright had decided to design storage units. I checked into the Safari Motor Inn, where in a paved courtyard ringed with chain-link, potted cacti collected cigarette butts. When we parted ways that night after dinner, Mike and Kristen were still debating the murder transect.

“What would you think if we assigned it to ourselves?” said Kristen.

“I’d probably do it,” said Mike.

On the grounds of the Mojave Desert Land Trust, a nonprofit in Joshua Tree that acquires land to protect as habitat, I met executive director Kelly Herbinson, a woman in a duck canvas coat and leather boots, her sandy hair whipping in the wind. Herbinson had been chasing tortoises for over two decades. She told me about her first hitch as an idealistic biologist who thought the work would allow her to connect with nature, but instead found herself trudging along a gas pipeline near Barstow, the industrial hub of the Mojave. She was 24 and had never even seen a desert tortoise. What the fuck did I do? she asked herself.

Herbinson warmed to the work quickly. She sold her possessions, ditched her apartment, and bought a 1989 Nissan truck topped with a Wildernest rooftop tent. During her first stint, she camped in the desert with two dozen turtle counters for three months. “It was like meeting my family for the first time,” she said. “They lived the way people are meant to live, walking all day through the most beautiful landscapes. It was physically challenging, and we cared deeply for one another. We stumbled into this magical thing.”

But tort world changed. A year after the animal’s 1990 listing threatened to shut down new construction around Las Vegas, builders and agencies engineered a swap: public lands near the city would be developed, while lands further afield were protected as habitat. The critters themselves would be picked up, delivered to a conservation center at the city limits, then translocated to the sticks.

The plan succeeded for builders but largely failed the tortoise. At the conservation center—which some turtle counters referred to as the concentration camp—thousands of animals that tested positive for the illness were euthanized, and in 2013 it closed due to budget cuts.

Nevertheless, mitigation became a common practice among developers and land managers: construction could proceed as long as they hired a crew of counters to remove the tortoises from the building sites. And the pay for doing so was more than twice as much as walking line distance. Turtle counters could earn $1,000 per day on the construction projects while living on the cheap. They weren’t motel types, Herbinson told me. “Why would you be when you have a sweet truck?”

After about a decade counting turtles for what felt like the benefit of the species, Herbinson took a job on the site of one of the nation’s more ambitious solar energy projects, the Ivanpah generating station near the Nevada–California border. The year was 2011, the threat of global warming was urgent, and the promise of renewable energy seduced just about everyone on the left up to President Barack Obama. Even as she knew the project would tear up miles of tortoise habitat, she wanted to help save them.

Soulful wandering was replaced with the grim monitoring of smoke-belching road graders. “Instead of just counting tortoises, now we were attaching radio transmitters and clearing them out of their homes. I was watching the bulldozers mow down Joshua trees and collapse the empty burrows, thinking: This can’t be the solution to climate change,” Herbinson said.

The 14-hour days were taxing. “A lot of politicians doing ribbon cuttings,” she remembered, “and calling it a win for green energy.” But within a few years Herbinson, like many of her coworkers, was able to buy a house, hers near Joshua Tree.

“We have to stop losing land,” Herbinson said. “[The tortoises] are never going to survive if we keep destroying biodiversity.” She explained that fossil-fuel and electrical companies won’t support less destructive—and less lucrative—strategies like rooftop solar panels that allow homeowners to sell back to the grid. Hence large projects like Ivanpah. “The only way we can make renewables is if the energy corporations get rich.”

“I think the desert tortoise will be extinct in 100 years,” she said. “We have ten years to save them.”

Paul Frank texted me a story headlined, “Body identified 31 years after biologist spotted remains in Nevada desert.”

The article detailed how a woman was found on what was then still the outskirts of Las Vegas, where Tropicana Avenue petered into two-track and cut across miles of sage and yucca—prime tortoise habitat. Police called her Jane Tropicana Doe. She was found in 1993, and the coroner ruled that she’d been murdered in 1991. In early 2024, with DNA testing, she was identified as Linda Sue Anderson. This was the body Pam and Craig had found so many years ago. After I saw Anderson’s daughter interviewed by a Las Vegas reporter, I looked her up.

“Inside I’m dying,” Mical told me on one of our subsequent Zoom calls. “I want to go into a corner into a fetal position.” She wanted her mother’s murder solved. And she was tormented. “I’m hoping they did hit her good the first time so she didn’t have to suffer,” she said, referring to the two shotgun shells that the turtle counters had found alongside Linda’s body. “The rest was just out of anger. I think about how scared she must have been.”

