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The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin
Noted writer and photographer Stephen Trimble mixes eloquent accounts of personal experiences with clear explication of natural history. His photographs capture some of the most spectacular but least-known scenery in the western states. The Great Basin Desert sweeps from the Sierra to the Rockies, from the Snake River Plain to the Mojave Desert. "Biogeography" would be one way to sum up Trimble's focus on the what lives where, and why. He introduces concepts of desert ecology and discusses living communities of animals and plants that band Great Basin mountains—from the exhilarating emptiness of dry lake-beds to alpine regions at the summits of the 13,000-foot Basin ranges. This is the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin, a place where "the desert almost seems to mirror the sky in size," where mountains hold "ravens, bristlecone pines, winter stillness—and unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep." Trimble's photographs come from the backcountry of this rugged land, from months of exploring and hiking the Great Basin wilderness in all seasons; and his well-chosen words come from a rare intimacy with the West.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 1991
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About the author
Stephen Trimble
44 books12 followersAs writer, editor, and photographer, Stephen Trimble has published 25 award-winning books during 45 years of paying attention to the landscapes and peoples of the Desert West. He’s received The Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation and a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College. In 2019, he was honored as one of Utah’s 15 most influential artists.
Trimble speaks and writes as a conservation advocate and has taught writing at the University of Utah. He makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah. Environmental historian James Aton has said: Trimble's books comprise one of the most well-rounded, sustained, and profound visions of people and landscape that we have ever seen in the American West.
Trimble speaks and writes as a conservation advocate and has taught writing at the University of Utah. He makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah. Environmental historian James Aton has said: Trimble's books comprise one of the most well-rounded, sustained, and profound visions of people and landscape that we have ever seen in the American West.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 18, 2014
For one interested in the natural history of the Great Basin, this was a thorough, deft, and fascinating read. Fans of McPhee's Annals of a Former World will likely enjoy this branch out to the biology of an area where McPhee spends a large portion of his geological focus. The book is accessible, without sacrificing depth and biological treatment, and is accompanied by beautiful and illustrative photographs, taken by the author. This is the type of book you read carefully, and with appreciation, absorbing the detailed science of the ecosystem, grasping concepts of biological relationship, human impact, and evolution through the years. It's also, simply put, a beautiful book--not of your average production. From pocket mice to the ancient Bristlecone Pine, I appreciated having my understanding of a remarkable ecosystem expanded.
I'm off to find the Methuselah Grove.
I'm off to find the Methuselah Grove.
April 19, 2011
It gave me a greater appreciation for the Great Basin. I've lived here all my life and I never realized what an amazing ecosystem it is. This weekend, I was overcome with the amazing beauty of the Great Basin thanks to the perspectives Trimble offered in this book.
December 28, 2007
A great overview of Great Basin natural history. It is a coffee-table format, large with big pictures. While much of the information is stuff that I already knew, I do not find it boring in any way. Rather, it is written in a way that comes off, for me, as a pleasant review. Trimble is clearly inspired by the Great Basin and serves as a good spokesperson to correct the popular idea that this area is "just a barren wasteland." Yes, mile after mile of sagebrush is a tad boring, but through Trimble's eyes you can see the diversity that this region truly holds. A must-read for people who have just moved to the region!
August 3, 2016
This was an excellent and often beautiful introduction to one of the probably least appreciated areas in terms of natural history in the continental United States, that of the Great Basin Desert. As Barry Lopez writes in the foreword, it “Is one of the least novelized, least painted, least eulogized of American landscapes.” The author through prose, drawings, and photographs did a great job of giving a feel for the land and its fauna and flora, showing it wasn’t monotonous or uninteresting as it is often supposed to be.
