Largest Lithium Deposit in North America holds Ancestral Stories of Climate Change in the McDermitt Caldera

The following article by Nikki Hill is based on research that was partially supported by funds from the NPSO’s Field Research Grants program. Kudos to Nikki for making the extra effort to provide these insights on their project. Their work illustrates the kind of research that NPSO supports via your membership and donations. This type of project harkens back to the earliest days of NPSO’s field research grants program when we were particularly interested in documenting the flora of special places such as Wilderness Study Areas. This study looked at the flora of an area of conservation concern with the added perspective of a focus on culturally important plants. – Dan Luoma

The sagebrush sea has held my attention, longing, and direction for going on eleven years. The smell of Artemisia tridentata is one from my childhood that, when I inhale it, fills me with the serenity of vast connection on my nomadic journey. I have spent my 30s following the seasons of wild food plants within the high desert of the Great Basin, returning to places annually while also expanding my range. These cyclical wanderings have been a seeking to understand human kinship within the fabric of ecology: how we belong and how we can come to remember this as we reassess our social/environmental relations and seek out the keys for a sustainable lifeway going forward.

Culturally important plants are those that hold fundamental roles in foraging and ceremonial practices that shape a cultural identity. Their persistence speaks to a longstanding cultivation, one in which horticultural tending has ensured the mutual survival of both plants and people. They are like fingerprints of cultural ecology, and the patterns of their occurrence in the landscape are telling stories of a deep interdependence, resilience and sophisticated collaboration with niches, topography, and climate.

My endearment for the various culturally important plants of the high desert led me to the more remote reaches of the sagebrush sea in far northwestern Nevada and southeastern Oregon. I first heard about the McDermitt Caldera when a camp was set up at Thacker Pass—known by local Paiute people as Peehee Mu’huh—in resistance to the development of a large-scale lithium mine. It had been a region that my mentor had mentioned as a corridor of travel where one could find food and water when navigating around the Alvord Desert; an area where the culturally important plants were present in abundance, having sustained a nomadic lifeway on foot or horseback for centuries. With the heat on to secure resources for a “green energy” transition, nearly the entire McDermitt Caldera has been staked out by lithium claims.

In April of 2023, I organized a Lithium Lands Fellowship with the non-profit educational organization Groundwork. Our intention was to floristically document the McDermitt Lithium Project claim held by Jindalee Resources, which potentially contains the largest lithium deposit in North America. This area is a giant sagebrush bowl just below the Northern rim of the McDermitt Caldera, held by the Oregon Canyon and Trout Creek Mountains. It is currently threatened by plans to increase exploratory drilling for mine development and has little-to-no floristic documentation on record. Our fellowship sought to connect people, plants, and data by sinking into the area for a five-week period. To do so, we set out with a map of the claim area on a relational tracking endeavor.

Plant tracking. The concept may land a bit funny at first, like, how do you follow plants? Don’t they stay where they are? It may be more accurate to say tracking plant patterns, but to do so one does end up tracking where the plants lead.

It was a very delayed spring following an exceedingly wet winter. We drove through a blizzard in central Nevada, arriving to news of blown-out access roads and a 19 degree Fahrenheit temperature. Once we scouted and set up camp, the winds were a constant blustery companion, attesting to the presence of three different climate zones in McDermitt Valley, apparently all interacting to create their own weather in this sagebrush bowl. Our beginning botany lessons began while the floral realm was holding tight in vegetative buds. The geophyte food plants, however, had already appeared, attesting to their high desert adaptations to start early! Each day we would pick up these plant trails and describe where they were found.

We started loosely mapping the patterns of the various culturally important plants, marking where they started and faded as best we could. But descriptions serve as a better map, in part because of the persistent presence of these plants: it’s not just one patch here and there, but a repeating pattern along the topography. Yellow bells (Fritillaria pudica) showed us how the adobe clay hills wick moisture from below to sustain mucilaginous starchy bulbs through their summer dormancy. Sprawling spring parsley (Cymopterus longipes var. ibapensis), its longevity ensured by a three-foot taproot, entertained us with the anatomical adaptations of developing a tall stilt to outpace and rise away from the scorching heat of the southern clay exposures, while flowers borne on tall upright stalks elegantly bend back to touch the soil surface as the seeds ripen, placing them perfectly for wind driven ground dispersal aided by their papery sails.

Micro terraces, created by cryptobiotic soil crusts, denote a very thin layer of life that remembers the seabed floor: a microcosm of diatoms and algae residing in a leathery skin of liverworts and lichens, becoming photosynthetically active only when wet in their ocean flashback. Here, marine creatures are called to mind in emerging bitterroots (Lewisia rediviva) resembling sea urchins, while the wavy leaves of two-edged onion (Allium anceps) seem shaped by some unseen current. These plant beings lead us further into layers of old stories, of densities along volcanic rock flows hinting at both the shaping of place by eruptions of fire and the persistence of lakes fifteen million years past. Strewn petrified wood of winged elm (possibly Ulmus alata) and tanoak (Notholithocarpus sp.) speaks to a much wetter climate before the precipice of the Sierra Nevada range blocked the ocean moisture currents.

Of particular interest in this region, so prominent on the hills of western Nevada up into southeastern Oregon, are the rocky talus zones that resemble giant scratches. It was by tracking the presence of Bolander’s yampa (Perideridia bolanderi and other Perideridia spp.) that we illuminated their utility in this landscape. Yampa species have roots that taste like nutty carrots and are culturally important plants for a variety of Native American tribes across the western U.S. yampa can often be tracked up dry, rocky seasonal drainages. They have a particular requirement in these arid lands for landscape niches where seasonal water lingers a bit longer than the surrounding zones. These talus zones act as important micro niches in this arid environment as well: holding snow, water, and coolness to buffer plants from the hot dry conditions of summer. White rims could be seen along the talus edges later in spring, showing the intimate relation of water held by rock for yampa to bloom en masse. These natural niches were noticed by ancestral indigenous people following their food plants, and tending would have involved some degree of anthropogenic lithic rearrangement to enhance wild plant niches and support seasonal subsistence.

I had the good fortune to bring an archaeologist out to the site later that spring. By returning to places where yampa was the densest, and tracking obsidian and chert fragments, we were able to find lithic diagnostics that point towards 8000 years of human habitation and a possible upland village site. This tracking thread aligns with a story of climate change from the Middle Archaic period in the Great Basin when the lakes began to dry out and people adopted lifeway adaptations higher up in the watersheds.

The sagebrush sea is keeping time, not in minutes and days, but in relations and adaptation. The story of the landscape is broader than a particular site, as these stories have roots that walk between them. However, the memory held in the hills gets fragmented with the fragmentation of the landscape. The ways in which humans of the Great Basin found resilience in these upland plant niches could hold valuable clues to illuminate a new chapter of continuance in the face of drastic changes we face today. How will we remember the bigger movements of the ocean if we destroy the memory of the water?

This area of the McDermitt Caldera contains some of the last suitable dancing grounds for Greater- Sage Grouse, is considered critical rearing ground for Lahontan cutthroat trout to seed the rest of Nevada, and has cultural significance in need of further representation. If the sagebrush sea also calls your name, this area is worthy of a visit with some time to sink in to the layers of deep time, migrations, and resilience, and to help protect it for future generations of humans, animals, and plants alike. – Nikki Hill