Mical had long, dark, curly hair, and an easy smile despite her grief. She was married and living in Canada when I reached her. All those years—decades, a lifetime—wondering where your mom is, why she won’t talk to you, come to your wedding, meet her grandchildren, only to learn that whole time she’d been dead, murdered, left to the coyotes and then buried in a potter’s-field cemetery in Las Vegas called the Garden of Hope.

Up to now, I’d thought this was a story about a bunch of eccentric nomads. As for the bodies they came upon, I had adopted their somewhat hard-boiled attitude that it was part of the job. I hadn’t anticipated finding a grieving daughter at the end of the road. But now it hit me. Though I could not fathom Mical’s grief, I could imagine something like it, having laid my own baby boy into a coffin some years before. Even as I set out for California, my second son, who was four, had just spent two nights in the hospital with viral pneumonia, tangled up in oxygen and IV tubes, and I wept beside his bed, his brother’s spirit never far. I’m haunted by kids separated from their parents, mothers from their babies.

“I had to joke around that my own mom blocked me,” Mical said. She managed to smile at this memory. “I wanted her to be happy and live the life she wanted to live, even if it wasn’t with us.”

Mical had never given much thought to desert tortoises, and now considered how their fragile existence was somehow connected to her mother’s fate. “Maybe without them, she wouldn’t have been found.”

At dawn I cleared out of the Safari Motor Inn and drove toward Nevada. Before me the pale moon beamed atop San Gorgonio Mountain, while in the mirror the fat sun rolled over Twentynine Palms Highway. Joshua trees glimmered in the first rays of light.

A text from Mike:

We got through the scary zone in one piece. One of our crews watched a pot grow get busted with helicopters and the whole works, through binoculars. Not far from the murder site. It’s the wild west for sure.

At a shadeless gas station in Barstow, a hatchback parked at the pump in front of me had all its cargo covered in black plastic, either because the roof leaked or because the driver was transporting a dead body.

I drove northeast into Nevada. Dust devils rose up from the flats. The desert was even sparser now. I wound through the blooming yellow flowers of the Amargosa Valley and over a brown mountain pass, where a snow-covered peak came surprisingly into view. I coasted into Pahrump Valley, less than 50 miles from Las Vegas but resonant with that empty-desert feeling.

At a T in the road, I met a pair of sun-beaten desert denizens: Kevin Emmerich, a former ranger at Death Valley National Park, and Laura Cunningham, a biologist and onetime turtle counter. Both are now activists who cofounded the nonprofit Basin and Range Watch, which works to conserve California and Nevada deserts. Gray hair spilled from their wide-brimmed hats. We crossed the road to a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Inside: the silent radiance of hundreds of solar panels tilted toward the sun.

“There it is,” said Cunningham. “The monstrosity.”

The 3,000-acre Yellow Pine Solar Project is expected to power 100,000 homes. To be sure, the electricity won’t go to nearby Las Vegas. The customers are in California, where strict environmental laws push industry elsewhere. San Bernardino County has even banned large-scale solar projects. So the energy farms are coming to Nevada, providing its polarized politicians a rare chance to agree: Republicans like energy, and Democrats love solar.

The panels whirred and clicked as they adjusted to the dropping sun. Emmerich and Cunningham were in an even lonelier position than the average earth activist. Large solar farms in Pahrump Valley were supported by the Nature Conservancy, the National Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society, and Defenders of Wildlife, in part because the lands were deemed to have lower ecological value. More broadly, the rush to build solar in this part of the desert makes sense when you consider that 28 million people—8 percent of Americans—live in Southern California and Las Vegas. Everyone wins. Except the tortoise. Emmerich told me that during pre-construction of Yellow Pine, which coincided with a historic drought, 139 tortoises were moved across the highway. The animals don’t immediately dig new burrows; tortoises maintain a wide berth from one another and aren’t welcomed into new territory. Often they simply try to walk home, exposing themselves to predators. “We tracked a translocated male that walked 20 miles in two weeks, then hit the fence,” Cunningham said. Thirty-three of the moved tortoises were killed by badgers.

Each year their territory dwindles, and so do their numbers. I spoke to Patrick Donnelly from the Center for Biological Diversity. For the biologists working with developers—the “mitigation-industrial complex,” as he calls it—Donnelly has little patience. He’s also dubious of any counting that isn’t paired with protection. “If the desert tortoise goes extinct, it will be the best-studied extinction in history.”

Pam and Craig Knowles offered to meet with Linda’s daughters. I gathered them on a Zoom call. Pam and Craig are in their late sixties and early seventies now, raising bison in Montana. Their children are grown. Their Australian shepherd made its way briefly onto the screen. Pam and Craig recounted the story of finding Linda.

