If you want to really get away, you should consider Nevada. Esmeralda County’s one thousand, three hundred forty-four inhabitants, for example, had two million, two hundred eighty-four thousand acres all to themselves in 1996. Today, fewer than eight hundred of those isolated citizens remain. Nye County is ten times larger – half the size of the entire state of Maine – and boasts about eight thousand citizens outside Pahrump, it’s only real city. The true total is more ambiguous, as Nye County also hosts the secret Air Force test facility called Area Fifty-one, which until recently did not officially exist.
All told, Nevada comprises more than seventy million acres, sixty million of which are federal, state or local public lands. Fifty million of those acres are owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management (the BLM).
All that emptiness draws me like a magnet.
“Public Land,” though, doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere. In Nevada, it means you’ve got almost all those millions of acres to choose from when you’re looking for a place to wander during the day and unroll your sleeping bag at night. The landscape may be a bit repetitive, it’s true, but on the other hand no one puts up signs that say they’ll shoot you if you set foot on the public land on which they’ve leased grazing rights, as they do a couple states over in New Mexico. Some of those renters probably even mean it. As one sign mockingly phrased it, “It’s not worth your life to find out what’s at the end of this road.”
True, the BLM land in Nevada, like BLM land everywhere, is mostly all rented out to ranchers (much of the rest has been leased to copper, lead, silver and gold mining operations, mostly now inoperative). But these arid lands can only support a few head of cattle per square mile, so you won’t see many of plodding devourers of sparse vegetation, though their impact on the habitat is harsh. What you will see are wild horses, pronghorn antelope, cotton tail and jack rabbits, vultures, magpies, ravens, golden eagles (if you’re lucky), shrikes, kites, hawks, and lots of Edward Abbey’s anonymous “little grey birds.”
About forty graveled miles north of Gerlach, I finally (remember? No jeep trails) saw a likely looking dirt track ducking across a ditch on the west side of the road. Not long after, it petered out in a small but welcoming patch of tall grass, centered by a rush-edged spring and surrounded by soaring sage and grass covered mountains. With no rain or bugs to worry about, making camp takes as long as unrolling your sleeping pad and bag.
It’s very easy to do nothing in a place like this except watch the light change as the day turns to night. The silence is palpable. For hours (and days, for that matter) you can hear nothing other than the chirp of an occasional bird. When there are no clouds at sunset to the west to turn crimson and purple, a performance of equal grandeur can be found in the opposite direction, where the enlivening alpenglow sets the mountains afire in yellow, tempering to gold on its way to lavender.
When at last the sun is ready to depart, the shadows of the mountains it has slipped behind chase the glow of their eastern companions higher and higher before extinguished them at last at their crests, like the flames of candles. The little grey birds twitter until the light goes, and then they stop.
The insects take over then, as the temperature drops swiftly from the nineties into the fifties, and the darkening sky comes alive once more. First, with nighthawks feasting on the insects, and then with all the glories of the celestial sphere. First the planets reveal themselves, ghosting mysteriously into view, followed by the stars, eventually filling the sky more fully than you can imagine until you’ve been far away from city lights on a clear night at a high altitude. At last, the trilling of the insects subsides, and the silence is complete.
You want to be a light sleeper on a night like this (helpful hint: drink a couple of beers before retiring), waking, as I did, every few hours to keep up with the show, watching as the big dipper and Venus set and were replaced by Orion and Saturn, each blazing like nothing you can imagine from within a city’s glow, wheeling majestically and timelessly overhead along the Milky Way.
On this crystalline night, nothing around me moved, and all was still except, towards dawn, for the gentle snort of a wild horse, come to drink at the spring a few yards away, and then catching my scent. But for that single note of surprise I would have been unaware of its visit. That, and the two hoofprints I found on rising, small saucers of shining water in the muddy margin of the spring.
August 18, 2005
You can find the first installment of this series here.
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