Amanda Ulrich
Amanda Ulrich

Amanda is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Southern California. She is both a regular contributor to The Guardian, where she writes narrative features about environmental issues and remote communities in California, and a college lecturer at San Diego State University, where she teaches journalism courses on feature writing and public affairs reporting.

Over the past decade, Amanda’s other work has been published by Outside Magazine, USA Today, PBS, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Sunday Long Read, among many others.

Amanda has written about the lengthy aftermath of category five hurricanes in the Caribbean; the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S.; the tiny, crumbling towns that have been bought up by corporate interests in the California desert; and hundreds of other stories in between. She has worked as a staff reporter for news outlets in the Caribbean, Europe and across the United States.

Featured articles

A brutal hurricane razed their town. Five years later, they’re still searching for home

Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas in 2019. In 2024, the storm’s poorest survivors were still being pushed from one shantytown to the next.

Published by The Guardian, featuring original photos. Reported from Great Abaco and Nassau, Bahamas.

After wildfires, LA residents see outpouring of support: ‘One of the more beautiful things I’ve seen’

Overwhelmed by loss but buoyed by friends and strangers alike, Angelenos who lost their homes to the LA wildfires prepared to rebuild their lives.

Published by The Guardian, featuring original photos. Reported from Altadena, California.

The circus that bought a tiny California town

Nipton sat neglected for years until Las Vegas’ Spiegelworld turned it into a circus haven.

Published by The Guardian, featuring original photos. Reported from Nipton, California.

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. Reported from a hike along the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

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. Reported from the Mojave Desert, California.

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. Reported from San Diego, California.

‘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, featuring original photos. Reported from the Salton Sea, California.

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. Reported from Palm Springs, California.

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. Reported from Ocotillo Wells, California.

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, featuring original photos. Reported from the Morongo Band of Mission Indians’ reservation in Banning, California.

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 was remarkable.

Published by The Guardian. Reported from Death Valley, California.

The rise, fall, and uncertain future of Desert Center

On its 100-year anniversary, a crumbling, nearly abandoned town in California’s Colorado Desert was 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. Reported from Slab City, California.

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, featuring original photos. Reported from Tortola, British Virgin Islands.


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. Reported from Angeles National Forest, California.

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. Reported from Palm Springs, California.

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. Reported from the eastern Coachella Valley, California.

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. Reported from the Santa Rosa Mountains, California.

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 worked as a staff reporter 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 and reported from the British Virgin Islands, where she worked for a small weekly newspaper called The BVI Beacon. Two months into her time at the news outlet, category five Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest hurricanes in modern history, made landfall in the BVI. With wind speeds over 200 miles per hour, the storm leveled the Beacon’s newsroom and buildings across the archipelago, led to widespread looting and the deployment of the U.K. military, and downed electricity on 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 news outlet 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 reporting.

Amanda now works as an independent journalist based in San Diego. She regularly writes long-form features for The Guardian, ranging in topic from 21st-century gold prospectors to self-proclaimed micronations in the desert. For many of those stories, she shoots her own photos. In addition to freelancing, Amanda also teaches two journalism courses at San Diego State University, and leads a Q&A series and podcast for the Sunday Long Read called “Behind the Story,” where she talks with other journalists about the ins and outs of the industry.

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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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