Great Basin

That time when the dog got stoned

As I usually do in early July, this last summer the dog and I headed off to the hinterlands of northern Nevada.  The trip is timed to allow us to get far from civilization to spare Shadow the horrors of fireworks.  This years trip took us across central Nevada to Ruby Lakes Wildlife Refuge, then […]

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Into the Quinns

In southern Nevada, a bit more than 100 miles north of Las Vegas, lies a mountain range known as the Quinn Canyon Range.  I first became aware of it when I was pondering over some vegetation maps of Nevada, and noticed that this range had an unusually high diversity of trees.  Some, such as white

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Sagebrush Singers

Wow, where did the summer go?  It seems like just yesterday I was waking up to some lovely dawn choruses and now many of the birds have already migrated south.  With breeding season over, even most of the resident birds have quieted down, so the steppe and woods surrounding my home are much quieter now.

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Hart Mountain Summer

Winter still has it’s cool and windy grip on northern Nevada, so I’m digging into the archives from last summer for some recordings to share.  In July of last year, after visiting and recording in the Santa Rosa Mountains, I traveled to Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon.  I first visited Hart Mountain

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Escaping the smoke

This summer has been unbelievable in the amount of smoke, even in areas distant from the wildfires in California, Nevada, and the Pacific Northwest.  In northern Nevada, rather than the rare smoky day, a day better than “moderate” air quality was something to celebrate.  During much of July and August, the air quality never got

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Fire and feathers

It’s been a hot and very smoky summer in western Nevada.  I almost hate to complain, given the horrific blazes that have occurred just on the other side of the Sierras in California.   Much of the smoke from those fires moves east, over the Sierras to linger in the valleys beyond. Day after day of

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First breath of winter

It’s been an insanely busy few months, as I relocate my residence to northern Nevada.  But now that the move is done and most of the boxes unpacked, it’s time to filter through the many recordings I made this year and get back to blogging. The move itself was hectic, as I packed up a

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Desert Marsh

The Great Basin is a rough, corrugated landscape of rugged mountain ranges separated by desert flats.  Although each one differs a bit, most of the valley bottoms are decorated with bursage, big sage, and salt flats. When the glaciers melted at the end of the Pleistocene, these basin were filled with large lakes, primarily Lake

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The Sagebrush Ocean

It’s no news to anyone who reads my blog that I am fascinated by the Great Basin.  Where some people see brown desolation, I see a complex and intriguing ecosystem.  Actually, many ecosystems, that differ by elevation, latitude, longitude and history.  Lying in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains, the Great

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Seeking quiet in eastern Nevada

I recently returned to Arizona, after spending the entire summer in northern Nevada.  My first stop on my way south was in the newly designated Basin and Range National Monument in southern Nevada.   I spent the first night at a little campground on the Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge, which comprises a series of wetlands near

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Canada geese on the Carson River

The dead-end river

River speech is a concatenation of murmurs and burbles, hisses and humming, snarls, chokes, whispered asides, and violent coughs.  The voice of mountain water is always many voices, blended like the roar of the crowd, and although even before you think about it you know you can never tease those myriad elements apart, you keen

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