The Great Basin is a desert that is a “giant sweep of the West, sparsely populated and largely unknown,” that stretches from western Utah, covering most of Nevada, the southeastern corners of Oregon and Idaho, to California east of the Sierra Nevada (these mountains cast a rain shadow over the Great Basin), all the way south until one encounters the creosote bushes and Joshua Trees of the Mojave Desert. The author writes that many people imagine “Nevada as a network of highways traversing a void surrounding the pulsing neon of Reno and Las Vegas…[this] void beyond these strips of asphalt” is the Great Basin Desert.
The Great Basin is a land of alternating basins and ranges, one isolated mountain range separated by a basin, then another range, and then a basin in “lilting rhythm” (indeed one of the books mentioned in this one and a well-known one on the region is called _Basin and Range_, a popular book on geology by John McPhee, a book I plan to read). Each basin is usually covered in vegetation, often a “dusty, gray-green…shrubland,” hence the terms used often in the book “sagebrush seas” or “the sagebrush ocean,” with these “seas” serving to separate the various archipelagoes of “mountain islands,” though some of these “seas” were actually once bodies of water themselves, areas that during the last Ice Age held immense freshwater lakes.
Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the Great Basin Desert was that it was just until a few thousand years ago anything but a desert. Not only did glaciers creep down as low as 9200 feet, but several lakes filled various basins sometimes to depths of a thousand feet (also interestingly these lakes resulted not so much from increased precipitation but thanks to cooler temperatures decreased evaporation).
Though there are still lakes in the Great Basin Desert, such as of course Great Salt Lake, others can only be discerned by what they left; immense playas, flat, sun-blasted, often very salty areas that seem devoid of life. Two of the most famous are the Black Rock Desert (a mostly clay desert, once crossed by the Applegate-Lassen trail by pioneers, that though they lamented the lack of water or shade, was flat and easy on their wagons) and the Great Salt Lake deserts. Seemingly lifeless as the moon most of the time, playas can fill with life if they fill with winter rain and snow, with buried seeds, spores, eggs, and aestivating adults suddenly blossoming and becoming with the rains a swirl of activity in the form of fairy, clam, and tadpole shrimp, insects, phytoplankton, and algae (in some cases waiting for more than a decade for enough rain to fall).
Though the land is ancient, so recent is the sagebrush ocean and playa world of the Great Basin Desert that some of the oldest specimens of one of its characteristic mountain trees – the famed Bristlecone Pine – may at around 4500 years have been alive the entire span of what we would call the modern Great Basin Desert.
To me the book was its best when really bringing to life the various plant communities, especially of the “shrub seas” of the basins. Far from being unvarying or boring endless shrubs, there is quite a bit of variety, as the “ocean” has smaller “seas” and “bays” with different plants and plant and animal communities; most areas might be gray-green sagebrush, but there are also areas of intensely green greasewood, of dusty-leaved, tough, spiny shadscale, or lush whitesage. The areas around the Great Salt Lake deserts for instance are not sagebrush at all – sagebrush finds the low water table and the high amounts of salt intolerable – but are instead iodine bushes, plants that can survive in soil that is up to 5 percent salt and are so successful that by a 1965 estimate covered as much as 9% of the Utah section of the Great Basin Desert. Beyond the iodine bush flats is greasewood country, which dominates soil that while the top two feet or soil aren’t particularly salty, the deep layers are often quite a bit saltier. Greasewood thrives in areas that receives both fair amounts of runoff (such as at the base of dunes or along drainage ways), sometimes along the latter forming “woodlands” that might be as high as 15 feet, but also taps groundwater at depths of 30 feet. Shadscale, which according to T.H. Kearney (as quoted by the author) looks “nearly conquered by the environment,” parched looking plants that according to Elna Bakker appear “crafted from cornflakes,” a tenacious plant that had can survive while being three-quarters dead, is the main plant in areas too cold for creosote bush and too dry for sagebrush. Not everything is necessarily even parched or weathered looking as far as the different communities go, as the author introduces the reader to whitesage flats, areas made up of a “small, feathery, light-colored shrub” that is also called winterfat, often standing out in vivid contrast to neighboring gray-green shadscale flats, looking “like a prairie or a manicured desert golf course.”
