Great Basin

The arid cold deserts of western North America are often spare landscapes, whose small towns are often inhabited by eccentrics, individualists and wayward believers. The Great Basin describes a region of North America in many different ways. It describes a geographic region of basin and range, a biological region of grass and scrub, and a historical region of related Native tribes. Follow me as I explore America's Great Basin.

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The Good Lizard of Coalpits Wash
Great Basin | July 10, 2011
It's a sunny day in Canyonlands National Park, in Eastern Utah, and I have the whole day ahead of me, and it's March, which means the desert parks around Moab are still nearly empty; tourism season starts next month.
Coal Pits Wash

What Creatures will Roam Glen Canyon?
Great Basin | Updated February 28, 2007
When I stop at a gas station to stretch my legs under a blue sky, I notice some homes, wooden fences and a few trees. I ask the blonde teenage attendant what town I am.

Glen Canyon

Escalante Desert
Great Basin | April
I see myself in the truck's mirror. But the face I see is black with sun, drenched in rain and sweat, the under-eyes are blue, with veins popping, and the nose and ears are rutty and exposed from sun. I am panting like a dog, my nose is bleeding.

escalante, Utah

Blue Butterfly at the End of the Loneliest Road
Great Basin | June
A journey across the Nevada's Great Basin and the Loneliest Road in America. We follow the struggle between off-roaders, Great Basin Indians and conservationists over the fate of a blue butterfly.
loneliest road

Summer Lake
Great Basin | August
Part II of a conversation about travel writing, this episode continues into the southern Oregon Desert. Because these observations are my own, they are in some regards infallible.

Summer Lake, Oregon

Rachel, Nevada and Area 51
Great Basin | March
That was my cue. I'd heard it before. The UFO crowd approaches their beliefs much like somebody with an unusual religious belief - shy when faced with potential mockery, but explosively chatty when faced with an ounce of interest. I said that I thought the government was coming up with a way to make everybody the middle child.

Rachel, Nevada

The Owyhee Puzzle
Great Basin | May | Part I of the Oregon Testament.
There is nothing extraordinary about finding Native American antiquities in Oregon. Arrowheads and other stone tools are still found. But to find such a thing on your own, even if you are one among thousands to do so, is an immeasurable joy and education; because to experience it for yourself is to set yourself on a quest of deduction and discovery...

Owyhee River, Oregon

The Alvord Desert
Great Basin | May | Part II of the Oregon Testament.
The stone tools that Hans and I hold in our hands have small etched teeth. There is a comfortable cut in the rock, so that it fits snugly into the left hand. On other parts of the rock, there are deliberate cuts for functions we can only guess at.

Alvord Desert

Mono Lake, an Economy of Ecology
Great Basin | June
I finally reach the famed Tufas of Mono Lake; the monoliths which one day were preserved under water. They are twisted, trollish, ungodly, like a woman turned to stone at Gomorrah. They are beautiful and obscure; the pale gray-white of un-uniform columns springing out of the shore, out of the lake.

mono LakE, California

Smith Rock and the Oregon High Desert
Great Basin | February"It was an honor, I suppose, to be drinking Johnny Walker with a military official on Alaska Airlines' red-eye flight to Portland. "After fourteen flights in ten days," the top technology officer for the Army said as a way of introduction, "you'd figure I'd get upgraded to first-class."

Smith Rock

The White Mountains
Great Basin | April
At the high tundra peaks, twisted pines shot up from the steep dolomite cliffs. Many of these bristlecone pines were brewing sap long before Abraham emerged from the wilderness. They are witch trees - leathered from millennia, worn, tattered and distant.

White Mountains

Zion Narrows and the Theology of Sin
Great Basin | July
Since no one was around, Ramona felt free to tell me about life in Mesquite. "I can finally own land for my horses," she said. "That is what life is all about, some land and lots of trails." She talked about the Indian heiroglyphics in the area, and the summer heat.

Zion Narrows