The Sagebrush Basin Is the West's Best Landscape

The West's best landscape is the one nobody photographs: the sagebrush basin between the mountain ranges.

The Case for the Basin

In southern Wyoming, the Continental Divide splits into two rough parentheses of ridgeline, and between them lies a large bowl of high desert—sagebrush and clay and sky. This is the Great Divide Basin. It is not a valley. It has no river running out to a sea. Rain that falls here either soaks into the earth, evaporates under the high sun, or gathers for a time in shallow playas until the wind carries it off as dust. The water simply has nowhere to go, and because of that, the land seems to be waiting for someone to notice it.

The mountains do the easy work. A peak announces itself. It has snow on top, a tree line, a narrow trail. It asks to be admired and is. The basin makes no such offer. From where the two-lane road drops off the last ridge, the view is the same for every mile of the crossing: a pale, flat table of sagebrush, each bush separated from its neighbor by a foot or two of bare soil, as though a gardener had planted them with a spacing rule. The color is not green and not gray but the silver of something that has been washed by wind and light for so long that it has given up its original name.

This is the country that does not appear in calendars. No overlook, no pullout, no sign reading "Scenic View." The travelers who cross it on the interstate point their windshields at the hazy blue shape of the Wind River Range ahead and count the miles until they can get back to something worth seeing. They are wrong. The basin has no postcard but it has weather—the low horizontal light of mid-morning that makes the dust glow like a dry field, the sudden squall that turns the sky purple and the sagebrush almost black, the evening when the wind stops entirely and the silence is not empty but deep, the way a basement is deep. That silence is the thing the postcards cannot sell. After a rain, the smell of the sage is the smell of the whole West, sharp and clean, the one thing the postcards never captured.

It is the landscape of the actual West, the connective tissue between the ranges. The mountains are the exceptions, the freestanding monuments the continent raised to itself. The basin is the rule. It covers more ground than any single peak, and its ground is the ground the whole West is made of. To stand in it is to understand why people once thought the plains were an ocean of land—flat, endless, moving with weather.

The Case Against It

But the case against the basin is easy to make, and it is made millions of times a year. The basin is monotonous. It is the same view for a long, flat stretch, and the eye begins to ache for a slope, a cliff, a line of aspen turning gold. The West that people photograph has form. It has a foreground, a middle ground, a vanishing point. The basin refuses all composition. It offers no landmark to orient a traveler, no tree to measure distance by. It is the landscape travelers pass through, not the landscape they go to.

Even the history of the West has mostly used it as a passage. The trails that crossed the plains picked their way along rivers and through passes, and the Great Divide Basin—unless a wagon train was desperate for a cutoff—was a place to get across, not a place to stay. The railroad came through, then the highway, and then the service roads leading to nowhere. The photographs that do exist of it are not landscapes so much as documentation: a straight line of road, a fence, a gas station on a horizon. Beside a photograph of the Tetons or the Wind Rivers, it is hard to argue that the basin is even a decent landscape, let alone the best.

Except that the argument depends on what a landscape is for. The mountain photograph tells a viewer what to feel, and it is a feeling anyone can have. The basin withholds all feeling until it is earned. It does not turn toward the light. It lets the light lie flat and long across its emptiness, and a traveler who slows down actually begins to see the texture: the many shades of sage, from silver to blue to the near-green of spring growth; the tiny white flowers that appear after a wet June; the pronghorn that stands absolutely still at the edge of sight, not a creature in a landscape but a part of the same pale grammar. The basin is not a view. It is a place that asks to be read, and reading takes time.

So the claim holds, but in a way that changes the meaning of best. The best landscape is the one that repays a longer look. The basin is vast and unphotogenic, and it is the ground the mountains stand on—the heavy, slow, unphotographed ground that holds the whole great scenery of the West in place. On a day in late October, when the light is low and the wind has died, a single pronghorn moves across the Great Divide Basin. The only sound is the rustle of sage.

Photos: Mats Skölving, Bureau of Land Management (CC BY 2.0)