The dominant plant of course of the central, higher Great Basin is the sagebrush, which “self-assuredly fills valley after valley,” even broken up as it is by “shadscale seas” and the like. This aromatic, gray-green plant is not a singular species but is rather comprised of twelve different species, several of which have distinct subspecies, many of which have distinct climatic and moisture preferences. Trimble dispels a few misconceptions in the chapter devoted to sagebrush, such as writing is not a true sage (a member of the genus Salvia and the mint family) and tastes nothing like the sage one might using in cooking, and it does not occur in pure stands and apparently had and still does have fair amounts of grasses mixed in (a surprisingly controversial subject as detailed by the author).
The sections on iodine bush, shadscale, greasewood, whitesage, and sagebrush definitely discussed animals as well. The reader learns for instance of how the chisel-toothed kangaroo rat essentially makes shadscale the center of its particular universe while black-tailed jackrabbits “outnumber every other sagebrush vertebrate.” Pronghorn probably always found Great Basin sagebrush peripheral range at best while Sage Grouse, which “feed on it, take cover under it, and nest beneath it” need other shrubs to thrive and “a monotonous stand of dense big sagebrush will not support the grouse.”
Dunes were surprisingly active and life-filled areas, the author describing them as a “metropolis of nocturnal rodents,” places that might seem sterile in the light of day but if one looks early enough in the morning notices that they are covered in tracks. Far from being barren and lifeless as one might expect in say the Sahara, Great Basin dunes often hold water deep in protected reservoirs, reachable by long-rooted plants, are easier in general for plants to remove water from than in say the fine-textured clays elsewhere in the desert that bind water tightly, can contain nutritious windfalls of plant debris, and are good habitat for kangaroo rats and lizards. Indeed the discussion on dune rodents was interesting, the author describing studies of how not only carnivorous grasshopper mice but also a wide variety of seed-eating rodents (kangaroo rats, kangaroo mice, pocket mice, deer mice, and harvest mice) are all able to coexist.
I could go on and on about the many fascinating aspects of Great Basin ecology, fauna, and flora that Trimble discussed, ranging from the impact of such invasive species as cheatgrass, to the unique role of cattle in the Great Basin (sometimes described as a “wilderness with cows”), to the Great Salt Lake food chain, the weird ecology of the Mono Lake, the forests (yes forests, those “mountain islands” often have forests) that are home to the venerable, ancient Bristlecone Pines (another favorite section of mine), the two “bird pines” (at lower elevations the culturally significant Pinon Pine, spread by the fascinating Pinyon Jay, and at higher elevations the Limber and Whitebark Pine, spread by Clark’s Nutcracker), the subalpine “gopher garden” plants that owe their existence at least in part to pocket gophers…but I will stop. I knew very little of this before reading this book.
Very few complaints about the book. I liked the maps of the different ecological regions of the Great Basin Desert and how each area (sagebrush ocean or dune or pinon-juniper woodland for instance) got its own chapter. Sometimes the names of the many, many mountain ranges got to be a blur to me as I really hadn’t heard of hardly any of them and they weren’t generally detailed on maps. I think I enjoyed the chapters on the basin ecology more than the range ecology but I think that is just personal preference. The book had a good bibliography and while a little dated did suggest to me a few good books which I have since ordered. I often feel in these sorts of books plants get short shrift in comparison to animals and I am very happy to report that that is not the case here.
The Great Basin is a desert that is a “giant sweep of the West, sparsely populated and largely unknown,” that stretches from western Utah, covering most of Nevada, the southeastern corners of Oregon and Idaho, to California east of the Sierra Nevada (these mountains cast a rain shadow over the Great Basin), all the way south until one encounters the creosote bushes and Joshua Trees of the Mojave Desert. The author writes that many people imagine “Nevada as a network of highways traversing a void surrounding the pulsing neon of Reno and Las Vegas…[this] void beyond these strips of asphalt” is the Great Basin Desert.
