{"id":106287,"date":"2026-10-11T12:44:29","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T19:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=106287"},"modified":"2026-10-10T07:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T14:07:11","slug":"stephen-trimble-and-a-changing-sagebrush-ocean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/stephen-trimble-and-a-changing-sagebrush-ocean\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Trimble and a Changing Sagebrush Ocean"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When Stephen Trimble<\/a> published The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin<\/em> in 1989, the metaphor of his title seemed almost inevitable. Sagebrush blanketed nearly half of the Great Basin, the enormous sweep of basin and range country extending from Utah across Nevada and into California and Oregon. \u201cIf you picked the right line, you could actually walk across the hundreds of miles of the Great Basin in sagebrush all the way,\u201d Trimble says.<\/p>\n

Thirty-seven years later, Trimble has returned to the book, and to the country that inspired it, for a substantially revised edition. What he found is a landscape that is still enormously wild and still capable of surprising him, but one that in many places no longer looks like the sagebrush ocean he first encountered. \u201cThe Great Basin is now a place where we\u2019ve lost half of those sagebrush communities, with 1.3 million acres disappearing each year across the West,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re adapting to sobering aridification. Cheatgrass and fire are overwhelming sagebrush in an era when climate change will only accelerate their destructive power.\u201d<\/p>\n

When 15 Bytes profiled Trimble in 2019<\/a> as part of our Utah\u2019s 15<\/em> project, he recalled that before beginning The Sagebrush Ocean<\/em>, he knew the Southwest well but knew little about the Great Basin beyond \u201cheadlights and late-night truck stops.\u201d \u201cI take enormous pleasure in learning about new country,\u201d he told us then. \u201cI fell in love with the Great Basin because it\u2019s so enormously wild.\u201d The book was his first freelance project, following earlier natural-history work for the National Park Service. It combined his photographs with an exploration of the plants, animals, geology and ecology of the region and became an important step in a career that has since moved between natural history, photography, Native peoples, conservation and activism.<\/p>\n

In September 2021, University of Nevada Press director JoAnne Banducci contacted Trimble about updating the book before another printing, proposing a 35th-anniversary edition. Trimble was intrigued but wary of what a full revision might involve. \u201cWriters are always loathe to revisit early work, and this would be a time-consuming project,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I love the Great Basin. I\u2019ve lived in the Great Basin, here in Salt Lake City, for nearly forty years. I had to say yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first he imagined researching and writing a substantial new introduction. Then the project grew. The press was redesigning the book, which meant converting the original text into a new digital manuscript. Trimble could rescan old photographs, add new ones and revise material throughout. What had begun as a new introduction became an opportunity, and in Trimble\u2019s view a responsibility, to reconsider the entire book.\u00a0The natural-history stories about desert plants and animals remain. Around them Trimble has added what he calls two generations of science and landscape change.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stephen Trimble, “Monitor Valley”<\/p><\/div>\n

Some changes to the Great Basin were obvious not long after the first book appeared. During fieldwork in the 1990s for Earthtones<\/em>, a book pairing Trimble\u2019s photographs with essays by Nevada writer Ann Ronald, Trimble realized The Sagebrush Ocean<\/em> had become \u201can historic document pretty much on publication.\u201d A resurgence of gold mining that began in the mid-1980s was pushing improved roads into remote mountain ranges. \u201cBackcountry faith\u2014\u2018this dirt track feels right and will go where I think it will\u2019\u2014no longer sufficed,\u201d he says. \u201cLonely two-tracks were now graded, graveled, and sometimes even gated\u2014blocking access to whole ranges.\u201d Behind some of those gates were open pits and cyanide pools associated with new mining techniques.<\/p>\n

In the ensuing decades, change has come at an alarming rate: climate change and invasive species, industrial-scale solar farms and transmission lines, geothermal development and lithium mines. Returning to the Great Basin for the new edition, Trimble encountered some of those changes in valleys he remembered as remote and empty.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sagebrush ocean has become the most endangered biome in North America,\u201d Trimble says. \u201cThe Great Basin\u2019s imperiled indicator species, the sage grouse, has become the spotted owl of the Intermountain West, the desert canary in the lithium mine\u2014choose your own metaphor. It\u2019s not just one iconic creature at risk. The entire ecosystem is passing through rapid and drastic change.\u201d Some of the new photographs he made in Nevada and Utah\u2019s West Desert give visual form to that transformation. They carry a caption that deliberately echoes and unsettles the title of his book: \u201cthe cheatgrass sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stephen Trimble, “Antelope Valley”<\/p><\/div>\n

