A Valley in the Sierra Nevadas

The Sierra Nevada mountain range is on the western side of the Great Basin opposite the Rockies.  In southwestern Nevada, there is another smaller mountain range called the Pine Nuts Mountains.  Between them is a broad desert valley full of sage brush.  Here glider planes set world records by working their way back and forth up to 30,000 feet off air currents as if they were in an aerial half-pipe.  The desert terrain is full of quail and rabbits, and there are snakes and scorpions although I’ve never seen one.  Hawks and eagles perch on high tree branches and telephone poles watching for prey invisible to me.  The place is full of life, but not in ways familiar to my east coast sensibilities.

This was once Wasatch Indian territory.  After the Mexican Cession of 1848, Mormons built settlements in the region ultimately establishing their permanent home in Salt Lake City in 1857.  Miners arrived with the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859, and ranchers found the land was good for cattle grazing.  They dug gullies along horse trails to divert and collect rainwater, and sluice gates controlled irrigated fields of grain for feed.  A natural hot spring supported a resort Mark Twain visited to relieve his rheumatism.

Nevada needs no state income tax because of gambling revenues, and this has attracted development of another kind.  During the pre-recession boom, track housing sprang up like algae blooms, and spread in ways that necessitate complete dependence on the car.  Today the state has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at over 14% and the second highest rate of house foreclosures after Florida.  In this valley, five-acre zoning has resulted in what looks like pens for the wealthy with shiny, white PVC fences surrounding lots impossible to “landscape” to a non-local ideal, and houses that can’t resolve the competing conflict between being open to the astonishing views and being protected from the intense sun.

These human efforts pale in comparison to the scale of the landscape.  The quiet is deep and feels eternal.  Cold northern winds and warmer ocean breezes mark the seasons more than changing foliage.  Copious snow melts run off the mountains in streams shaping foothills like folds of great hoop skirts.  The morning mist hovers between valley and mountains.  Spectacular sunrises and sunsets are reflected on mountain faces as both a prelude and echo of shadow and light to such a degree that the colors in the sky above one mountain range compete with the reflected ground on the other.  People who have found a way to live here relish the rugged conditions and have one request:  “Don’t write anything that makes people want to live here.”  Whether the ecological balance of this desert valley landscape is so fragile that human development will eventually destroy the very characteristics that attracted people here in the first place, or these activities are no more than insignificant scratches on the land, remains to be seen.  To belong here, though, clearly requires yielding to a place that is greater than you.