How best to know this place? On a map, it is a giant dotted border that extends through most of southwest Wyoming and into Colorado and Utah, covering over nine-thousand three hundred square miles. It overlaps multiple counties — Carbon, Sweetwater, Fremont, Sublette, and Natrona. Places commonly noted on driving maps include the Great Divide Basin, the Killpecker Sand Dunes, Adobe Town, the Oregon Trail, and the former mining towns of South Pass and Atlantic City. To drive around it, you might take Interstate 80, US Highways 191 or 287, or State Highway 28.
From these ribbons of asphalt, perhaps it looks like flat, dull country, miles of sagebrush going out across alkali and dust to a few ragged ridges and on to the thin, white edge of the horizon. Online guides describe it as shrub steppe and high desert, as housing diverse landscapes, like badlands sand dunes, and alkali flats. Photographs show red-white dirt, clay cliffs, sagebrush, antelope, and wild horses.
But the desert only truly begins to come alive when you dare to take gravelled and grated roads until they trail off into two-tracks, when you roll down your windows and feel the wind whip through the cab of your truck, the cool, dry touch of it against you cheek, your neck, when you rest your elbow on the window-sill and feel the sun warming your arm even if the day is cool, when you see antelope race flat-backed across the road ahead of you and wild horses proud-stepping through the sagebrush, when you can smell the strong, nearly metallic bite of sage and sun warmed rock.
This is the Red Desert I grew up in, the place where I came of age just as much or more than I did in my hometown of Rawlins, Wyoming. I do not know it’s more famous locals (fame in desert landscapes is relative, less easily won than fame for picturesque mountain peaks and waterfalls, which more readily fit cultural definitions of “scenic) like Adobe Town and the Killpecker Sand Dunes. The desert of my heart is the Antelope Hills in the northern stretch, just beyond the way stations of South Pass and Atlantic City. Those liminal hills tumble down from the Wind River Mountains, another soul-scape for me, and crease into wondrous draws along the Sweetwater River’s unexpected canyon.
Even if you are within a few miles of the river on a two-track, it is easy to miss it — in this stretch of the desert, the Sweetwater cuts deep and sudden, and if you look out across the flats and ridges of the desert, across all that sage between you and the sky, the river canyon can look like any other small coulee or wash. But draw nearer and you see the size of it, how it drops steep-sided and wide to the river bottom. Walking down is like taking the stairs from the top of an old five story building, except for the uneven, sometimes shaley-footing. Smaller canyons and draws crease the sides of the river canyon, winding up into the desert and out into the sagebrush waves, some steep scrambles, others angled ambles.
Over and over, I come to know the desert more deeply, walking all those draws and the high country rising up beyond them. Many draws are dry, though runneled by spring runoff. Others cloister clear groundwater springs and streams, some of which run year-round, others that fade to trickles before retreating beneath the ground, perhaps rising to the surface once more nearer the river. At my feet, not just sagebrush and gravel, but also bright and surprising wildflowers, scarlet Indian paintbrush, blue flax, lemon and orange prickly pear blossoms, golden spearleaf stonecrop.
In that broken country, I might see antelope, yes, but also mule deer and sometimes elk, perhaps a moose. I have seen bear and mountain lion sign in the deeply timbered bottoms of a handful of draws, amongst the limber pines and aspen stands, once saw a bear trundling down the far side of a ridge. I might bust a lek of sage chickens (grouse, technically, but not in my family’s lingo) or track the flight of a red-tailed hawk or a golden eagle across a sky so blue it pierces me through.
This is the topography of my soul, my heart, twined into me as if part of my own flesh and bone. Which is to say it is like any other place a person might know and love while others simply pass by, never knowing the beauty and awe which it holds.
