No Boundaries

One of Dozens of Several Hundred Foot Lamoille Canyon Waterfalls

This Post and accompanying gallery addition were intended to include a fairly comprehensive shoot of  two important examples of the sky-island aspect of saline environments: Great Basin National Park and Lamoille Canyon in the Ruby Mountains. Both are isolated high-elevation alpine ecosystems in Central Eastern Nevada.

Things often don’t go as projected, so I can only provide a few good images from what was a largely botched expedition. Fortunately, I can blame almost everything on the weird weather that we’ve been having this year. One of the problems with a winter that extends into June is that, eventually, it has to warm up, and when it does, Summer temperatures ensue without regard for those absent Spring months which have fallen by the wayside, discarded by mother nature. Then months of snow melt are compressed into days or weeks and havoc reigns at elevation.

The general concept of the sky-island is an easy one to explain. Millions of years ago the rocks of the great basin were pulled apart resulting in what is called basin-and-range topography: long north-south oriented high-elevation ridges separated by similarly oriented flat valleys. Thousands of years ago, when everywhere was cool and wet, all of this terrain was covered with either forest or alpine tundra above the forest. As global warming progressed, long before human utilization of fossil fuels, things heated up and dried out. The valleys became desert and the ranges became isolated, forested ecosystems. These small mountainous regions are similar because they share their beginnings in a unified whole and have had a similar environmental history, but all are also somewhat different because they have been isolated from one another, by the intervening desert, for some time.

If you are interested in a more involved and informed explanation please consider “The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin” by Stephen Trimble or “The Desert’s Past: A Natural Prehistory of the Great Basin” by Donald K. Grayson. These are the best books on the subject. The first is more of an extremely-well curated photography exposition and fluid narrative  intended for layman readers while the second is a scientific treatise valuable to those of us willing to put up with large amounts of dry text in order to find answers to the perpetually recurrent question: “I wonder how they figured that out?”

The thing that most people miss when considering the mountains of the great basin is that these are, although limited in aerial extent, serious kick-ass mountains. The elevation of Wheeler Peak at the tippy-top of Great Basin National Park is 13,063 ft — exceeding the tallest peaks in Idaho, Arizona and Montana and just a bit shy of the top spots in Utah, Wyoming and Nevada (in the Sierra Nevada). When you toss in the associated facts that the great-basin high points are often little used and visited, haven’t anything resembling cell-phone service, are largely lacking in navigable roads to the top-parts (or lower-middle-parts even), have lousy trail systems, and are often only accessed by traveling dozens and dozens of miles on dirt, these can range from daunting to downright intimidating.

I once had three simultaneous flat tires on a valley road somewhere around a hundred or so miles from pavement  in the middle parts of nowhere in Nevada (bit of a pickle). Our last trip also provided it’s share of set-backs and debacles. Kate broke her finger in an errant car-door incident on the first night, a long way from civilization. Most everywhere we went we encountered the unfortunate result of the immediate temporal juxtaposition of winter and summer resulting in snow/mush-packed trails, overflowing streams, a partial midnight campground evacuation, a full campground closure due to a mud/debris flow (same campground), and general mayhem and yuck. And we capped everything off with a lengthy episode involving finding treatment for said broken finger in the small, somewhat odd and historic mining-boomlet of Elko.

On the other hand, in a normally dry place we encountered water flowing abundantly from nature’s every orifice and left two days early with a large number of great basin waterfall photographs (somewhat rare indeed). Because Elko is the business end of one the world’s largest gold centers, I have a good excuse to be in the area often, so we’ll have to catch up with the rest of the sky islands photography later (another trip in August is already planned).

Great Basin National Park is now one of my favorite parks. It is small and the parts accessible to the regular traveler are even smaller. Mention of bristlecone pines, a major feature of the park, was all the rage at Salt Lake City cocktail parties around ten or fifteen years ago when the park was brand-spanking new.  These are some of the oldest individual trees on the planet. But fads fade and I have heard little said of the park in the last five years.

It is special for a couple of reasons. It isn’t well visited, so is free of the parading clots of hikers characteristic of most summertime National Park trails. And, it does have a good paved road which accesses a very high basin just below the highest peaks of the range. One of the most striking features of sky-island ranges is that there is a rapid progression of ecosystems as one moves upward in elevation. This is due to both the steepness of the ranges and the dramatic variability in precipitation with the valleys being extremely dry and the summits being extremely wet. So, in the twelve miles of the park road, it is possible to access greater ecological variety than is available in vast areas of the eastern and mid-western United States. For someone fascinated with ecological systems, this is a wonderful thing.

The great tragedy that I now associate with the park is that, on a six mile hike with a steep 2,500 foot vertical climb (up and then back down again), Kate left me in her long-legged, teenage dust. This is especially significant because the last time I hiked in the park, it was with her on my backpack. Age happens. Sad but true.

Lamoille Canyon is a small, stunning place in the Ruby Mountains outside of Elko. It offers topography similar to the Cottonwood canyons above Salt Lake City, and Glacier National Park, and the high-thin waterfalls of Yosemite. All of this probably should go without mention on the interweb because it is one of those places which almost no-one knows exists. It is very small, so even a minor uptick in visitation could be tragic. At the time we were there a massive melting was underway and several-hundred-foot waterfalls were to be found at something like quarter-mile intervals on both sides of the canyon road. The downside of this was that all of these waterfalls collected along the narrow canyon bottom resulting in  big campground mess in the middle parts of the canyon and flooding in the town of Lamoille at the place where the canyon empties into the valley.

I could, and perhaps should, get into, at length, the campground goings on: an ice dam breaching, mud/debris-flows, a bridge shifted on its foundation, the river flowing over roads and through campsites next to occupied sites, and a middle of the night evacuation. But all of that was rendered water-under-the-bridge when the Forest Service arrived and shut the whole place down resulting in our early departure.

This edition of our sky-island photography can be visited by clicking on the above image. There are a large number of macro-shots in this group. Forgive me, I’m fond of flowers. Several panoramas were created using Photoshop CS5.  Any HDRI imagery was done using Photomatrix prior to processing of the tone-mapped image in Camera RAW and Photoshop. Also there are several shots from Elko which occupies the valley below the Ruby mountains and is fairly characteristic of a central Nevada town. It is known as an economic center for the Carlin trend gold mining district, all things cowboy (including a cowboy poetry festival) and Basque food and culture. It’s also a good place to visit the doctor if need presents itself, and if you can find his office.