On the 400-square-mile playa at the heart
of northeastern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, the terrain is so
flat that you’re sometimes better off looking at the GPS unit
on your dashboard than at the road in front of you. Though you
might run into locals enjoying the obscure sport of “land sailing,”
or into temporarily transplanted city folk at the annual Burning
Man Festival, it’s generally so lonely, and so dry, that
you’d better carry enough gas and water to get you from one
end to the other.
The Black Rock Desert
is a brief, elegant visual and verbal meditation on one of the
West’s most mysterious landscapes. Fox, the author of several
books about the arid West, and Klett, a respected landscape
photographer, bring this odd part of the world to life in a few
dozen pages and some well-chosen moments. One night, freshly
arrived at camp, they spend long minutes wandering around with
their eyes closed. They know they can walk in circles indefinitely
without fear of tripping; in the Black Rock, there’s precious
little to stumble on.
The Black Rock
Desert, William L. Fox, with photographs by Mark Klett,
University of Arizona Press, 2002. 90 pages, 15 black-and-white
photographs. Softcover, 6 inches by 7 inches:
$13.95.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Nevada’s desert beauty.
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