Moments in Time with Dave Van Cleve: Paleontology at the Park
David Van Cleve has many ties to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and Anza-Borrego Foundation. In the 1980s, he was an environmental scientist in the San Diego regional office, where he collaborated with park staff on many significant natural resource projects. In 1989, he was selected to serve as the superintendent of the state park. In 1994, his responsibilities were expanded to include management of six other state parks (Mt. San Jacinto, Cuyamaca Rancho, Palomar Mountain, Salton Sea, Picacho, and Indio Hills) in addition to Anza-Borrego. After retiring from state service, he worked for The Nature Conservancy as Ecoregional Director for the South Coast Ecoregion and added over 1,000 acres to the Park. Each month, Dave will fill in some important issues in the history Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, which often dove-tail with the history of ABF. We are grateful for his wealth of knowledge of the Park and willingness to share with us!
And now, Dave’s latest: Paleontology at the Park
Once you dip your toe into local paleontology, it’s easy to get excited about it. This is a terrific way to look into the distant past. On your journey, you also learn about geology, climate change, biology, evolution, hydrology, and plate tectonics. It is also a good way to explore badlands. These heavily eroded, beautiful sedimentary layers house many of the fossils found in the Park.
In Anza-Borrego, you wind up looking at the landscape differently. The impacts of the Colorado River (which used to come through the eastern part of the Park), the immense ancient Lake Cahuilla, and the presence of marine sediments and fossils are mind-boggling at first. Trying to picture the region without the Peninsular Range on the west and the Santa Rosa transverse range to the north and their cumulative impact on the region stretches the imagination. You have to squint to see the landscape as a savannah with a totally different collection of plants and animals. Really? There were mammoths, camels, saber-tooth cats, early horses, giant tortoises, sloths, and short-faced bears roaming around? There is a three-mile-deep column of sediment that noted paleontologist Ted Downs called “one of the most remarkably complete sequences of animal life to be found anywhere in the world.” Incredible!
For an excellent history of paleontology efforts and discovery at the Park, read Barbara Mars’ chapter in Fossil Treasures by our own George Jefferson and Lowell Lindsay. I will focus on the advancements made since 1990.
In the 1980s, paleontology at the Park was a valuable and growing program. Professor George Miller of Imperial Valley College led the efforts of dozens of park volunteers to survey and collect the Park’s fossils. The knowledge base grew, as did the collections at the park headquarters. Miller served as instructor to the volunteers and ensured that the collection and field surveys were managed professionally.
When I arrived as the Park Superintendent in late 1989, I knew very little about the Park’s paleontology or its program. Basically, I was encouraged to meet and learn from Professor Miller. Unfortunately, he passed away before we had the chance to meet. I turned to several prominent volunteers for advice.
Betty Stout was a winter resident of Borrego Springs and an avid amateur paleontologist. She recognized the need for professional curation of the Park’s collections. Without an appropriate laboratory, many park fossils were being removed to remote locations at museums or colleges, usually based on which institution was sponsoring the surveys. Betty stepped up with several generous donations to create the Stout Lab that you see today behind the District Headquarters.
Harry and Julia Daniel were also big supporters. Harry, of course, was chairman of the board of Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association (ABDNHA), and you could often find Julia cleaning fossils in the lab. Harry encouraged me to get involved in the program.
George and Rosemary McDaniel were faithful volunteers as well. George was a career veterinarian. In retirement, he became a self-taught expert on the southern and Columbian mammoths of the Park. When it came time to expand the Stout Lab, George and Rosemary took it upon themselves to spend one summer visiting paleo labs throughout the country. He told me he would grill the lab managers about what worked and, especially, what could be improved upon if they had the opportunity to redesign them. He wanted to ensure that the expanded Stout Lab would be state-of-the-art.
