Why a teenager spends weekends picking up balloons in the Nevada desert

In the desert a few miles northwest of Las Vegas, everything pretty much looks the same.

Cactuses spring up in between mounds of dirt. The mountains reign to the West. On a Saturday morning in April, there isn’t a cloud in the sky.

Look closer, though, and shades of color dot the drab landscape. Flowers, sometimes. But more striking, and almost more plentiful, are deflated Mylar balloons, stuck on plants throughout the desert.

It’s here, a few miles away from the nearest road, that Christian Daniels, 15, is hiking with his dad, Bill. Their dog, a 4-year-old English Labrador named Ruby, runs after a lizard. Spoiler: She doesn’t catch it.

Christian stops on a dime.

“There,” he says.

He takes off in the opposite direction, and comes back a minute later with a red balloon, formerly pinned to the thorn of a cactus. “Happy Birthday” is printed across its side.

A few minutes later, a similarly bright object appears. This time, though, it’s a red flower.

“That doesn’t look much different than the first balloon we picked up,” Bill Daniels remarks.

A year and a half ago, Christian found out that desert tortoises often mistake balloons for flowers and eat them. It’s a potentially deadly mistake, and the influx of balloons in the area doesn’t help their odds. So he started the Desert Balloon Project, and goes hiking almost every weekend with his dad or his 18-year-old brother, Hayden.

Bill Daniels said his older son has loved hiking with him since he was young, but Christian “never wanted to hike.”

“And then literally a year and a half ago, he read about the tortoises, and he’s like, ‘Dad, let’s go get balloons,’” the father said.

Christian routinely posts about his adventures on his Facebook page, and it’s there that he’s connected with other charities and foundations that help advocate for desert tortoises, which are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act as a threatened species.

Sarah Mortimer is the executive director of The Tortoise Group, a nonprofit that advocates for the well-being and protection of desert tortoises. Mortimer has connected with Christian and is excited about the work he’s doing, especially because it’s an area that most people don’t know much about.

“Desert tortoises can see color,” she said. “And they’re really attracted to bright pinks, bright yellows, bright oranges — those same colors that they’re seeing of desert wildflowers. So sometimes they go after painted toenails, or a crinkled-up balloon.”

Christian and his dad find all sorts of items in the desert: air conditioners, beer cans, smashed television sets, even a fully intact refrigerator.

They sometimes spend three or four hours hiking, but one thing is for sure every time they go out: They’ll find balloons. They have a collection back at their house to mark each time they’ve gone out, alongside a table filled with deer antlers and tortoise shells.

Christian, a student at Somerset Academy’s Sky Pointe campus, spends Sunday mornings in the Fire Explorer Program, a step toward his dream of becoming a firefighter. He started the Desert Balloon Project, because, well, he now likes hiking and he likes nature. And this was a great opportunity to give back.

“The first time I found a balloon, I picked it up because I never knew what it did,” he said. “When we brought it home we did some research, and we found that tortoises will eat them, and it will get inside their intestines and kill them.”

The goal of the Desert Balloon Project is to raise awareness about the issue and urge people to stop releasing Mylar balloons into the air. It’s a simple ask, and something most people don’t think twice about.

For now, though, Christian has no plans to stop hiking into the desert on Saturday mornings, picking up stray balloons and single-handedly saving tortoise lives in the process. And how does that feel?

“It feels good,” he says, and then pauses for a second. “It feels really good.”

Contact Jonah Dylan at jdylan@reviewjournal.com. Follow @TheJonahDylan on Twitter.