(upbeat music) - Death Valley: A Land of Extremes. The Funeral Mountains, Coffin Canyon. The lowest place in
the Western Hemisphere. 130 degree weather, why, that's
the hottest place on Earth! After a day in Death Valley, pop over the eastern
mountains to the middle of absolute nowhere and
visit this little hole in the middle of the desert. (desolate music) I wish to speak now to one
person and one person alone and that person is Rolf Hirsch. - Here. - Rolf Hirsch came to visit Devils Hole and gave it one star, saying,
quote, "Nothing Spectacular." To be fair to Rolf this is a caged walkway surrounded by a chain link
fence over a tiny little hole in the middle of the desert. But, if we do our job
right today we are going to convince you, Rolf,
that that little hole is intellectually and emotionally and historically spectacular. (eerie music) What if I told you that that little hole contained magically missing corpses, Charles Manson's race strategy and the rarest fish in the world. Would that be worth five stars? - Well maybe? - We're sure gonna try. It's hard to imagine that the
land around the Devil's Hole, now known as Ash Meadows
National Wildlife Refuge, wasn't always a desert. 10,000 to 12,000 years ago
Death Valley and it's environs were home to enormous bodies of water; lakes miles long and
hundreds of feet deep. But in those tens of thousands of years, the water and the animal life it supported have mostly disappeared. Species that have
survived against all odds did so by stealing away to small nooks and
crannies in Death Valley. The Devil's Hole is one such nook, a 60,000 year old geothermal pool, described as a "gash" in the earth, unassuming, deceptively tiny. Well it was unassuming,
now it's surrounded by security cameras and barbed wire. The water in the hole is warm, up to 100 and consistently around
93 degrees Fahrenheit or 34 degrees Celsius, it's
saltier that the ocean, it's deprived of most oxygen, only gets a few hours of
direct sunlight a day, truly no animal life would
find the pool hospitable. "Hold my beer." said Cyprinodon diabolis, or the Devil's Hole pupfish. These adorable desert
cuties have been thriving in Devils Hole for thousands of years. Wait, is this video about a fish? Yes, it's about a fish, but existentially it's a tale of humans insatiable desire to meddle with mortality and death. - Sure it is. - Let me emphasize this:
the Devils Hole pupfish can only exist at the Devils Hole. I'm not being dramatic, the
pupfish are the smallest, most isolated vertebrate
population in the world. No one can say how they even got there. Were the original indigenous
tribes in the area intentionally moving pupfish? Carried by an ancient stream? Overflowing water levels? I don't know, alien stuff? As for the pupfish themselves,
they are mild mannered, bright blue or olive colored,
less than 2 inches long, biologically unique, and
less than 200 in number. Conservationists have tried
to preserve this specific subspecies by moving them to
other, larger desert pools and hoping they'll fortify their stock by breeding with other kinds of pupfish. And it never works. (Rolf sniggers) One species they've tried to put them with are the Amargosa pupfish. The Amargosa are the
larger, pushier cousins of the Devil's Hole pupfish. They're tenacious, they're
territorial, they're survivors. When bred with the Devils Hole pupfish, the dominant characteristics
of the Amargosa pupfish take over, and the Devils Hole pupfish just become Amargosa pupfish. The Devil's Hole pupfish on the other hand are like the Bratz doll version
of the Amargosa pupfish. They maintain multiple
juvenile characteristics into adulthood, so they've
got these big kewpie doll eyes and big heads and wittle fins. They're just smaller,
they're not territorial, they're a little needy, they're just trying to be your friend. They're like those little
teacup Pomeranians, just defenseless. I should mention, there
was another subspecies, the Tecopa pupfish, that lived in the nearby Tecopa Hot springs. They were able to thrive in waters as hot as
108 degrees Fahrenheit. These were tough fish,
but they were no match for the spa and bathhouse
that humans came in and built in 1965. And they're
destroyed now, they're gone. But here's the question we will keep coming back to: so what? - My point exactly. - Many conservationists mourned
the loss the Tecopa pupfish, but when the biologist Christopher Norment asked a worker at the Tecopa
Hot Spring about the pupfish, their response was, "I
think they were pretty tiny, not much good for anything. You couldn't eat them. Not like trout." - That's what I'm talking about. - Is that the question we should be asking when deciding whether or not
a species deserves saving? "What purpose do they serve
for people? Can we eat them? Can we make them into fishsticks?" - That's what I'm talking about. - Or is the question more, is it our fault that they're dying? Is this on humanity and
our desire for sprawl and building Targets and
hot springs bathhouses? - I love Target. - So, the Devil's Hole
pupfish, the specialest pupfish of them all, have to
live at the Devil's Hole. Not only that, even though the hole is perhaps the deepest
underwater cave in America, spooky, at well over 500 feet deep, that's not all pupfish territory. The pups live in only a tiny
