Prose by Gregory McNamee
Photos by Stephen Strom
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These visions speak to a fact of the desert: such places are disorienting, and for reasons both meteorological and geological. If you stand at a high point in a field in, say, the piedmont of Virginia or the hill country of eastern Kansas or southern Ohio, places where the sky is full of moisture and the relief is broken by low rises and trees, your vision will be limited to something under three miles in any given direction. From a similarly high point in the middle of a valley in the basin-and-range deserts of the West, however, where rocky plains are bounded by mountains fifteen or twenty miles distant, that fifty-odd-square-mile domain grows a thousandfold. The absence of water in the atmosphere brings what would elsewhere be a hazy horizon into sharp focus, so that those faraway mountains stand out in sharp relief against the sky. It is hard to judge distances in such conditions, and many a traveler has perished by underestimating the amount of hot, waterless ground to be covered. Overlook, Canyonlands National Park, Utah |
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Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural
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