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, […]
Deserts
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 […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Bonfire of the Superweeds
In the Sonoran Desert, good intentions combust
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
The Red Desert: Wyoming’s endangered country
RED DESERT, Wyo. – Fossils of tree limbs were all around, most the size of my fingers, a few the size of horse troughs. Prehistoric bits of turtle shell, horse bones and arrowhead chippings also lay scattered, testimony to the diverse inhabitants who once frequented this ocean-turned-desert. I suddenly looked up. Our group had flushed […]
Posted inJune 8, 1998: Don't fence me in
1998 Earle A. Chiles Award
The High Desert Museum gives its 1998 Earle A. Chiles Award to people who have enriched the cultural and natural wealth of the high desert. Past winners include photographer and writer Stephen Trimble and biologist Jack Ward Thomas, former chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Send nominations to the High Desert Museum, 59800 S. Highway […]
Posted inMarch 31, 1997: Big Sky, big mess in Montana
Mexico launches a green offensive
Sitting on folding chairs borrowed from a local Chamber of Commerce, the gathering March 22 at the U.S.-Mexican border in Lukeville, Ariz., looked like a Jewish Orthodox bar mitzvah: American members sat on the U.S. side of the fence; Mexican members sat on the other. They did this, says Reynaldo Cantu, a member of this […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Lawns and pools close in on desert lab
Tumamoc Hill, Ariz. – When the Carnegie Institution established its desert laboratory on this stony, black basalt hill 94 years ago, some 12,000 residents lived in the small town of Tucson two miles to the east. Today Tucson has grown to almost half a million people, and Sunbelt sprawl threatens the future of one of […]
Posted inAugust 19, 1996: Western voices
While the vultures circle
The air around the volcanic mesa shimmers with reflected heat; if the temperature rises, surely it will return to molten lava. I’m on Black Butte in the southernmost peak of Arizona’s Vulture Mountain chain, a place where vultures are the only birds ingenious enough to perch atop the black crags: They piss on their feet. […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Naked and marvelous
NAKED AND MARVELOUS The Colorado Plateau and its Drainage, a topographic map by Kenneth Perry, is the closest most of us will ever come to seeing the West from heaven. Perry combines USGS data with sophisticated Macintosh graphics to create maps that are both useful and colorful. While Raven Graphics maps are handsome and accurate, […]