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Travel Photography > Great Basin
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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Great Basin | July 10, 2011
The Good Lizard of Coalpits Wash
Is travel during a global recession thoughtless? Is a dad who is away, wandering aimlessly, a bad dad? Is to travel to sin? Maybe these questions seem silly to readers of travel. I think it's the right time to ask. 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 |
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Great Basin | Updated February 28, 2007
What Creatures will Roam Glen Canyon?
The town name doesn't immediately ring a bell, but the presence of trees, shrubs, those fences - might make this a good spot to check for any new species of birds I had never seen before. The Utah-Arizona border, north of the Grand Canyon and east of Las Vegas, is a weird sort of biological zone. Some creatures exist here that exist nowhere else in the world. More likely though, a little town with its trees and fence-posts amidst all this dry scrub and red earth might attract some migrating birds, moving south to Mexico in the fall.
Glen Canyon |
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Great Basin | April
A Gulch in the Escalante Desert
When the clouds pass over the Escalante Canyons, and the evening desert sun again beats down on the mesa, I walk out and look in every direction. The south - mountain. West and east - bald rock. It is fifty miles to Escalante, and because of the rain, I am trapped here until the road dries. I walk around the truck, throw some rocks. Try to pick up trash around the trailhead. There is none. I boil five potatoes, more than I need. And cut onions, garlic, red peppers. I am a chef deep in the desert, and waiting for my unsuspecting patrons to appear from the end of a dark hollow.
Escalante, Utah |
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Great Basin | June
Blue Butterfly at the End of the Loneliest Road
It's called Sand Mountain, and it's the second largest sand dune in North America. Sand Mountain is a seif-dune, and was molded from the sands of dried up Lake Lahontan. In the Pleistocene, this sea covered the Great Basin. Sand Mountain is BLM land, and it has been designated in part for the use of off road vehicles. The uniquely steep, soft and rolling grades of this mountain of sand have created a dreamscape for gasoline-powered fun.
The Loneliest Road |
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Great Basin | July
Zion Narrows and the Theology of Sin
I wake the next morning with that singular passion that all travelers carry with them - to go. And so I do, towards Zion Canyon in Southwestern Utah. I've conveniently forgotten my observations from the night before; I am no social commentator, I am just a landscape photographer. There are stereotypes even about people like me. The landscape photographer is patient, and yet also a bore. He is rural, and poor, but fakes the suburban life. He seeks what a thousand before him did.
Zion Narrows |
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Great Basin | August
Magicians, Travel Writers and Summer Lake
Nobody's in the cafe except an old fat man, who's asleep on the bar stool. This cafe - it's somewhere north of Northeastern California; along the westernmost portion of the Great Basin desert. Technically, I'm in Oregon, but the wet emerald kingdom of the Northwest doesn't apply here. Like most of Oregon, the Southeastern basin and range is dry, its vegetation comes in golden and amber hues, its landscapes all deep gullies and dry lakes, its people few and far between. Southeastern Oregon is almost the size of New England, yet holds only 40,000 people.
Summer Lake, Oregon
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Great Basin | March
Rachel, Nevada and Area 51
North into the Nevada desert from Las Vegas for a hundred fifty miles or so. No trees, no towns, no humans or a goddamned bit of greenery to speak of. You call this straight road miserable, but you haven't yet been to Rachel, pop. 100, whose only claim to fame is that it is the closest town to Area 51, America's famously secret experimental military installation. I pulled over a slim hill and saw Rachel sparkling by the light of the moon, a dozen mobile homes and some trash sticking out of the dirt.
Rachel, Nevada |
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Great Basin | May | Part I of the Oregon Testament
The Owyhee Puzzle
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 |
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Great Basin | May | Part II of the Oregon Testament
The Alvord Desert
We have stumbled on a small Native American site, a hunting perch that includes a handful of stone tools and a mortar. 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. Hans knows that the primary function of these tools is to scrape the hide off freshly killed animal. But what did they hunt?
Alvord Desert |
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Great Basin | June
Mono Lake, an Economy of Ecology
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 |
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Great Basin | February
Smith Rock and the Oregon High Desert
"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, Oregon |
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