Amanda Ulrich
Amanda Ulrich

Amanda is an award-winning journalist and editor based in Southern California. She has written about tiny, off-the-grid towns in the desert; the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S.; the aftermath of a category five Caribbean hurricane; the families forced to flee from rampant wildfires on the West Coast; and hundreds of other stories in between.

She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, where she often writes narrative features about environmental issues and remote communities in California. Her work has also been published by Outside Magazine, USA Today, PBS, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Sunday Long Read, among many others. Over the past eight years, she has worked for news outlets in the Caribbean, Europe and across the United States.


Featured articles

The fight to save lives in the treacherous California desert: ‘A broken ankle is a death sentence’

Hundreds of migrants die each year along the U.S.-Mexico border, often from exposure to the heat or cold. Amid this humanitarian crisis, the work to keep people alive in the desert often falls to volunteers.

Published by The Guardian

The modern-day gold prospectors of California: ‘It doesn’t take much to catch the fever’

Way out in the wild center of Southern California, in a scrubby patch of desert a few hours from Los Angeles, some things haven’t changed much in the last 200 years.

Published by The Guardian

Inside the female-led world of ethical taxidermy

Beyond the pure novelty of taxidermying an animal for the first time, many women have gravitated to the practice for a much more profound reason: to examine the thin margin between life and death.

Published by The Guardian

‘I’ll run until there’s no sea left’: The gas mask-wearing ultramarathoner circling the Salton Sea

California’s Salton Sea is steadily shrinking, exposing a toxic lakebed that threatens the region. One activist ran nearly 100 miles around the lake’s circumference to draw attention to the environmental and public health crisis.

Published by The Guardian

No cellphone? No problem: The vintage radio enthusiasts prepping for disaster

Ham radio users, from teenagers to eightysomethings, are ready to communicate in the next crisis – be it a wildfire, pandemic or “the big one.”

Published by The Guardian

Welcome to Slowjamastan: The desert micronation

An 11-acre plot of land in the middle of the California desert, ruled over by a faux “sultan,” is attracting thousands of “citizens” looking for an escape from everyday life.

Published by The Guardian

Native American rodeo thrives as a younger generation takes the reins

Across the West, Native American rodeos serve as a modern-day reminder of Indigenous cattle ranching history that dates back hundreds of years.

Published by The Guardian

Death Valley sizzles, but the tourism doesn’t stop

Death Valley National Park is hardly a stranger to elemental extremes and has long attracted those drawn to the edge. But even by Death Valley standards, the summer of 2023 has been remarkable.

Published by The Guardian

The rise, fall, and uncertain future of Desert Center

On its 100-year anniversary, a crumbling, nearly abandoned town in California’s Colorado Desert is sold for more than $6 million. What happened to Desert Center, and what will happen next?

Published in partnership between the Sunday Long Read and The Desert Sun. One of the most popular stories of the week from the Los Angeles Times’ Essential California newsletter. Republished by Longreads.

In California, a Native woman’s killing remains unsolved. There are many others like her.

A body was found off an isolated highway in Northern California in 2013. Two years later, the remains were finally identified: It was Rachel Sloan, a 23-year-old Native American woman from Laytonville.

Part of a yearlong series with USA Today that examined the national crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Published by USA Today and The Desert Sun.

Vaccinating the 'last free place': In this remote desert community, shots are a hard sell

Slab City, an anarchic encampment near the Salton Sea, has long been a landing place for those who want to live outside the confines of modern society. In the spring of 2021, its occupants grappled with the idea of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Published by USA Today

Surviving Irma: A next-generation hurricane

For long, blurred hours, people cowered under beds, inside closets and in bathtubs as concrete walls and wooden roofs fell around them. The British Virgin Islands were facing a catastrophic storm.

Published by the Sunday Long Read


Destroyed homes, indefinite hotel stays: Wildfire evacuees find lives in limbo

With 25 major wildfires burning in California in September 2020, entire communities and towns were forced to flee, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Published by The Desert Sun

One year of Covid-19: Life and loss for three Native American families

A father and Vietnam War veteran. A former chairman dedicated to tribal sovereignty. A grandmother known by her family simply as “Goo.” Three families share their stories of losing loved ones to coronavirus.

Published by USA Today

Getting out the Latino vote in rural California

Latinos make up nearly 40% of California’s population, but at about 22% of the state’s actual voters, they are significantly underrepresented after decades of disenfranchisement. Shortly before the 2020 election, one woman worked to change that in the eastern Coachella Valley.

Published by PBS

After a century away, tribal members reconnect with ancestral land

Until very recently, many Cahuilla tribal members had not stepped foot on one ancestral route in the Santa Rosa Mountains in more than 100 years. In 2022, they returned.

Published by The Desert Sun

About

Amanda started her journalism career as a reporting fellow with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in 2016. With the help of a Pulitzer Center grant, she wrote a series of stories about the European migrant crisis from Rome, Italy. She later reported for an independent newspaper in Norwich, England and for the media company the Daily Mail in London and New York.

From 2017 to 2019, Amanda lived in the Caribbean, where she worked for a small weekly in the British Virgin Islands called The BVI Beacon. Two months into her time at the paper, category five Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest hurricanes on record, devastated the archipelago. The storm leveled the Beacon newsroom and many buildings across the BVI, led to widespread looting and the deployment of the U.K. military, and downed electricity across the main island of Tortola for six months. Amanda and the remaining newspaper staff reported from a one-room makeshift office for the next year and a half, writing special reports and investigative pieces about the storm’s aftermath and relief efforts.

In 2019, Amanda moved back to the U.S. and worked for The Desert Sun, a USA Today-affiliated paper in Palm Springs, California, for two years. There, she covered Native American tribes in Southern California and isolated communities in the desert, winning five California Journalism Awards for her work. As a Report for America corps member, she also taught journalism fundamentals and skills to high school students in the Coachella Valley.

Amanda now works as an independent journalist and editor based in San Diego. She regularly writes long-form features for The Guardian, among other outlets and magazines, ranging in topic from 21st-century gold prospectors to self-proclaimed micronations in the desert. Do you have a story you think she should write? Reach out at ulrichamandac@gmail.com.

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Awards

California Journalism Awards

1st place: In-depth reporting, 2020 (Judge’s comment: “This story brought to life two years of secret negotiations and, within weeks, killed a $2 billion project to build a super-prison on remote Native American lands.”)

3rd place: Land-use reporting, 2020 (Judge’s comment: “A fascinating exploration… Thoroughly researched.”)

3rd place: Coverage of the pandemic, 2021 (Judge’s comment: “Impressive solo story delving into a hyperlocal topic while featuring textbook balance… So many standout quotes, indicative of strong interviews.”)

3rd place: Breaking news, 2020

2nd place: Coverage of local government, 2021

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