rock shelf at the very top about 8 and a half feet
wide and 20 feet long, like their own studio
apartment in New York City. It's just that one shelf
that has the perfect soup of sunlight, nutrients,
bacteria, and plantlife, this shelf is a pupfish paradise. If they were allowed to
just hang out there forever in perfect bliss and big eyed harmony, maybe we wouldn't be
having this conversation. But, issue one, nature is
interconnected and always changing in ways we don't even understand. For example, the veins and
arteries of the Devil's Hole complex reach much farther
than the wee opening at the top would suggest. Earthquakes happening all around the world can be recorded at Devils Hole. In 2012 a 7.4 magnitude
earthquake struck Oaxaca, Mexico causing waves up to 5-feet to lap at the walls of Devils Hole, flushing away debris from
the pupfish's habitat. And issue two, humans
have always been drawn by the mysterious pull
of the Devil's Hole. Jim Houtz a diver who
mapped the Hole in 1965 and completed over 300 dives there, said: "It's beautiful in there.
It goes straight down, like a pipe, then opens into a room. The bottom of the room
narrows into another tube. At the end of the tube it opens
again into something else. We don't know what the next room is, or if it's a room at
all. It's like infinity." Alan Riggs, who dove Devils Hole in 1976, called it, "like being
the first person to enter a fresh opened Egyptian tomb." The tomb comparison is apt. The indigenous Timbisha
Shoshone tribe have a myth that if a person lingers
too long at the mouth of the Devils Hole, creatures
known as "water babies" would grab them and swallow them up. - Huh. Sure, whatever. - On a June night in 1965,
19-year-old Paul Giancontieri, his 20-year-old brother-in-law David Rose, and their friends, brothers
Bill and Jack Alter, crawled under the fencing
that enclosed Devils Hole, donned SCUBA equipment,
tromped past the pupfish, and dove in. Descending into the darkness, even with bright diving lights, Bill and David became separated from Paul. Said Jim Houtz, who would end
up being one of the rescue divers for this incident,
"Once you round that first bend at 90 feet, you don't know what dark is." When, after midnight,
Paul did not surface, Bill and David dove
again to search for him, but at around 175 feet Bill
also lost sight of David. Neither Paul nor David
would ever surface again. A rescue team of divers
was dispatched in the hopes that Paul and David had
found one of the air pockets that exist in the caverns. As we know from the dramatic
rescue in Thailand in 2018, small air pockets can save lives. But the search was called
off after 36 hours, the only remnants of the
divers they ever found being a mask, a snorkel, and
a flashlight tied at 100 feet in a vain attempt to mark the way out. Really thought we'd get through this year without another terrifying
cave diving tragedy but, I think this year taught us you can't always get what you want. - Duh! - Then, just a few years
after the two boys vanished into the Devil's Hole, and
just months before the infamous Manson Family murders terrorized
Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Charles Manson
shows up at Devil's Hole. Manson loved Devils Hole. He talked about it in multiple songs. ♪ It's deeper than the Devils Hole ♪ - If we get copyright claimed
for a Charles Manson song, I swear to God! You've probably heard the
phrase "Helter Skelter." Manson believed there
was a coming race war, Black versus White,
inspired by secret messages in The Beatle's White Album. The Manson family and the
Beatles would win the war and rise up as the
leaders of this new world. The Beatles were unaware of this. The way the story goes is
that Manson is wandering the desert for days looking
for this mythical Devils Hole and when he gets here,
he sits at the entrance and meditates for three days. What comes to him is that all the water in the Devils Hole has to
go, it has to be drained out because the water is blocking the entrance to this underground cavern,
an underground paradise beneath Death Valley,
where water from the lake would give everlasting life and you could eat a fruit
from 12 magical trees, a different one for
every month of the year. This is where his followers
were going to seek shelter during this helter-skelter,
this apocalyptic race war. When it's all over, they
will emerge above ground into a purified world. But he was arrested before
he could drain Devil's Hole and make it his apocalypse bunker. But it turns out Manson
wasn't the only one looking to drain the hole of water. That's right we also thought
we'd make it through the year without another deep
dive into water politics. It's what? March? - Who even knows anymore? - In 1967, this is right
in the middle of the diving accident and Manson's
apocalypse bunker plan, the Devils Hole pupfish
were named on the first list of endangered species, what would become the
Endangered Species Act of 1973. That same year, the Spring
Meadows ranching corporation began buying up 5,000 acres
of Ash Meadows property from the government to turn into farmland. How do you turn a desert
that gets less than 4 inches of rain every year into lush farmland? By drilling wells and pumping water. When this drilling started,
water in the Devils Hole immediately started to
fall by almost 3 feet. Threatening the pupfish!
