Three days after rumbling up out of La Guardia, four days before the summer solstice, I was finally there, as far from New York as I could get. I was driving through the spatial and sensorial opposite of my home city: Route 375 in the Great Basin desert, 30 miles southeast of Warm Springs, Nev. […]
Deserts
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Hidden Waters resurfaces
These days, Charles Bowden is known as a grizzled, pistol-packing scout of the Southwest’s dark side, a man who chronicles the lives and deaths of the border’s most infamous drug runners. A quarter century ago, however, Bowden wrote an unpretentious book, Killing the Hidden Waters, that was equal parts ethnography, mysticism, hydrology and thermodynamics. That […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Journal of the Dead
The open roads and big spaces of the West have always called young men and women from the cities and suburbs of the East. So it was with David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian, both in their 20s, who, in 1999, headed from Boston to California. Inspired by Jack Kerouac, the nascent literati took along a […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2004: Two decades of hard work, plowed under
Getting under the desert’s skin: Biologist Jayne Belnap
The scenery of southeastern Utah is hard to miss. Steep redrock canyons plunge into long and lazy riverbends; wind-sculpted stone arches glow pinkly at sunset. But when biologist Jayne Belnap hikes through this famous landscape, it’s not the show-stopping rocks that draw her attention. It’s the algae. “This is not a rocky landscape, this is […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2003: Riding the middle path
Leaving Las Vegas
I lived in Las Vegas recently for about a year, doing research at a large weapons-testing facility outside of town. Among all the places I’ve lived, from tropical islands to small towns to Western strip-mall communities, Las Vegas seemed uniquely American for its boosterism of get-rich-quick schemes and the sex industry — and for the […]
Posted inWotr
A love letter to a sewage lagoon
At a neighbor’s house a few years ago, I saw a sphere of ruddy sandstone displayed on a ledge. Rolling it in my hand, I recognized the heft and grittiness of the ball. “We used to find these at Lake Powell,” I said, “Is that where this came from?” Our neighbor, a dedicated environmental activist, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Barren, wild and worthless? Anything but
For naturalist Susan Tweit, moving to New Mexico meant learning to love the harsh beauty of a landscape that one haggard 19th century surveyor dismissed as “barren, wild, and worthless.” That bitter phrase became the title of Tweit’s eloquent 1995 memoir on life in the Chihuahuan Desert. Taken in by her masterful prose, readers, too, […]
Posted inMay 26, 2003: A losing battle
Desert saved from ‘dingbat’ development
The Wildlands Conservancy, a California-based nonprofit organization, has wrapped up the largest purchase of private land for conservation purposes in the country’s history. In March, the Conservancy completed a four-year effort to buy over 600,000 acres in the Southern California desert and turn the land over to the federal government. The land was owned by […]
Posted inMay 12, 2003: Planting time
Nevada: A diamond in the rough
Our country’s driest state does not treat humans gently. “The desert was one prodigious graveyard,” wrote Mark Twain about his arrival in Nevada in the 1860s. “And the log chains, wagon tires, and rotting wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones.” Today, many people perceive Nevada as a gambling mecca surrounded by […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Fences go up along the Mexican border
Interior Secretary Norton ‘troubled’ by impacts on desert wildlife
Posted inFebruary 3, 2003: The death of the Super Hopper
Nevada’s desert beauty
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 […]
Posted inWotr
On the road with Edward Abbey, chaos as usual
(Editor’s note: Renowned Western writer Edward Abbey, who died in 1989, would have celebrated his 76th birthday this Jan. 29, 2003.) About this time of year, almost 30 years ago, the writer Ed Abbey and I were laboring through the exurbs of Ajo, in the south of Arizona. We were driving on a miserable backcountry […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Sagebrush artistry
Nevada potter Dennis Parks celebrates his exit from the rat race in a new memoir, Living in the Country Growing Weird. With his wife and two sons in tow, Parks left a tenure-track professorship in Southern California 30 years ago, settled in Tuscarora, Nev., a ghost town, and founded a pottery school that today attracts […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
The oldest living thing is a quiet survivor
The oldest living thing in the world is hard to find, and soon I’m lost. I drive out a rutted dirt road south of Barstow, Calif., in search of “King Clone,” a creosote bush identified as the oldest living thing on Earth. Said to be 11,700 years old, that makes it centuries older than the […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Looking for the Language of Red
Even in its hardcover form, Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, is small enough to fit easily into your backpack, the one you might carry if you happened to be taking a trip through, say, the redrock country of southern Utah. The book’s size is no accident. A collection […]
Posted inSeptember 10, 2001: The rise and fall of a desert stream
The rise and fall of a desert stream
I stopped. Swallowed. Looked around my feet, my eyes burning with sweat and light. A hundred and nineteen degrees Fahrenheit, at least. This was the hottest July on record for Arizona. It was, in fact, the hottest single month recorded in all of North America. If I prayed for rain, the sky would laugh at […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
The sublime delight of backtracking
It’s a Saturday midnight in late September, and David Bertelsen drives his battered car to the northern edge of Tucson, where the newest pseudo-adobes push hard against the Santa Catalina Mountains. He parks off the road, then begins walking up Finger Rock Canyon toward the summit of Mount Kimball. While many hikers try to avoid […]
Posted inMay 7, 2001: Back into the woods
County unveils pioneering protection plan
ARIZONA After two years of biological studies, the Tucson, Ariz., area has the first draft of its pioneering plan to protect from development hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin desert, and 56 vulnerable species, including the endangered pygmy owl. The Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan would also allow 400,000 newcomers to build on less environmentally […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Pilot finds a soft spot for a hard land
Under the Sun: A Sonoran Desert Odyssey, by Adriel Heisey. Treasure Chest Books, P.O. Box 5250, Tucson, AZ 85703 (520/623-9558). Hardcover: $40. 114 pages. Flying his ultralight airplane high above the Sonoran Desert, Adriel Heisey found an appreciation for an alien landscape. A former commercial pilot, Heisey moved to Tucson on a whim, and at […]