America's Great Empty Has Pleasant Surprises

A companion story to this month's
National Park Pick - Nevada's Great Basin

John C. Fremont, in his epic exploration of the Far West in the 1840s, was the first explorer to figure out the secret of the Great Basin of Nevada, Utah and Idaho. The vast high-desert area he traversed covered almost 200,000 square miles, encompassing dozens of north-south tending mountain ranges and basins, and stretching 500 miles from the Wasatch Mountains in Utah west to the Sierra Nevada and Death Valley in California.

The one characteristic that Fremont found set this vast space apart from all other regions of the United States was that it had no drainage to the sea. The rivers and creeks that originated on the innumerable mountain peaks of this expanse would struggle their way down the intervening basins for a few dozen or few hundred miles, turn into mudflats, then finally disappear into the thirsty ground.

The greatest of the Basin’s rivers, the Humboldt, was a bitter disappointment to pioneers who followed it in the 1840s, hoping it would lead them to the Pacific. For 290 miles it arched its way across Nevada, providing some meager sustenance for people and their animals, only to disappear miserably from sight some 70 miles northeast of present-day Reno.

It was not always that way. Twelve thousand years ago, at the end of the last great ice age, the basins were filled with giant lakes, some of them as large or larger than the Great Lakes of today. The mountains surrounding them were blanketed in conifer forests. The scene was much like the one that greets modern visitors to Lake Tahoe, only the lakes would have extended to far past the north or south horizon.  The biggest remnant of the Great Basin’s ice age glory is the Great Salt Lake in western Utah, the brackish 2,000-square mile (about 10x the size of Lake Tahoe) ghost of Lake Bonneville, a 500-foot-deep body of water that covered 20,000 square miles, an area about the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

As the earth warmed, the forests receded, then disappeared, gradually replaced by low-slung, drought-resistant desert plants. The mammoths, musk oxen and camels that had frequented the shores of the ice age lakes either retreated north or were hunted to extinction by the ancestors of the Indians. The Great Basin became a high desert, inhospitable to all but the heartiest and best adapted of humans and animals.

Surprises, Surprises

Today, the Great Basin is the least populated part of the U.S. outside of Alaska. With the exception of Reno and Las Vegas at its far western edge, and Salt Lake City on its eastern, the region averages only two people per square mile. Yet for all its emptiness, it still has managed to impinge on people’s consciousness in intriguing ways: the Bonneville Raceway is here, a great salt flat that has seen some of the world’s most determined drivers set automobile, motorcycle and truck land speed records.

In the Black Rock Desert northeast of Reno, one of the most remote areas in the continental U.S., the Burning Man Festival takes place in late summer each year, drawing thousands of anarchists, artists, contrarians, New Agers, dreamers, libertarians, post-modernists, unrepentant Marxists, exhibitionists, voyeurs, rebels and just plain folks to its week-long celebration of ephemeral art and culture, and life without the kind of rules lawyers write, legislate and then fight over.

Great Salt Lake, so briny it’s almost impossible not to float on it, intrigues with its sheer size – what's this big expanse of water doing in a desert? – and often incredible blue.  Explorers once excitedly thought it was an arm of the Pacific Ocean, an illusion fueled by the millions of seagulls living there who figured so prominently in Mormon lore when they providentially swooped down in 1848 to devour the crickets that were eating the Saints’ crops.

In nearby Salt Lake City and its satellites live the hundreds of thousands of descendants of the Mormon pioneers who, in 1847, began a grim trudge west from the Mississippi River along a 1,300-mile route. Their dream was to find a refuge so remote and forbidding that they would never be bothered again by hostile governments or neighbors. The city is no longer remote – heck, it’s the crossroads of the trans-mountain West – and its resident ballet and symphony, as well as ski areas, have put it on many maps.

In the southern part of the Great Basin is Area 51, a “secret” airbase where the U.S. Government for years experimented with and developed such exotic aircraft as the U2 and SR-71 spy planes, the Stealth bomber and fighter, and, rumors say, “Aurora,” a 4,000-mph successor to the SR-71. Nearby is the Nevada Test Site at Yucca Flat, the site of scores of atomic bomb tests, both underground and above, from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Near the geographic center of Nevada is the town of Manhattan. Unlike its Atlantic namesake, this mining town at 7,000 feet on the flank of Bald Mountain has no nightlife. In fact, it’s abandoned. As ghost towns go, it’s one of the better ones. The derelict homes, storefronts and churches, though sagging and rotting, are still in good enough condition to give visitors a great glimpse into life in a small western town at the turn of the 20^th century.

Then there is Route 50, the old U.S. Highway that a Life magazine article in 1986 declared “the loneliest road in America.” The article quoted an AAA spokesperson who said, "It's totally empty. There are no points of interest. We don't recommend it. We warn all motorists not to drive there unless they're confident of their survival skills."  This enraged the people who live along the nearly 400-mile stretch from Utah to California. Like Australian aborigines, who can look at a desolate stretch of Outback and envision a week’s worth of full-course meals, the denizens along Route 50 knew that their highway was the highway Americans dream about when they imagine the perfect road: A two-lane blacktop that stretches forever, with few other cars on it, and enough twists, turns, ups and downs, and old mining towns to keep it interesting.

There’s another thing they knew: The Great Basin has a beauty that enthralls those who will let it get to them. This apparently monochrome land is a realm of distance and shadow. As the sun transits the day, the light plays with the mountains – the range that appeared one way in the morning is a different range in the afternoon. The stark mountains and the long alluvial fans that have been washed down from them also funnel visitors’ eyes to the horizon ahead, forcing them to take in the big picture rather than focus on the small details that they would during a drive through the woods or a closed-in area. They begin to enjoy a refreshing sense of vastness. Even in a country the size of the U.S., a huge slice of sheer, empty distance is a rarity to revel in. –Patrick Totty