Carrot Quinn volunteered with No More Deaths, an organization devoted to those who risk dehydration entering the US where the wilderness is a ‘weapon’

We’re walking in the Growler Valley near Ajo, Arizona, sidestepping around bristling cholla cactuses and traversing the deep, sandy washes that cut the land when we find the skull.

It’s a human skull resting in the center of an ocotillo – the desert plant with long, spiny arms that bloom red in the spring. The day is warm and bright, and the air, here in the Sonoran desert in December, is still. The arms of the ocotillo rise up around the skull like a cage.

I’m in the desert with No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid organization that, each year, enlists hundreds of volunteers to hike deep into the wilderness with thousands of gallons of water in an attempt to prevent death and suffering along the US-Mexico border. One of the volunteers, Genevieve Schroeder, tells me about the complicated process of remains recovery in situations such as this one as we carefully photograph and make GPS waypoints of the skull, as well as of the objects we find nearby – jeans and a shirt, rumpled and torn beneath a palo verde tree. A set of waterlogged sneakers. A torn blanket.

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Schroeder explains they will call the local sheriff’s office and give them the GPS waypoints, in hopes that they’ll drive out in their trucks and do a recovery, eventually passing the remains along to the medical examiner where they might be connected with a missing person’s case. All of this is best case scenario, however.

Earlier this week, another set of human remains – a mandible, some vertebrae, a couple of scattered rib bones – were found by No More Deaths volunteers near Hat Mountain, just north of where we are today.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Except for rare instances, there is no water in this desert.’ Photograph: Carrot Quinn

Finding human remains anywhere else in the US would be cause for public uproar – newspaper articles, grid searches, possible criminal investigation, a desperate scramble to connect the remains to a missing person. But not here, where we are, in the dry wilderness of southern Arizona, 40 miles from the US-Mexico border. Here, a person died an excruciating, untimely death far from the ones they loved, and their skull now rests in the center of an ocotillo bush, as though that was the most normal thing in the world.

I didn’t know I’d be stumbling on human bones when I first decided to spend the month volunteering with No More Deaths, whose work is funded entirely by donations. But after just a few days in the desert I realized that I, like many people in the US, had no idea how bad the situation really was.



People are dying here: since the 1990s, Border Patrol claims, 6,029 human remains have been found in southern Arizona along the US-Mexico border, although the real death count is very likely to be higher. Many more people have disappeared without a trace.

It wasn’t always this way; for decades, the route into the US was less hazardous to human life, and yearly deaths hovered in the single digits. Then, in the mid 1990s, the Border Patrol adopted a strategy called “prevention through deterrence”: urban areas were walled off and checkpoints were placed in such a way that people attempting to cross were funneled into the driest, most remote and brutal parts of the desert, far from roads, resources or possible rescue. In other words, the US Border Patrol used the desert wilderness as a weapon.

After the implementation of this tactic, the number of people dying in the desert each year quickly reached into the hundreds.

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The skull in the ocotillo still has its teeth. This is good. Teeth will help the medical examiner determine the identity of the skull. Every year, hundreds of missing persons are reported to humanitarian aid hotlines. Margo, one of the lawyers who works with No More Deaths, says: “Finding human remains is an incredible opportunity to provide closure to a family who has been waiting for news for a very long time.”

We crouch to get a closer look at the skull, and the smell hits me, along with a wave of shock. It’s a familiar smell, the smell of passing bloated roadkill while riding my bike in the country. The smell of a rat that once disappeared behind the clawfoot tub in my bathroom. We all take a step back, alarmed. The skull is not as old as we thought.

In 2014, a group of anthropologists dressed two pig carcasses in clothing similar to what migrants might wear and left them in the Sonoran desert near trees rigged with motion-sensor cameras, in order to learn how quickly bodies are dispersed by scavengers, and in what way. Their hope was that the information would be useful to those doing remains recovery work near the border. The anthropologists discovered that once scavengers (in this case vultures, coyotes and domestic dogs) began to feed on the carcasses, it was only 24 hours before all the flesh had been carried away and the remaining skeleton had been dispersed over a wide area.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A volunteer scouts routes across the Sonoran desert. Photograph: Carrot Quinn

The drive back to camp on the bumpy dirt road is surreal. Night has fallen, and on the horizon a lone rescue beacon flashes its blue light against the dark.

