The Queen of the Desert


How Susan Sorrells transformed a Death Valley mining village into a model of ecologically conscious tourism.
Photographer: Kovi Konowiecki
Publisher: The New Yorker
Format: Digital
Date: 2022/01/04

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The Shoshone Education and Research Center is led by the geologist Darrel Cowan. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
Sorrells is the chief custodian of Shoshone; the seventy-four-year-old owns the village and a thousand acres of land around it. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
At the Crowbar Café, you may run into biologists from U.C. Davis, race-car drivers, massage therapists, and deputies from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
Shoshone’s market is named after Sorrells’s grandfather, Charles Brown. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
As of the 2010 census, Shoshone’s population numbered only thirty-one. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
The desert can be “a place not about extracting resources but about cohabiting with nature,” Sorrells said. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
Brown kept manning the gas pumps at the market even after he became a California state senator. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
Creatures that can survive in the desert tend to be hardy, but human destruction has pushed several species to the brink of extinction. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
The Shoshone Museum documents the town’s scrappy past as a mining community. Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker
Sorrells joined forces with state agencies and biologists to foster a habitat in Shoshone for pupfish—tiny, minnow-like fish that were once thought to be extinct there.  Photograph by Kovi Konowiecki for The New Yorker

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