The Great Basin is a land of alternating basins and ranges, one isolated mountain range separated by a basin, then another range, and then a basin in “lilting rhythm” (indeed one of the books mentioned in this one and a well-known one on the region is called _Basin and Range_, a popular book on geology by John McPhee, a book I plan to read). Each basin is usually covered in vegetation, often a “dusty, gray-green…shrubland,” hence the terms used often in the book “sagebrush seas” or “the sagebrush ocean,” with these “seas” serving to separate the various archipelagoes of “mountain islands,” though some of these “seas” were actually once bodies of water themselves, areas that during the last Ice Age held immense freshwater lakes.
Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the Great Basin Desert was that it was just until a few thousand years ago anything but a desert. Not only did glaciers creep down as low as 9200 feet, but several lakes filled various basins sometimes to depths of a thousand feet (also interestingly these lakes resulted not so much from increased precipitation but thanks to cooler temperatures decreased evaporation).
Though there are still lakes in the Great Basin Desert, such as of course Great Salt Lake, others can only be discerned by what they left; immense playas, flat, sun-blasted, often very salty areas that seem devoid of life. Two of the most famous are the Black Rock Desert (a mostly clay desert, once crossed by the Applegate-Lassen trail by pioneers, that though they lamented the lack of water or shade, was flat and easy on their wagons) and the Great Salt Lake deserts. Seemingly lifeless as the moon most of the time, playas can fill with life if they fill with winter rain and snow, with buried seeds, spores, eggs, and aestivating adults suddenly blossoming and becoming with the rains a swirl of activity in the form of fairy, clam, and tadpole shrimp, insects, phytoplankton, and algae (in some cases waiting for more than a decade for enough rain to fall).
Though the land is ancient, so recent is the sagebrush ocean and playa world of the Great Basin Desert that some of the oldest specimens of one of its characteristic mountain trees – the famed Bristlecone Pine – may at around 4500 years have been alive the entire span of what we would call the modern Great Basin Desert.
To me the book was its best when really bringing to life the various plant communities, especially of the “shrub seas” of the basins. Far from being unvarying or boring endless shrubs, there is quite a bit of variety, as the “ocean” has smaller “seas” and “bays” with different plants and plant and animal communities; most areas might be gray-green sagebrush, but there are also areas of intensely green greasewood, of dusty-leaved, tough, spiny shadscale, or lush whitesage. The areas around the Great Salt Lake deserts for instance are not sagebrush at all – sagebrush finds the low water table and the high amounts of salt intolerable – but are instead iodine bushes, plants that can survive in soil that is up to 5 percent salt and are so successful that by a 1965 estimate covered as much as 9% of the Utah section of the Great Basin Desert. Beyond the iodine bush flats is greasewood country, which dominates soil that while the top two feet or soil aren’t particularly salty, the deep layers are often quite a bit saltier. Greasewood thrives in areas that receives both fair amounts of runoff (such as at the base of dunes or along drainage ways), sometimes along the latter forming “woodlands” that might be as high as 15 feet, but also taps groundwater at depths of 30 feet. Shadscale, which according to T.H. Kearney (as quoted by the author) looks “nearly conquered by the environment,” parched looking plants that according to Elna Bakker appear “crafted from cornflakes,” a tenacious plant that had can survive while being three-quarters dead, is the main plant in areas too cold for creosote bush and too dry for sagebrush. Not everything is necessarily even parched or weathered looking as far as the different communities go, as the author introduces the reader to whitesage flats, areas made up of a “small, feathery, light-colored shrub” that is also called winterfat, often standing out in vivid contrast to neighboring gray-green shadscale flats, looking “like a prairie or a manicured desert golf course.”