(dramatic music) In 1969 the private Desert Fishes Council and the federal Pupfish Task
Force came to the conclusion that you can't have your
farm and your pupfish too, pumping water would destroy them. - Fine by me. - The plight of the pupfish
was picked up by activists and the media and set
off years long battles between the ranching corporation, the Department of the Interior,
and the State of Nevada. While the pro-pupfish camp of
activists, conservationists, and scientists cheered-
- Hooray! - Many Nevada residents were angry because they felt that the
federal government was taking away Nevada's water jurisdiction rights in favor of 200 little
fish that nobody can see. - I certainly didn't see them. - The Desert Fishes Council
made a "Save the pupfish" bumper sticker and in response
the Nye County commissioner made a "Kill the pupfish" bumper sticker. The editor of the Elko Daily
Free Press suggested going over and dumping an insecticide
into Devils Hole to eradicate the problem fish and solve this "pupfish
Caper" once and for all. He was going to murder all the pupfish. Finally after years of
back and forth lawsuits, eventually making it to
the US Supreme Court, a ruling was upheld in
1976 deeming the pupfish "objects of historic
and scientific interest" and allowing the government to maintain a "minimum water level" at Devils Hole. The pupfish, the 200 in Devils
Hole at the time, rejoiced! - Hooray! - Or you know, just non-aggressively
swam on their shelf. ♪ Good morning starshine,
the earth says hello ♪ My impression of the pupfish. And what a triumph, by 1977 there were 553 pupfish in Devils Hole! The pupfish's future had been secured! Thank you so much for
watching today's video, oh, that's not the end? - I wish it was. - In 1980 the Preferred
Equities Corporation, if that doesn't sound like
an evil pupfish killing conglomerate I don't know what does, acquired the Ash Meadows
holdings and began moving forward with Calvada Lakes, a 13,000
acre, $250 million resort, residential, and commercial
development. Calvada Lakes! Bringing life to Death
Valley because we can hahaha! Calvada Lakes would decimate
not only the pupfish of Ash Meadows and Devils Hole, but a host of other endangered species. Just two years into the
project the Department of the Interior instated
an emergency protection that stopped the development,
and legal battle, legal battle, legal battle. In June of 1984 Ash Meadows
National wildlife Refuge was established by the US
Fish and Wildlife Service. But the pupfish remain precious
prima donnas of precarity. We already know if you move
the Devils Hole pupfish to other pupfish environments
they don't survive. They die off, mate away all their traits that make them special, or in
the case of one population, become quote, "misshapen". When the Endangered Species
Act was passed in 1973 there were about 220
Devils Hole pupfish left. Then by 2013 there were only 35 Devils Hole pupfish left in the world. But it seems like their
interventions lately have been working. In 2019, they counted 136 pupfish. Now, 2020 was a hard
year for all of us, so, how you doing down there pupfish? You doing okay? You hanging in there? Good luck, little pupfish. The pupfish population is so low, it would only take one intrepid hooligan to potentially wipe out
the Devil's Hole pupfish. - Now to the 13 Action News
update, two men pleaded guilty to killing an
extremely rare pupfish at Devils Hole in Death Valley. - Like 2016, when this gaggle of dudes went on an off-roading shooting spree drinking Malibu Rum and beer, broke into Devils Hole,
barfed in the water, went for a swim, left a
pair of boxers and beer cans floating in the pool, and killed at least
one of the 115 pupfish. - Cry me a river. - The main skinny dipper
and pupfish murderer went to prison for a year, for violating the Endangered Species Act. His father later told
Mother Jones that his son, "would just as soon give
first aid and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to that little pupfish than have this thing go on and on. He knows about endangered species, and he takes responsibility
for what he did." Ever since the incident
with the three men, this place has become even
more of a prison for pupfish. Barbed wire was added,
more security cameras, no trespassing signs. Now this goes against the ethos
