Stephen Trimble introduces new edition of ‘The Sagebrush Ocean’ as Great Basin National Park turns 40

Presenter: Moving inland from Oregon’s coastal watersheds past the Willamette, and all that make up the vast Columbia Basin, we arrive at the Great Basin, where we’re greeted by our tour guide, the author of The Sagebrush Ocean, Stephen Trimble:

Stephen Trimble (Author, The Sagebrush Ocean): I first came to the Great Basin Desert in 1981, when my dear friend Rick Stetter at the University of Nevada Press asked me to work on a new Great Basin natural history series.

I was a Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountain guy. This was fresh territory for me, and I was thrilled to have this whole new region of the West to learn about. 

My field work took me through the 1980s hiking, backpacking, photographing, getting to know mountain ranges from their bases to their summits, camping in obscure and sheltered canyons, and living out of my truck in the Basin.

My original assignment was to write the life zone volume in the series, but Great Basin life zones are not always tidy and static And so my focus widened to ecological communities and biogeography.

I seek to untangle relationships—what or who lives where, and why. Biogeography is the geography of life. That’s about as big a subject as I could imagine.

And it sent me out across the Basin to—as the poet Mary Oliver advises in her instructions for life—’Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.’

There’s a simple reason we have all this backcountry open to us. Nevada is our most arid state. Utah is the second driest. As a consequence, the federal government couldn’t find takers for giving away the public lands here, as they did everywhere else.

The Great Basin was simply too dry for homesteaders to succeed. Most of the forests too scrawny for logging companies to covet. Nearly everyone lives in cities in both these highly urbanized states, packed densely into islands of commotion, surrounded by all that space and silence that invites adventure and compels our stewardship.

Nevada remains more than 80% public land, the highest percentage in the Lower 48. Utah again is second, with two-thirds of the state still public lands owned and accessible to us all.

Peel the outer skin here and surprises lurk beneath first impressions. Nevada sand dunes turn out to harbor ten unique beetles. Undescribed species of Great Basin fish may still exist, going about their lives in remote mountain streams. There are glacier-carved peaks in the alpine lakes out here.

From Oregon’s Steens Mountain to Nevada’s Wheeler Peak to Utah’s Stansbury Mountains, the Great Basin reminds us this is a landscape with rhythm. Basin, range. Basin, range. It’s a breathtaking dance in 2/4 time—like the pulse on a heart monitor and with a cadence just as intrinsically emotional—one to one: basin to range.

And where are we in the continent? In the four North American deserts, the hot deserts, the southern deserts, the Chihuahuan, the Sonoran, and the Mojave, melting away as elevation rises to the north to the Great Basin desert, our one winter cold desert, our largest desert.

The Great Basin has many definitions. The eloquent 19th-century geologist Clarence Dutton famously compared what he saw on a Great Basin map to an army of caterpillars crawling northward out of Mexico. All those mountain ranges!

The fundamental definition is hydrographic, the defining character of this vast area of the West, with interior drainage noted and named by John Charles Frémont in 1844, when he realized this enormous region has no connection with the ocean or the great rivers which flow into it.

Then there’s the physiographic Great Basin, the Great Basin section of the Greater Basin and Range Province that goes all the way down into Mexico. The elasticity of the Earth’s crust seems palpable here as we define the basin and range landforms. The surface pulled tight until it gives way in the parallel fault blocks that create the bowls of basins and the ridgelines of ranges.

And as settlers’ historic Great Basin, made vivid by the journeys of the non-Native trappers and overlanders in the 1800s, the Basin was the hell the immigrants had beaten and never wished to see again. Imagine being the last in line in 1849, when 22,500 people slogged west with their 60,000 draft animals.

The cultural Great Basin goes beyond these physical boundaries. A map of the historic territories of Indigenous peoples who have made this desert their home since time immemorial and who are still here, the ancestral lands overlapping and evolving as these cultures shifted dominance over resources across space and time.

My Great Basin is the ecological Great Basin, the desert: the dry land created by the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades west of the Rocky Mountains at the Wasatch Range here in Salt Lake City, west of the Colorado Plateau and south of the irrigated fields and lava flows of the Snake River plain.

The southern boundary is defined by elevation, where the Great Basin drops off to the lower, hotter Mojave. Sagebrush and shadscale give way to the sharp rosins of creosote bush and the tentacled lattice of Joshua trees.

In the two generations since I completed research for the 1989 edition, conservation biology and reconciliation ecology now emphasize shocking losses in biodiversity. In the 21st century, we’re learning to adapt to sobering aridification— an epic transformation in this desert.

The sagebrush ocean itself has become an endangered biome. Non-native plant species led by cheatgrass, Russian thistle, and halogeton continue their disruptive advance, now dominating so much territory that some recent photographs of Oregon high desert, Nevada, and Utah West Desert basins bear the caption, ‘The cheatgrass seed.’