Dulcenea, now in her forties, with sharp features and straight black hair pulled back with a headband, told us how she’d gotten the news: she was on a playdate with both her children when a call came from the Clark County coroner. It must be about Linda, was her first thought. Linda was identified when her DNA was matched with her brother, Mical and Dulcenea’s uncle. Mical said that Linda’s five other siblings had died young.

The sisters no longer had any connection to Las Vegas, and they planned to exhume their mom and bring her to Washington State, where they both live now.

“I’m sad my brother isn’t here,” said Dulcenea. “He was so little and didn’t get the help and understanding. He wasn’t able to know this, to know he wasn’t abandoned.”

“We’ve had a lot of loss,” Mical said. As a nurse, “helping others has helped me heal.”

Dulcenea added that all the siblings had careers that involved caring for others. “We’re very proud of this.”

“And your mother would be, too,” said Pam.

“You found our mom,” Mical told them, “and you took care of her. We really appreciate it.”

It was a quick jaunt from Pahrump through the Spring Mountains to a commanding view of the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building, down to the valley where billboards shouted “New Homes at Desert’s Edge,” in a sea of two-story stucco cubes roofed with terracotta, spaced about three feet apart. I crossed five miles of Starbucks and Jamba Juices, punctuated by a big blue Ikea, to reach the corner of Tropicana and Durango, where, decades before any of the surrounding suburbia was built, Linda Sue Anderson was found.

The six-lane boulevards hummed as they intersected. The remote piece of desert that Pam and Craig Knowles had traversed was now a strip mall with a Pin Up Nail Bar and Island Pacific Seafood Market done in mustard and coral. There was no open land where a tortoise might dwell or a killer might bury a body. The Filipino fish market piped in Asian pop music and sold banana leaves stuffed with sticky sweet rice and whole lechon—a smooth roasted red piglet billed as “Crispylicious!”

Of the turtles and the bodies in the desert, the biologist Tim Shields had told me: “I think of the contrast between these ancient, highly attuned desert organisms fully dialed into how to survive, and then these crazy monkeys running around offing each other. Tortoises are completely sane, because they can’t survive without being solely focused on it. We’re so pampered with resources, and we just piss things away.”

That night I walked a six-mile transect through Las Vegas. I didn’t see any tortoises. I saw a man in a wheelchair holding a trash bag of aluminum cans with his teeth. I saw Astroturf coated with dust like it needed to be watered. A billboard read “Injured while searching for dead bodies in Lake Mead? Demand compensation.” I crept into the electric tunnel of Fremont Street, where the sky was blotted out, replaced by a vast screen flashing commercials and sports scores. The world churns forward as if none of us has lost what we love the most.

I’d been away from home eight days now, and suddenly the amount that I missed my own son ripped me open. He’d been so frail in that hospital bed. It was too late to call. Night fell over the glowing city, and still I walked. How do you love your child from a distance, from across the heavens when one of you has passed into the other realm? My path led to the mall. It was open late. I bought a pair of tiny black suede sneakers to bring home to my son. I walked toward the hotel toting this ridiculous purchase in a plastic sack that bounced with each step. Unworn child’s shoes. I was treading dark water now, longing for my first baby boy, who never wore shoes of any size, whose tiny feet had been inked and stamped onto a pad of paper by the kindly nurses, a memento that is now propped on our chest of drawers. Why can’t we and our children be together?

Months passed. I checked in with Mical and Dulcenea. They had received little word about their mother’s case, except that their stepfather was still alive. The Las Vegas investigator told me that the police had interviewed him and that he’d fully cooperated. I found a few phone numbers for him, but they were disconnected or just kept ringing.

The sisters had suffered enough to explode an entire planet. When I Zoomed with Mical, she looked me in the eyes and said, “There’s a whole world out there, and we’re just like ants on it.”

Or else we’re tortoises, trying to find our burrow, our mate, a patch of open desert to roam.

Pam and Craig had told me in detail about the day they discovered Linda Sue Anderson. When they brought the police to the burial site, the cops set up a perimeter and asked the tortoise hunters to stay out while they combed the desert. Pam couldn’t resist helping. From outside the police line, she hollered: “Oh, there’s a bone to your left!”

As Pam and Craig remember it, the sergeant finally told the policemen to get out of the way and sent the biologists back in. They had sharp eyes and good instincts for finding signs of life and death. That’s what turtle counters do: they see the essential things to which the rest of us are blind. Pam and Craig and Sally crossed the police line and located the rest of a mother’s remains scattered across the sand.

If you have any information about the murder of Linda Sue Anderson, call the Crime Stoppers of Nevada tip line at (702) 385-5555.

Mark Sundeen’s latest book, Delusions + Grandeur: Dreamers of the New West, will be published in February. He teaches environmental writing at the University of Montana.

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