The long drive between Salt Lake City, Utah and Reno, Nevada on Interstate 80 feels endless, the landscape timeless. But these basins and ranges of the Great Basin Desert are changing dramatically. Wildfire, climate change.
The long drive between Salt Lake City and Reno, Nevada, on Interstate 80 feels endless, the landscape timeless. But these basins and ranges of the Great Basin Desert are changing dramatically.
Wildfir.
I called this place “the sagebrush ocean” when I first wrote about it in the 1980s. Now, scientists mourn the loss of 1.3 million acres of healthy sagebrush each year, threatening animals that need sagebrush, like the Greater Sage Grouse and pygmy rabbit.
As highly flammable cheatgrass expands across the deserts of Nevada and Utah, the sagebrush is in danger of disappearing. The dilemma is how to hold onto and add to what's left.