Foreword by John Hart I WAS DRIVING ACROSS the Great Basin with a companion unused to desert places. We were near the center of Nevada, on U.S. 50, east of the tiny town of Austin. We had crossed the massive Toiyabe Range, skirted the north end of the lofty Toquimas, and were approaching the escarpment of the Monitor Range, yet our view was much wider than it was high. I found myself talking nervously, defensively, about the steppe around us. "It's not all like this," I said waving at miles of sagebrush. "Up in those ranges there are forests and streams. There are bristlecone pines on some of them, bristlecone groves you never hear about. There are meadows. Alpine lakes, even." Then I stopped, for I'd caught myself breaking a promise made to myself long before not to misrepresent, not to sell short, one of my favorite regions of the world. It's true, of course, about the tarns and forests, the cirques and snowfields and ancient trees, but these bits of the Great Basin make up less than 1 percent of it. If you want alpine surroundings, you can probably find them closer to home. People who love the Great Basin don't enjoy just the spots where it mimics the Sierra Nevada or the Rocky Mountains. They also like the endless, open pinon-juniper woodlands and the sage that, after a rainfall, gives off an odor as stirring as the wind off a glacier. They love the desert peach and the desert poppy and the bitterbrush and the Joshua tree, and even the drab, ubiquitous rabbitbruch, with its pale, twisted leaves and yellow flowers. They know the licken-splattered lava rims, the badlands with soils like drifts of powdered paint, the alkali pans with their dazzling, mathematical flatness. They've swum in the weird salt lakes with their heavy, amniotic water. Perhaps Great Basin addicts are hooked most of all on the distance itself, the miles of nothing much. They like that it is hours between gas pumps; they understand that it can be days to a mechanic should your car break down. They know, too, that anyone you meet on one of those incredibly bad back roads will stop and lend a hand. Heading out into the basin from one of the towns or cities that huddle around its flanks is almost like leaving a shoreline for a wild sea. Great Basin admirers are open to all of this: the strangeness, width, and leanness of it all; the unsupportedness. To love the Great Basin, you have to love it whole; and in this book, Claude Fiddler and Steve Roper show how that is done. Claude Fiddler's photographs find the textures and the colors where the unpracticed eye might register only vacancy. Spend some time with images like these, and you'll never look at emptiness in quite the same way. Steve Roper's lively history shows us the Great Basin as one of the continent's hard cases; a difficult habitat, even for the skillful Paiutes and Shoshones; for white explorers, a geographical puzzle that would not yield; for thousands of trekkers west in gold rush days, a debilitating obstacle. It wasn't really the Sierra Nevada that did in the Donner Party, Roper points out; it was the Great Basin. This land was comprehended late. It was mapped late. It was settled late. And its subtle beauties were acknowledged very late in the game. Even the earth's polar regions found their interpreters, their lyrical defenders, before the Great Basin did. After recognition (with a sometimes frightening lag) comes preservation. This phase also has been slow to arrive in the Great Basin region. Except in the California portion, the acreage devoted here to military purposes still dwarfs the acreage in parks and designated wilderness. Even where it appears to be unoccupied, this country tends to be used very hard. If it's not munitions, it's the results of mining: almost-random bulldozer scars, cavernous pits and strips, cavernous piles drizzled with cyanide. If not mining, in some regions it's off-the-road vehicles. If nothing else, it's grazing, often the excessive kind that punishes and impoverishes vegetation. (There should be lots more bunchgrass intermixed with that sagebrush than there is.) "The most common wilderness animal in the Great Basin,: a conservationist wryly notes, "is the range cow." We still have a long way to go toward embracing the Great Basin as a place worthy of respect, of celebration, and of some decent measure of protection. I'm grateful that Claude Fiddler and Steve Roper are helping so eloquently to get us there.