The dominant plant of course of the central, higher Great Basin is the sagebrush, which “self-assuredly fills valley after valley,” even broken up as it is by “shadscale seas” and the like. This aromatic, gray-green plant is not a singular species but is rather comprised of twelve different species, several of which have distinct subspecies, many of which have distinct climatic and moisture preferences. Trimble dispels a few misconceptions in the chapter devoted to sagebrush, such as writing is not a true sage (a member of the genus Salvia and the mint family) and tastes nothing like the sage one might using in cooking, and it does not occur in pure stands and apparently had and still does have fair amounts of grasses mixed in (a surprisingly controversial subject as detailed by the author).
The sections on iodine bush, shadscale, greasewood, whitesage, and sagebrush definitely discussed animals as well. The reader learns for instance of how the chisel-toothed kangaroo rat essentially makes shadscale the center of its particular universe while black-tailed jackrabbits “outnumber every other sagebrush vertebrate.” Pronghorn probably always found Great Basin sagebrush peripheral range at best while Sage Grouse, which “feed on it, take cover under it, and nest beneath it” need other shrubs to thrive and “a monotonous stand of dense big sagebrush will not support the grouse.”
Dunes were surprisingly active and life-filled areas, the author describing them as a “metropolis of nocturnal rodents,” places that might seem sterile in the light of day but if one looks early enough in the morning notices that they are covered in tracks. Far from being barren and lifeless as one might expect in say the Sahara, Great Basin dunes often hold water deep in protected reservoirs, reachable by long-rooted plants, are easier in general for plants to remove water from than in say the fine-textured clays elsewhere in the desert that bind water tightly, can contain nutritious windfalls of plant debris, and are good habitat for kangaroo rats and lizards. Indeed the discussion on dune rodents was interesting, the author describing studies of how not only carnivorous grasshopper mice but also a wide variety of seed-eating rodents (kangaroo rats, kangaroo mice, pocket mice, deer mice, and harvest mice) are all able to coexist.
I could go on and on about the many fascinating aspects of Great Basin ecology, fauna, and flora that Trimble discussed, ranging from the impact of such invasive species as cheatgrass, to the unique role of cattle in the Great Basin (sometimes described as a “wilderness with cows”), to the Great Salt Lake food chain, the weird ecology of the Mono Lake, the forests (yes forests, those “mountain islands” often have forests) that are home to the venerable, ancient Bristlecone Pines (another favorite section of mine), the two “bird pines” (at lower elevations the culturally significant Pinon Pine, spread by the fascinating Pinyon Jay, and at higher elevations the Limber and Whitebark Pine, spread by Clark’s Nutcracker), the subalpine “gopher garden” plants that owe their existence at least in part to pocket gophers…but I will stop. I knew very little of this before reading this book.
Very few complaints about the book. I liked the maps of the different ecological regions of the Great Basin Desert and how each area (sagebrush ocean or dune or pinon-juniper woodland for instance) got its own chapter. Sometimes the names of the many, many mountain ranges got to be a blur to me as I really hadn’t heard of hardly any of them and they weren’t generally detailed on maps. I think I enjoyed the chapters on the basin ecology more than the range ecology but I think that is just personal preference. The book had a good bibliography and while a little dated did suggest to me a few good books which I have since ordered. I often feel in these sorts of books plants get short shrift in comparison to animals and I am very happy to report that that is not the case here.
March 28, 2020
A rather technical read on the geography, fauna and flora of the Great Basin desert. I enjoyed reading of the areas I'd visited, but had trouble visualizing those I had not. You also have to know your fauna and flora as the author doesn't take much time describing the basics.
July 19, 2021
Quite a bit of the infotainment was above my understanding, so I skimmed a bit, but I still very much enjoyed this book about my home.
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May 22, 2022Ecosystems. Sagebrush versus cheatgrass. Bristlecone pine. Outdoor photography. Detailed text.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews