Wide Open Spaces

Looking northeast up the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. The tiny town of Gerlach, Nevada is more or less even with the skylined range (Granite Mountains) coming in from the left (see note). The site of the Burning Man countercultural festival is about 15 miles beyond, out in those flats. The powerline on the left that the road is following is the intertie that connects the Bonneville hydropower grid, on the Columbia River, with the Los Angeles grid.

The valley here was filled with Pleistocene Lake Lahontan about 15 K years ago, and large shoreline features such as wavecut benches are prominent here and there along the mountain front. I'm standing on one to take this photo, in fact!