Renee and I felt honored to be invited to present the Basin and Range Project to the Northwest Basin and Range Synthesis Ecosystem Symposium the past couple of days in Lakeview, Oregon (which has the distinction of being Oregon’s highest elevation town) hosted by the Great Basin Landscape Conservation Cooperative. It was really interesting to participate in the symposium’s panels and activities, which focused on the connectivity of landscape and ecological processes. We really believe that the Basin and Range Project has a lot of opportunity to contribute to making people fall in love with these areas that we love so much and to inspire them to champion them.
There have been so many really interesting and informed conversations at the symposium and I feel like were lucky to be able to take part in them with a lot of people, representing a really wide spectrum of people charged with and active in preservation of wild spaces and public land. It is really refreshing to take part in this symposium in the northern part of the basin and range, which is near and dear to us in a lot of ways, but also is one of the largest pieces of intact ecosystem in the lower forty-eight of the United States.
I was lucky enough to talk to Jen Ballard of the Great Basin Bird Observatory, who presented a really fascinating presentation on bird transects she had done in the Pine Forest and Black Rock Ranges, which featured pictures from Leonard and Chicken creeks and even had a thank you to the Montero family! She shared her love for birds with us and really deep knowledge and I really hope that we have a chance to volunteer with them in the future!
Last night we had dinner with the symposium’s keynote speaker, Michael Branch, writer and UNR English professor, aside from turning out that we know a lot of people in common (not least, his former student and our friend Paul Bogard whose second book, The Ground beneath Us is high on my reading list right now), we also really connected about writing, life, our feelings about the environment and more. Then Michael read from his book Raising Wild, which I have to confess I did not know about before, but after hearing the stories from his great reading will also soon be in my hands as well as his forthcoming book, Rants from the Hill.
After the reading a group of us continued the conversation on all sort of topics into the night. We got home around 11 just still full of a great day. As I was drifting off to sleep I remembered something that we had joked about with Michael at dinner, that, sharing friends, working at the same university, and being interested in so many of things, it had taken going to Lakeview, Oregon to actually meet and talk. But it seemed fitting, in a way, that of all places, these connections came in the tallest town in Oregon.
overland passages 