of the National Parks system which is access and experience. In fact, if you go a
couple miles down the road you can squat down next to the pool that the Amargosa pupfish are in and see 'em swimming around
right before your eyes. This leaves the question, how far should we go to save
the Devils Hole pupfish? The answer, it seems, is very, very far. Enter the house that pupfish built. In 2013 the $4.5 million Ash
Meadows Fish Conservation Facility opened less than a
mile from the Devils Hole. It's a little state of the
art building in the desert where the ecosystem of Devils
Hole is precisely mimicked. From algae to diatoms, temperature
to shade, oxygen depleted water to a manmade shelf
for the little puppers. So far it seems to be working. In 2014, 29 honest-to-god
Devils Hole pupfish were raised to adulthood through the
work of the facility. By spring 2019, 136 pupfish
were counted in the Devils Hole the highest springtime count since 2003. By December of 2019,
between 50 and 75 pupfish were counted in the facility
tank, and as of February 2020, over 100 Devils Hole pupfish
were hatched in the facility. We believe that down this hidden road, blocked off road, do not enter road, is the $4.5 million
secret pupfish facility. It's like their celebrity spa. This is how serious they are
about protecting the pupfish. Not even the original pupfish, the additional colony of manmade pupfish. So now the pupfish have the world's most expensive tiny house. At this point, abandoning the pupfish, letting them fend for themselves, would mean being content
with their demise. We are not content with their
demise, their food, habitat, their well-being are closely monitored by government scientists. The pupfish basically have a staff. But and I'm being
intentionally provocative here is death so bad? - I don't know, you tell me. You're the mortician. - We've done our best for the pupfish, we stopped the big bad
corporations from depleting their habitat; we fought
to keep natural resources at optimal levels; we
constructed laws and literal barbed wire fences stopping
people from traipsing into Devils Hole and Hulk-smashing
or poisoning the pupfish. We've done a lot. And still the pupfish are inclined to paddle
off this mortal coil. - I still don't care. - Now, nobody wants the pupfish to die. - Kill the pupfish. - Okay, well, most people
don't want the pupfish to die. I'm trying to keep an open
mind here because my natural tendency is to say "throw all
the money at conservation! No money for war machines!
Save the pupfish!" but if you're already
pro-development, pro-business, animal apathetic, I see why
the 4.5 million pupfish house is going to seem like some
wacky liberal latte drinking conservationist nonsense. I see you seeing me, and you are correct. - I always am. - At the end of the
day, where I come down, and there's nuance here of
course, feel free to disagree, is that there is something highly unique about the Devils Hole, and highly unique about these extremely rare little pupfish. Whether or not you value
them, whether or not you think they'd make good fishsticks,
their rarity, their divergence, their small little
habitat, make them special. And it's exciting to
be able to use science and human ingenuity to
save something special. Those who say, "let's not do anything" are essentially arguing that
large scale corporate ranching or more suburban sprawl,
or gas stations or casinos are more special than the pupfish. And I think we all know gas stations aren't more special than the pupfish. Alright Rolf, do your worst. What are we at now? Three
stars? For effort at least? C'mon Rolf. - Heh, dream on! - #justiceforthedevilsholegooglerating This video was made
with generous donations from death enthusiasts, just like you. Good vibes to the pupfish. Woohoo. I'm sending my good vibes to the pupfish. Can you feel it. Devils Hole woohoo. Which threatens the pupfish. Strong Pisces energy to the pupfish. Again. Once more with feeling. Strong Pisces energy to the pupfish. I really do feel like
I have a booger issue. Oh my god, it's Pisces season. Strong Pisces energy to the pupfish. I don't usually have a booger issue but first time for everything. Most iconic fish. Usually I'm flawless and beautiful. Ne'er a flaw. (Caitlin mumbles) What other funny things
can I say to the pupfish? - Pup voyage. - No, not pup voyage. We need you to stay.
