
A desolate Oregon landscape offers lessons on the modern wild.
This issue examines the value of the West’s open spaces, its public lands, and its rich natural and cultural resources. In such places we find solace, as well as common values across cultural and political divides. In our cover story, Kate Schimel, the magazine’s digital editor, visits a “wilderness for weirdoes,” asking what it means to love such a place, Correspondent Sarah Tory takes us to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where a piece of Americana, 12,000 years in the making, is crumbling rapidly away and essayist Peter Friederici examines our complicity in the realities of climate change.