Soul has been demoted to a new-age spiritual fantasy or a missionary’s booty, and nature has been treated , at best, as a postcard or a vacation backdrop or, more commonly, as a hardware store or refuse heap. Too many of us lack intimacy with the natural world and with our souls, and consequently we are doing untold damage to both.

Bill Plotkin

I discovered through a friend a place in Wyoming called Red Desert. My Google research shows it is a landscape of buttes, dunes, sagebrush steppe, mountains, and rocky pinnacles located in the south-central portion of Wyoming. My kinda place. At the desert’s heart is the Great Divide Basin—a large depression along the Continental Divide from which surface water does not flow out to either the Atlantic or the Pacific. The majority of this area has no legal protection, and is therefore open to oil and gas exploration and development. Sounds like someplace I’d like to visit before we totally screw it up and do untold damage to it, as Plotkin says.

I found some information from an organization wanting to protect the area from the untold damage Plotkin mentions. They are called Citizens for the Red Desert. You will find some good information about the area, photography and their mission on the website. The Shoshone people called the Red Desert two names. The first is “the place where God ran out of mountains.” The second name: “land of many ponies” relates to the major change in native cultures caused by the introduction of the horse. It looks like a four hour drive from me so I would like to make a visit this summer once my health issues are addressed.