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By Stephen Trimble
No place in the lower Forty-Eight invites such contemplation as the deep interior of the American West, the Great Basin Desert. The other three North American deserts conform to an art director's expectation that they look picturesque. Saguaro and cholla cacti prick the skies of the Sonoran Desert, Joshua trees spread a latticework of tentacled arms over the Mojave, and the canyons of the Rio Grande gash and cleave the Chihuahuan Desert. The Great Basin Desert, instead, has sagebrush and shadscale and silence.
Like so many rocky and arid landscapes, the Great Basin Desert seems timeless, yet change characterizes the place. These mountains and basins are immersed in the flow of time. For proof, ask a bristlecone. Testimonies to the drama hidden at the heart of the Great Basin grow ever so slowly at treeline in the highest ranges. On these austere limestone ridges where few other plants survive, Great Basin bristlecone pines while away the centuries. These are the Earth's oldest individual beings, living five thousand years and more.
They are remarkably easy to visit. At Great Basin National Park, above Baker, Nevada, a two-mile walk from the end of the road, past Stella Lake and onto the flanks of 13,063-foot Wheeler Peak, brings you to them. On the high ridges of California's White Mountains, Inyo National Forest preserves another meditative stand of bristlecones, the Patriarch Grove. The ancient trees stand below rock and snow, their wood dense with resin, sculpted by wind to the form and texture of stone. Living symbols of the Great Basin Desert, the bristlecones exhilarate us and humble us with the persistence of life on these high, silent outposts of Wild America.
Award-winning writer, photographer, and naturalist Stephen Trimble lives in Salt Lake City. His many books on western wildlands and native peoples include: "The People: Indians of the American Southwest" and "The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places."
Book Links:
The People: Indians of the American Southwest
The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places
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Stephen Trimble
The Sagebrush Ocean, a Natural History of the Great Basin
NATURAL HISTORY • 1999
• PAPER • 136 PAGES
A natural history of the Great Basin, published in a handsome, hard cover
10th anniversary edition. A leading naturalist and writer on the Southwest, Trimble
weaves excellent information on the flora, fauna and allure of the Great Basin into
a very readable narrative. (USW365, $39.95)
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