The beacon is a tall pole with a button and a drawing of a person holding a jug of water. Press this button, says a sign in both English and Spanish, and help will arrive. If water is what was really on offer, though, Border Patrol could have installed a large tank for a fraction of what the beacon cost. The beacon, which is closely monitored by Border Patrol, offers not water and salvation, but deportation. And possibly prison time as well – illegal re-entry carries a felony charge and up to 20 years.



There’s a potluck going on when we arrive back at camp – lots of people sitting in camp chairs, eating plates of food, talking and laughing around a huge fire. I have two friends visiting from Portland, and they wave at me from the fire. I realize that I’m expected to make small talk now, to sit with my friends and ask them about their drive. I start to shake.

Feeling cold, I boil water in the blue enamel kettle but I can hardly hold the mug; my hands are shaking too badly. Images of the skull begin to flash in my mind; that grinning hollow face, streaked with mud, staring up at us from the ocotillo. My friend is talking to me, but I can’t seem to focus on what she’s saying. I think of the man who fell behind, became injured, got lost, wandered for days, collapsed after a few hours, and died beneath the palo verde tree. I feel as though I am going to break; I feel that thing where something you understood in theory becomes suddenly real.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Every day, volunteers drive for hours on rough roads to reach the most inaccessible parts of the desert. Photograph: Carrot Quinn

“They’re all drug smugglers. None of these people are trying to get into the US to work. They’re just drug smugglers. All of the people coming through this area are drug smugglers.”

We’re standing on a dirt trail that leads down into the Growler Valley, talking with a fish and game officer who’s on his way up to the pass. We’re en route to the skull in the ocotillo to do a grid search for any other related remains, ahead of the sheriff, who is headed out this afternoon to recover the bones – the sheriff is not required to conduct a grid search and so it is up to us, unpaid volunteers with a humanitarian aid organization that has very limited resources, to make sure that as many remains as possible are counted for.

“Just drug smugglers in this valley,” says the fish and game officer, again, as though to himself. “Drug smugglers!” he seems agitated that we’re here at all, even after we tell him about the remains recovery work that we’re doing. This narrative is one I’ve heard again and again from law enforcement since arriving in the Sonoran desert. But the idea that some migrants are “good” while others are “bad” misses the fact that there is no “front door” through which an undocumented Mexican or Central American can cross into the US legally.

People crossing the border without documents are often fleeing extreme violence, poverty and destabilization in their home countries. They have few to no resources. They’ve often traveled thousands of miles already, through multiple channels, and suffered extortion and abuse in their long journeys, to arrive at the US-Mexico border, their one final hope to save their own lives and the lives of their families.

And upon reaching the border, if they have no money to pay someone to guide them on the long, dangerous desert crossing that lies ahead, they are sometimes offered a trade – carry a bale of marijuana, and you will be guided across the desert for free. So the migrants carrying bales of marijuana are often the most at risk of all border crossers; they are those who have traveled the farthest with the fewest resources, those who are fleeing the most desperate situations.

The movement of drugs across the US-Mexico border is a large, complex issue, informed by lack of economic opportunity in northern Mexico and our own trade agreements, among other things, but any way you cut it, our current strategy of funneling border crossers into the most hostile parts of the desert means that those crossing are often sentenced to death without trial, regardless of who they are, what they’re doing, and why.

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“They’re terrified to be out here,” says Genevieve, as we descend into the Growler Valley after speaking with the fish and game officer. “They don’t like to walk very far from their vehicles. They think they’re being hunted.” She tells me about a time she was on a multi-day backpacking trip through the desert near the border, scouting new areas where No More Deaths could leave water for migrants. She happened upon two sheriffs, parked in their trucks on a rocky Jeep road.