As the sagebrush ocean evolves with our understanding of this dynamic desert, I feel we must add a clarifying asterisk next to the title. This is the same place, and also a transformed place.

That endlessly expansive image in the title now rings bittersweet. We mourn the West’s full-blown ocean of sagebrush, redolent with acrid perfume, that essential aroma of this wild desert now no longer ubiquitous.

But I’m not writing an obituary. I’m taking a snapshot in the interior of an ever-changing continent.

In this second round of field work, I realized that The Sagebrush Ocean had become an historic document pretty much on publication.

The resurgence in gold mining that began in the mid-1980s brought improved roads to mountain range after mountain range. New mining roads not on my maps crossed the old roads at unlikely angles. Backcountry faith—this dirt road, this dirt track feels right and will go where I think it will—no longer sufficed.

Lonely two-tracks were now graded, gravelled, and sometimes even gated, blocking access to whole ranges. Beyond these gates lay peaks scarred with open pits and the cyanide pools this new mining technique employed to filter ore, toxic waters responsible for the deaths of thousands of migratory birds.

And now I’m returning to the Great Basin once again as we head into yet another boom, another era of transformation. The Great Basin has seen ichthyosaurs, sequoia forests, camels, and lions, all once native to the Great Basin. This place will see beings we can’t imagine sometime in the future.

Change isn’t new here. This is a brand-new desert. The playas—dry lake beds in the center of the basins—make almost as fine a symbol of this desert as sagebrush.

I begin here, organizing the book in sequence, from iodine-studded playa to wind-whipped tundra, moving up from basin to bajada, the apron of debris eroded from all those mountains, and then to foothill, woodland, mountain forest and alpine summit, from leopard lizards to marmots.

Each elevation has its own ecological communities, its own natural history. These living communities also cloak ridges and basins in a mosaic, a tiled array of soil types, and their accompanying plants.

These living landscapes remain exhilarating, even as they respond to climate change as they cycle between fire and waves of invasive species, all of these accelerating in tempo. It’s hard to keep up.

We’re well into the Anthropocene, the proposed geologic epoch defined by the physical evidence of 8 billion humans on the planet. Even in the remote corners of the Great Basin, our impacts are impossible to avoid.

We know where ecological succession can take us. Botanist David Charlet returned home after a startling field expedition to the Middle East and realised we are turning Nevada into Iran.

Iran is millennia ahead of us and the impacts of what we deem civilization, and Charlet could see what’s coming. He foresees human activities replacing forests with shrublands and shrublands with grasslands, both dominated by annual alien species from the Middle East.

He sees the same degradation in riparian areas. We are reducing biodiversity of fauna and flora everywhere, he says. Indeed, Nevada and Utah rank as the third and fifth states, respectively, most at risk for losing biodiversity.

And so we need to check in on the Great Basin Desert and update the stories of its plants and creatures as they address these new challenges.

We need to listen both to ecologists working in natural communities, and to socio-ecologists who emphasize the interconnections between humans and nature. What matters is relationship, and the stark stage of the Great Basin highlights this quest for connection.

Perhaps this is why the creators of monumental earth art are drawn here, challenging us to look at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in relationship with the migrating shoreline of the Great Salt Lake, or to view Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Michael Heizer’s City in context within big, booming, faraway basins.

Although we’ve gotten better at managing salinity even with low water, the only way to protect the integrity of Great Salt Lake is to decrease diversions and crank open the spigots of incoming streams.

We can tell this same story at any of the big terminal saline lakes in the Great Basin, Mono Lake in California, Walker Lake and Pyramid Lake in Nevada, Lake Abert and Malheur Lake and Summer Lake in Oregon.

Indeed, of the planet’s 120 larger saline lakes, 100 are in structural decline. And these saline lakes globally aren’t a casual footnote. They hold 50% of the Earth’s lake waters. They are fragile, precious, and dependent on human management. We really do live in the Anthropocene.

You could walk across the hundreds of miles of the Great Basin In the 1980s in sagebrush all the way. Now we’ve lost half of these sagebrush communities; 1.3 million acres disappearing each year across the West.

Cheatgrass and fire are overwhelming sagebrush, in an era when climate change will only accelerate their destructive power. Nurturing the surviving core areas of healthy sagebrush turns out to be the key to slowing the loss of this entire interwoven community of plants and animals.

The Great Basin’s imperiled indicator species, the sage grouse, has become the spotted owl of the Intermountain West, the desert canary in the lithium mine (choose your own metaphor). It’s not just one iconic creature at risk. The entire ecosystem is rapidly becoming a new place, a different place.

Where pinions and junipers grow densely, they block out the light with little in the way of understory— here and there a prickly pear or mallow.

