Have you heard what the “green energy” corporations are doing to the Great Basin Desert, with your government’s approval, on your public lands? The plan is to cover the pristine basin-and-range interior of Nevada with industrial electricity factories over endless thousands of acres of desert woodland. And the people who should be out protesting this, chaining themselves to the desert trees marked for annihilation, etc., well they don’t really care. Because they’ve been told “environmentalism” now means destroying the last wild places in America, the last wild landscapes, so a fly-by-night solar corporation can get free land to scrape clean of all living things.
Where’s the beautiful part, anyway? Well, start by walking about a mile past the last parking lot or dirt road or residential car-parts dump or informal halfway house or accidental pit-bull breeding farm, and keep going in the direction of the difficult terrain: the hills and the mountains and the boulders. Not the hills covered in radio relay towers, but the ones with nothing up there at all, nothing except more boulders, more spiky yucca trees that slash your arms, gnarled junipers and needle-armed Joshua trees, up to the craggy peak where the stately pinyons stand proud. Keep going that way.
Real gods require no faith, they just are: expressed in the life force of the pronghorn herd racing across the High Desert, the mountain lion traveling hundreds of miles as master of its environment, the invigorating violence of a summer thunderstorm, the lightning strike of a rattler upon its prey, the mourning dove pair bringing up each of their dozen offspring with the same determination and patience and love, one after another, all summer long. This is EPISODE #196: THE WILD BEASTS.
Now that it’s good & hot outside, let’s wander the high desert boulder-strewn hills of Nevada’s Lincoln County. Home to Pahranagat Man, a very specific rock-art figure that fits right in with what this land would become in the 20th Century: Area 51, dreamland for the believers in the E.T. mythology. It’s EPISODE #163: AREA 51’s MYSTERIOUS PETROGLYPH: PAHRANAGAT MAN Hosted by Ken Layne, with soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver.
Listen on the radio, 10 PM Fridays, on KCDZ 107.7 FM in the Mojave High Desert. You can get the new trade-paperback edition of Desert Oracle Vol. 1 wherever you buy books.
What happened to Army Private Gerry Irwin on a Utah two-lane, way back in February 1959? There was no plane crash. No passengers. Nothing but Pvt. Irwin, unconscious in the Utah night. Strange things happen on the desert highways. It’s EPISODE #157: PHANTOM CRASH ON A UTAH HIGHWAY.
PS — If you turn on KZMU-FM in Moab (or steam online) tomorrow night, there will be some special Desert Oracle audio playing. It’s the KZMU spring Radiothon!
You ever drive the “Loneliest Road In America”? That’s what they call U.S. 50, across the Great Basin Desert through the middle of Nevada. Not many people out there, not a lot going on. Just as we like it. The mystery visitors like it, too. They like the quiet. They need the wild mountains and desert valleys of the Basin and Range. We hope em like this: Episode #119: “Alien Corpses of the Great Basin,” with all-new spacey soundscapes by our own RedBlueBlackSilver. (And we’re on Spotify, too.)
And way back in 1952, so the story goes, 16 little alien friends were found dead in the wreckage of a glowing oval craft that smashed into the side of a copper mine near Ely, Nevada. Find out more, if you dare, tonight at 10 p.m. on Joshua Tree’s own Z107.7 FM, or streaming from Z1077FM.com or Tune In.
Speaking of, we are also joined by Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director of the Center for Biological Diversity, which along with Nevada native tribes and desert lovers everywhere is celebrating a victory. Ever been to the Desert National Wildlife Refuge? Well whether you ever set foot there or not, it’s safe again, for the desert bighorn and desert tortoise and a true wonderland of rare wild lands. For now. Let’s keep it that way.