“What are you doing out here?” asked the sheriffs. “Don’t you know that this is the most dangerous area in the United States?”

“We’ve actually been having a nice time hiking and camping,” said Schroeder.

“You’re crazy to be out here,” said the sheriffs. “There are people in the mountains, trying to kill us.”

Another time, while shuttling water into the desert with No More Deaths, Schroeder happened upon a group of four migrants who were being apprehended by Border Patrol. The No More Deaths volunteers stopped their trucks, and offered the migrants food and water.

One of the Border Patrol agents began to scream at them: “No food and water! All these people are drug traffickers! They’re all bad people! Bad people! Drug traffickers.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A volunteer patrolling the rugged terrain north of the US/Mexico border. Photograph: Carrot Quinn

Dehydration is a terrible way to die. First, your mouth dries out and becomes coated in a thick substance. Then your tongue can crack, your eyes recede into the skull, usually followed dry heaving and vomiting, fever and convulsions as the brain dries out; finally, after several days, the organs quit and death occurs.

Of course, in the Sonoran desert with its cold nights (in winter), sweat-soaked clothing can cool to the point of hypothermia, and one can die of this as well. And there can be injuries, and hunger, and all manner of these things combined. But mostly, water; except for rare instances, there is no water in this desert.

I think of this as a helicopter hovers above us in the desert one morning, its blades chopping at the clear bright air. The helicopter circles us, dips low, flits away out of sight and an hour later returns. In the afternoon, on our walk back to the truck after leaving our offerings of water to those who’ll pass through this way, we run into two Border Patrol agents in a sandy wash.

“God dammit!” says one of them, when he sees us. “We were tracking humanitarians!”

“I saw bodies,” says the other. “I got excited.” He points to our tracks on the ground. “I thought this was at least 10 people, easy.”

Last year, No More Deaths put 19,444 gallons of water in the desert, with the help of more than 200 volunteers. I hiked to many of these drops during my month in the desert, carrying up to six gallons of water at a time up steep, scrambly slopes and along dry washes to known migrant trails that can only be reached on foot. Sometimes we’d arrive to find that our last water drop had been vandalized; the water gone, the empty, slashed gallons scattered in the brush.

I ask some long-term No More Deaths volunteers what their fears are around the Trump administration and his promise to be heavy-handed in an area which is already heavily militarized and fraught with violence.

“Trump emboldens law enforcement,” they say. “Trump emboldens militias. But things are already bad down here. They’ve been bad for a long time.”

•••

Two days after finding the skull in the ocotillo, a group of No More Deaths volunteers finds another human skull, near the Bates mountains to the south. The skull is not 500ft from a road. When they return to do a grid search the next day, another skull is discovered nearby.

A few weeks later, we’re on an exploratory hike in Organ Pipe Cactus national monument, one edge of which sits right on the US–Mexico border. We’re walking up a rough road that is closed except to Border Patrol and law enforcement when we see a sheriff’s vehicle, making its way slowly towards us. Remains recovery.

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“Did you do a grid search?” we ask the Border Patrol agent who’s trailing behind the sheriff in his truck, after he pulls abreast of us and confirms that they were, in fact, recovering human remains. He hasn’t.

He agrees to tell us where they were, so that we can do a grid search. We hike to the pothole of murky rainwater in a drainage filled with boulders and make GPS waypoints, stacking tiny rock cairns next to the radius, the clavicle, the rib bone. We sit on the ground next to the green water and say a few words. I imagine what it might have been like to live out the last days of a life here, next to this green water, with only the saguaros and coyotes as witness.

This will be the fifth set of human remains we’ve seen in a month. I’m sorry, I think. I’m sorry you were alone. In a few days, the sheriff will return with another group of volunteers and they’ll lead him from bone to bone, watching to ensure that he picks up every one. The sheriff will drop the bones into a clear plastic bag and tie the sack on to the back of his quad. The volunteers will watch him drive away down the dirt road, the quad spitting up dust beneath the empty Sonoran sky.