So, with Professor Miller’s passing, we had a problem. Betty volunteered to lead the volunteer program, but she soon admitted she was not up to the task. With the primary goal of educating myself on how to manage the program, I convened a panel of experts – Dr. John White, Dr. Charles Hutchinson of the University of Arizona, the lead paleontologist for Dinosaur National Monument, Betty Stout, and George T. Jefferson of the LA County Museum (La Brea Tar Pits).
They soon came up with two major goals – create and fill a staff paleontologist position at the Park, and retrieve as many collections as possible from remote sites and house them at the proposed expanded Stout Lab. I don’t think they had any idea of how difficult it would be to create a new state park civil service position. Another small obstacle – nowhere in the state’s entire roster of hundreds of thousands of employees existed a civil service job entitled “paleontologist,” or anything close. Retrieving collections seemed almost as difficult. The third major goal for me was to ensure the highest level of professionalism among the staff and the volunteers. This involved the development of a training course, setting and maintaining standards, and regular meetings – in the classroom and in the field.
At about that time, a man living in Canebrake with his wife came to my attention. He told me his wife was a volunteer in the Park’s paleontology program. He owned a helicopter and told me a ranger had told him he could no longer land his helicopter in the Park and collect fossils with his wife. He told me his wife, since she was a trained volunteer, had been given a permit to collect fossils. They wanted permission to keep landing wherever they saw fit and collecting without supervision.
I told him that he could not land his helicopter in the Park, and he and his wife could no longer collect fossils unless it was part of a project under park staff supervision. (This is not just for paleo – it pertains to natural and historical resources as well). We went round and round. He kept coming back to “You don’t think my wife is a good paleontologist?” I kept coming back to “You and your wife are breaking several laws. I am going to uphold and enforce those laws. The first time I catch you, I will write you a citation. The second time, I will book you into the county jail.” I never heard from him again and received no reports from the rangers about his helicopter.
Throughout my career, I have been very fortunate. I think there is a saying somewhere along the lines of, “When opportunity knocks, open the door.” Or maybe it was, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it! Right around the same time as the turmoil in the paleo program, severe budget cuts threatened the park system. Creating a new civil service position, much less filling it, seemed unlikely.
The new State Parks Director, Donald Murphy, convened a committee composed of a wide variety of state park employees – park superintendents, maintenance chiefs, admin supervisors, ecologists, land acquisition specialists, archeologists, and planners. Their task was to invent a new parks department that was more effective and efficient while working with a reduced budget. It took three months of hard full-time effort, but they achieved their goals.
The most important outcome for the Colorado Desert District, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and the paleo program was the transfer of civil service positions to the field offices. These had to come from somewhere, and the committee’s plan was to take them from regional offices (like San Diego) and headquarters (Sacramento) and put them in the field – in this case, Borrego Springs. “Have experts work closer to where the field work exists” was the mantra of relocating positions. While the department’s overall workforce shrank, our district wound up with two environmental scientists, a planner, a land agent, two archeologists, an education specialist, and a GIS specialist. Fortune smiled again, since the education specialist had a major in electrical engineering, and he was able to guide our district through the internet tidal wave.
Wait, you say, where is the paleontologist? Patience, Grasshopper…
While I was delighted to receive two new archeologist positions, I believed the department had to pay more attention to its incredibly rich paleo resources. I needed to get creative to fill one of those with a paleontologist.
Around the same time, George Jefferson was looking to find a new job. As an experienced Pleistocene (Ice Age) paleontologist at the LA County Museum, he was the perfect candidate for Anza-Borrego.
Doing “the red-tape shuffle” takes time. While George was excited about the prospect of working at Anza-Borrego, the approval of the position switch was not fast-tracked. We were able to create a seasonal position for George, and then later he moved into the full-time slot. He worked diligently on retrieving some of the Park’s collections. Now that we had the ability and facilities to curate them properly, he had a stronger case to argue. George quietly earned respect for the park program from researchers, universities, and museums throughout the United States.
30 years later, George, Lynn Murray, excellent seasonal staff, and a multitude of volunteers have developed a professional program that we are all proud of.