The Sagebrush Ocean
A Natural History of the Great Basin
35th ANNIVERSARY EDITION COMING IN 2025!
1991 Sierra Club Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation
1990 High Desert Museum's Earle A. Chiles Award
foreword by Barry Lopez
illustrations by Jennifer Owings Dewey
"The Sagebrush Ocean will be a revelation to those who have habitually steeled themselves to drive across the desert at seventy miles an hour, generally at night. They have been missing something fabulous. . . It ought to be in the pack of every desert camper and every off-road recreationist, just to teach them respect for what they use so freely. It ought to be on the seat of every car that starts across from Salt Lake to Reno, or vice versa, to give even seventy-mile-an-hour travelers some notion of what that apparently monotonous sagebrush ocean contains of the diversity and mystery of life." —Wallace Stegner
"...one beauty of a book, a triumph of regional literature of the kind we need, to relate more closely to this land of ours." —Harold Gilliam, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Stephen Trimble combines the scientific reason and clarity of a Voltaire with the poetic sensitivity of Rousseau." —Amazon.com
"... few other regions of our continent have been treated in the format that Trimble has pioneered. For the Great Basin, it's all there under one cover, lavishly and lovingly served up in text and picture." — Arthur Kruckeberg, Douglasia
"The strength of The Sagebrush Ocean is its overall grasp and its remarkable clarity. ...if his photographs, both poetic and scientifically apt, don't arouse reverence for the Great Basin, one wonders what could." —Thomas Lyon, Sierra Magazine
"The Sagebrush Ocean, a handsome, lucidly written, and amply illustrated book, does the place justice with authority and style, outlining its human and natural history with equal facility and sometimes with prose that gives nothing away to John McPhee or anyone else." — Wilderness Magazine
"Trimble has come close to capturing the majestic diversity of the Basin in an exquisite language of written and photographic imagery, and I am terribly afraid he will attract the casual visitor to places that I find it impossible to be casual about." —David Madsen, Utah Historical Quarterly
The Sagebrush Ocean summarizes a vast amount of information in a text of synthesis and celebration. Trimble mixes eloquent accounts of personal experiences with clear explication of natural history, and his photographs capture some of the most spectacular but least-known scenery in the western states.
The Great Basin Desert—an ocean of sagebrush—sweeps from the Sierra to the Rockies, from the Snake River Plain to the Mojave Desert. "Biogeography" best sums up Trimble's focus on this land: what lives where, and why. He introduces concepts of desert ecology and discusses living communities of animals and plants that band Great Basin mountains—from the exhilarating emptiness of dry lake-beds to alpine regions at the summits of the 13,000-foot Basin ranges.
Trimble's territory is the Nevada desert, Utah's West Desert, southeastern Idaho, southeastern Oregon, and California east of the Sierra. This is the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin.
(University of Nevada Press, 10th anniversary edition, 1999)
