stillwater & the great basin abstract

Nevada’s is the most militarized landscape in the country. That is, with so little water and so much open space, there are about 4 million acres here designated for firing rockets, dropping bombs, and otherwise running around in the desert training people and testing things.

Also, because vast expanses of dry, remote, federally-held land tends to resist the smear of suburban sprawl, places like Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge and Fallon Naval Air Station (NAS) can occupy the same airspace.



Fallon’s NAS is the largest naval air station in the West, and the largest electronic warfare range in the world. The interpretive signs at Stillwater also riff on this incongruity.




Tom with some cliff swallows.


Ash and a Super Hornet (?) fighter plane.


swallow nests. Ash checking the guano.


climbing around on six thousand year old petroglyphs (Grimes Point) at the old shoreline of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan.


ten million year old lizards (Ash took this photo).