05 Jun 2025 6 min read

The Great Basin

My lifelong love affair with a very special place

In the Great Basin you can drive 100 miles between gas stations on lonely highways, or much further on dirt roads where you can go days without seeing another vehicle. Photo by David Lukas

Call me crazy, but my favorite place on Earth is the vast, empty heart of the American West known as the Great Basin.

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The Great Basin is much more than a name, it is one of the most significant topographic, hydrographic, physiographic, and historical features in the American West: an immense region defined by the fact that all of its waters flow inward and no rivers escape outward towards the sea.

map of Great Basin — The Great Basin is the heart of the American West.

At the same time, over the past 20 millon years the entire Great Basin region has been lifted 10,000 feet, so this is not the low, hot desert you'd imagine, it's more of a high, cold desert that catches you off guard with its stark beauty and wonder.

Great Basin lake — If you think the Great Basin is barren and ugly, you might need to look again. Photo by David Lukas

I've spent a lot of time in the Great Basin, including four months barefoot and naked, except for a buckskin loincloth, living off the land with the renowned paleolithic teacher Jim Riggs. But it wasn't until I flew over the Great Basin that I realized I was in love with this place. At the time I was flying to Costa Rica to lead nature tours, and all I could think of for the two months I was in that tropical paradise were the visions I had of the Great Basin from the plane's windows.

Great Basin at sunset — The subtle, haunting beauty of the Great Basin and its sprawling landscapes. Photo by David Lukas

Why exactly do I love this place? Yes, it's desolate beyond human comprehension, a place where evaporation exceeds rainfall eight times over, and where scattered pockets of standing water are rendered bitter and undrinkable due to accumulated minerals. But look deeper, and give this place time, and it works wonders on your spirit.

drying lake bed in the Great Basin — Immense bodies of water filled many Great Basin valleys during the Pleistocene, but are now reduced to a few alkaline lakes and rivers. Photo by David Lukas

First and foremost, this landscape calls to me because it is empty, and for this reason it is full of dreams. I recently drove a highway across 150 miles of vast, vast, vast emptiness between two tiny towns, and along a longer 500-mile stretch I only passed through three towns of any size.

open highway in the Great Basin — It takes a unique kind of person to love places that are this empty. Photo by David Lukas

It's hard to believe that this much open space exists anywhere in the United States, and that's just thinking about the Great Basin from a highway-centric point of view. Look outward from the highway, leave the pavement behind, and all you'll find are one distant mountain range after another where the only roads are rough jeep tracks fading into dust and rock.

Great Basin desert — This landscape may look empty from the security of a highway, but the area's sheer remoteness becomes even more intimidating when you leave the pavement. Photo by David Lukas

This is the kind of space you can fall into and never reach bottom. For most people, that's a kind of terror, but for some of us it's a kind of freedom.

These mountains are another reason I love this place. There are over 300 named mountain ranges in Nevada alone, and very few places where paved roads approach anywhere near them. In fact, most of these ranges are incredibly difficult to access due to a combination of large private ranches and horrible roads, but if you can get to these places they are heaven on earth.

Great Basin wilderness — Driving as far as I can on a deteriorating access road below a remote trailhead in Nevada's Santa Rosa-Paradise Peak Wilderness. Photo by David Lukas

Each Great Basin mountain range is an island unto itself, a unique ecosystem separated from its nearest neighbors by bone-dry valleys that prevent plants and animals from dispersing or colonizing new sites. Yet many of these mountains are high enough to support snowfields, alpine tundra, pockets of conifers, groves of quaking aspens, hidden springs, and vibrant green meadows full of life.

White Mountains — Forbidding from a distance, these impossibly rugged mountains hide many shimmering pockets of water and life. Photo by David Lukas

I can't tell you how many times I've worked my way across rocky hillsides and stumbled into paradises of clear, cold waters, vibrant flowers, and singing birds on remote mountain tops and hidden canyons. These are places that go years between any human visitors, if at all.

These mountains are rugged, remote, and incredibly beautiful. Together with their sibling valleys, they form landscapes of sun and shadow that play across the bare-skinned body of the Earth itself.

In my heart, this is the shape of love.

An endless dance of light and shadow on the bare skin of the Earth. Photo by David Lukas

A Final Note:

A couple weeks ago I emailed a bonus issue of the newsletter to paid subscribers describing more details about hummingbird bills. This was my first time sending out a special issue so I'd love your feedback on whether you'd like more added content like this. If you're a paid subscriber and you didn't receive this bonus email please let me know because the system might not work perfectly yet.

And Some Events:

David Lukas - Language Making Nature — Nature Journaling Week

Nature Journaling Week

Earlier this week, I gave a talk on the art of language making for a worldwide gathering of nature journalers. Here is a link to the recorded talk (this is the only time this talk has ever been recorded).