He was equally struck by what hadn\u2019t changed. There were \u201can even larger number of basins that remain remote and empty, with little signage on the dirt roads,\u201d he says. \u201cStill exhilarating backcountry, still an adventure.” One of Trimble\u2019s favorite new photographs shows a cattle truck moving across Antelope Valley, a little-visited valley in eastern Nevada. After a day without encountering another vehicle, Trimble says, the first one to appear is often a local rancher. \u201cThe Great Basin remains today as I\u2019ve described it in the past, \u2018a wilderness, with cows.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

His five years of research, photography and wandering those roads have only reinforced the attachment that began with the original book. \u201cThe \u2018place\u2019 is SO big,\u201d Trimble remarks. \u201cI can drive a transect from Salt Lake to Bishop, California or to Fields, Oregon and take new backcountry routes every time. So many of these dirt roads lead to these incredibly beautiful places that I\u2019ve never thought about or heard of\u2014and where you can feel like you have the earth to yourself. This feeling is more intense here in the Great Basin than just about anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

Stephen Trimble, “Swamp Cedars, Spring Valley”<\/p><\/div>\n

But loving the Great Basin does not necessarily make the choices involved in protecting it any clearer. One of the most difficult sections for Trimble to rewrite concerned the expansion of pi\u00f1on-juniper woodlands into sagebrush habitat. \u201cPi\u00f1on-juniper woodland is my home landscape,” he says, “and though I\u2019m attempting dispassion in my narrative, old-growth pi\u00f1ons and junipers are my friends.” Do you clear one to protect the other? \u201cI feel a responsibility to both sagebrush and p-j as a desert citizen. As a writer, I want to do justice to these beings, to their ecosystems, to the Great Basin Desert itself. I don\u2019t want to choose between them. I don\u2019t want to lose them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of Trimble’s revision reflects not so much changes in what there is to see, but in how Trimble sees it. He points to the \u201cswamp cedars\u201d of Spring Valley in eastern Nevada. These unusual stands of Rocky Mountain juniper grow on the basin floor, hundreds of feet below the pi\u00f1on-juniper woodlands of the surrounding ranges. In the original book, Trimble treated them primarily as a natural-history puzzle: why did a tree associated with wetter, higher environments thrive here? But now he also tells the story of the groves as Bahsahwahbee, a place sacred to Shoshone and Goshute people, associated with ceremony as well as with the memory of 19th-century massacres. Shoshone and Goshute people also fought to protect the Spring Valley aquifer from plans to pump its water south to Las Vegas. \u201cAs in so many places, species and landscapes notable to ecologists have an Indigenous history long overlooked,\u201d Trimble writes in the new edition. \u201cIt\u2019s really a human wilderness, where people have lived for many thousands of years in small numbers, interacting with this big empty landscape and its plants and animals in intimate, quiet, but powerful ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stephen Trimble, “Cheatgrass Sunset, Puddle Valley, West Desert, Utah”<\/p><\/div>\n

Thirty-seven years after The Sagebrush Ocean<\/em> first appeared, Trimble has revised the book because the Great Basin has changed\u2014and because his understanding of it has changed. There is more science now, more history, more urgency and considerably less certainty about what protecting this country actually requires. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to unravel the skein of changes,\u201d he writes. \u201cI have no simple solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stephen Trimble launches the new edition of The Sagebrush Ocean<\/em><\/a> Tuesday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m. at the Natural History Museum of Utah.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Stephen Trimble published The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin in 1989, the metaphor of his title seemed almost inevitable. Sagebrush blanketed nearly half of the Great Basin, the enormous sweep of basin and range country extending from Utah across Nevada and into California […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2589,35,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-11-09 04:19:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/TSO-cover-with-blurb-.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106287"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106302,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106287\/revisions\/106302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}