Range managers don’t much like that because there’s no grass under those trees. So they open up the woodland, chaining and masticating and destroying the trees, reseeding with grass and shrubs for cows and huntable elk and mule deer.

The managers call this treatment. But let’s be clear what treatment means. Two crawler tractors dragging 20,000-pound battleship anchor chains jolt through the forest, uprooting trees and shrubs. Bull Hog masticators shredded trees into mulch and leave the debris on site.

I happened upon a mastication project in the current mountains of easternmost Nevada, where a crew had been contracted to thin an especially dense woodland. They had created a firebreak for sure, but I felt I’d entered a war zone with the scattered corpses of hundreds of trees littering newly cleared ground.

Three-fourths of the time, these brutal efforts either do nothing to improve the range or even prove harmful. Sage grouse may benefit in rare wet springs, but chaining has unknown impacts on a vast number of invertebrates and small mammals and proves catastrophic for pinyon jays.

Jay populations have declined by 84% since 1970, and are projected to lose another 50% in the next 20 years. I dearly love piñon and juniper trees, and I mourn their destruction as I do the loss of my friends, the raucous pinyon jays.

Flocks of jays collect piñon nuts in fall, cache them in the ground, and then return in spring to harvest the berries, nuts, to feed early nesting mates and young. And the trees need the birds to disperse their seeds, for the jays remember only about 95% of all those caches and forgotten nuts sprout to pioneer new piñon grows.

Ron Lanner, the wise elder of bird and pine co-evolution, says simply: ‘Piñons were invented by jays.’

Piñon-juniper woodland is my home landscape, and though I’m attempting dispassion, old growth piñons and junipers are my companions, and sound and pragmatic reasons exist to cease their persecution, maintaining both maximum carbon storage and the great pool of continental biodiversity that holds answers to our unspoken questions.

But it seems to be true that PJ is encroaching on sagebrush, shading out shrubs and native grasses, empowering cheatgrass. I feel a responsibility to both sagebrush and PJ as a desert citizen.

As a writer, I want to do justice to these beings, to their ecosystems, to the Great Basin desert itself. I don’t want to choose between them. I don’t want to lose either of them.

Researchers find interlocking reasons for PJ expansion, each driver important at different times and at different places: overgrazing; fire exclusion; collapse of Indigenous land stewardship; climate variability; and an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that favors the trees; long-term range expansion following glaciation; recovery from 19th-century wildfire and intensive logging.

So how do we untangle these multiple causes? How do we evaluate the relative worth of these two ecosystems? Sagebrush and PJ—what do we save? How do we slow or divert change? The sturdy piñons support incredible biodiversity.

At least 1,000 species depend on these pines and their nuts for habitat and food. Sagebrush supports more than 350 species of animals and plants, and more than 200 of them are species of concern.

The fire cycle has gone from almost a century to three to five years in some places. It’s impossible to unravel the skein of disruption. I have no simple solutions.

For hope, for respite, I turn to the ancient bristlecone pines high on the raggedy ranges. Bristlecones may be squeezed right off these summits by climate change, but for now, they remain among the Earth’s oldest living things.

Great Basin Bristlecone has become the symbol of Great Basin mountains, whether the Methuselah Grove in California’s White Mountains or the high ridges of the Snake Range in Great Basin National Park.

The ancient pines lived so long by drying back to a single strip of living bark, carrying water from a few functioning roots to the single living needled shoot, adding wood in tiny increments of half an inch a century.

By matching overlapping rings, scientists have constructed a tree ring record that reaches back 9,000 years. The serene dependability of the trees connects us to the long cycles of life here, even in the Anthropocene.

To truly know the Great Basin requires making sense of complicated topography and esoteric science as much as savoring the smell of sage crushed between your fingertips.

It requires absorbing the difference in scale between a coyote trailing across the Tule Valley playa and the rise of Notch Peak in the House Range nearly a mile above.

Stand in mud bordering Borax Lake, singular home of the Borax chub, and then look up to the rounding space reeling away around you in Oregon’s Alvord Desert, a dizzying tension between intimacy and immensity that defines the essential core of this place.

The more we know, the more we see. Mary Oliver’s instruction to pay attention counts for everything.

Once Great Basin boundaries are fixed in your mind, each time you cross them, they resonate. I take great pleasure in these pivot points. My goal is to understand the character of the place so clearly that I have a visceral awareness of its boundaries when I cross them.

My desire to share this with readers grows from my belief that only through experience and knowledge do we come to care about this place or any place. Only our passion and activism will protect the earth from those solely intent on exploitation.

I hope these stories about the desert make you want to return again and again. I hope they help in making the Great Basin a part of your spiritual home.

Presenter: Stephen Trimble spoke to the Great Basin National Park Foundation Sept. 15. You can learn more about becoming a Guardian, and about the 40th anniversary celebration for Great Basin National Park, at GreatBasinFoundation.org.