What is the Great Basin?
America’s wasteland seeks a new identity by Jon Christensen The landscape casts a rhythmic spell in the Great Basin. You can feel it driving Highway 50 across Nevada. Grinding up a steep grade to the summit. Seeing a broad valley, and more mountains, one range after another, like waves to the horizon. Then coasting down the other side and out across the wide expanse. Basin and range, basin and range; it’s hypnotic, like the sea. A harsh expanse of dry desert and high mountains between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin has always been a land in between, a region apart, not included in visions of the other Western regions, the Rockies, the Colorado Plateau, the Southwest, or the West Coast. The landscape is more than half empty. So we fill it with images and ideas. Ten years ago, Life magazine proclaimed Highway 50 the loneliest road in America. It isn’t. But turn off almost any place and you’re on your way to some of the loneliest roads in the West, narrow ribbons of as
There is no one definition. Drawn most simply, the way water flows, the Great Basin drains – when there is something to drain – roughly 200,000 square miles, one-fifth of the West, where creeks and rivers flow inland to terminal lakes, marshes, salt flats and sinks, rather than to the sea. Geologically, the Great Basin is part of the larger Basin and Range province, a section of the earth that is inexorably being pulled apart. Reno and Salt Lake City move one human step farther apart each century. Geology more than anything else defines the Great Basin with its characteristic ranges, tilted fault blocks that rise gradually on one side and drop precipitously off the other. And geology determines hydrology.
There’s a saying… “If you have to explain it, it need not be understood.” No other saying personifies the Great Basin better! Few people already know what the Great Basin is, so here’s a noting of the place I live and where I spend my days and my camera. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but us Basin locals prefer to keep it that way! Nevadans’ find another definition for the term, “beauty”. “What’s in a ‘Great Basin’?” “It’s just a wasteland!”, he told me. A friend of mine from elsewhere, who’d only stepped foot in Nevada to open his wallet in the casino. It was either ‘get rich quick’, or stuff your face at one of our cheap buffets. This is the moniker most of America uses to define the Great Basin. A wasteland, a sump, or my favorite one… an empty hole in the ground. The Great Basin doesn’t define itself well. Nor is it a place that seems to want to be understood. To most people, it’s a hole of emptyness in between California and the Wasatch, a vast nowhere of flat, monotonous roa
Defining the Great Basin begins with a choice: are you looking at the way the water flows (hydrographic), the way the landscape formed (geologic), or the resident plants and animals (biologic)? Each of these definitions will give you a slightly different geographic boundary of the Great Basin, but the hydrographic definition is the most commonly used. The Hydrographic Great Basin is a 200,000 square mile area that drains internally. All precipitation in the region evaporates, sinks underground or flows into lakes (mostly saline). Creeks, streams, or rivers find no outlet to either the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean. The region is bounded by the Wasatch Mountains to the east, the Sierra Nevada to the west, and the Snake River Plain to the north. The south rim is less distinct. The Great Basin includes most of Nevada, half of Utah, and sections of Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, and California. The term “Great Basin” is slightly misleading; the region is actually made up of many small basin
Shrouded in myth and mystery since its discovery by Europeans over 150 years ago, the Great Basin is still misunderstood today. Called dead, barren, and desolate, visitors are surprised to find it alive, fruitful, and full of wonders. Great Basin National Park preserves a small representative piece of this larger region, whose boundaries can be defined three different ways. more…
