Nevada S Black Rock Desert

It is the only absolute desert in North America, a four-hundred-square-mile dry lake bed so desolate that nothing ever grows there. Vast and featureless, Nevada's Black Rock Desert defies visual measurementÑmuch to the consternation of off-roaders who venture out onto this playa only to run out of gas before reaching the other side. It is the largest flat area on the continent, where the sound barrier was broken in a car. And it is a place of total silenceÑnot even birds or insects live hereÑexcept when thousands of humans congregate for the Burning Man Festival on Labor Day weekend. Writer and poet William Fox has demonstrated his familiarity with the Great Basin in such respected books as Mapping the Empty, just as Mark Klett has been documenting the landscape of the American West in his acclaimed photographic studies. Now these accomplished artists turn their combined talents to an appreciation of this desolate corner of North America, where the only change in scenery comes with the shifting pattern of cracks in the earth after seasonal rains. The Black Rock Desert is a philosophical and visual meditation on an extraordinary place virtually devoid of the usual physical features one relies on for orientation and comfort. It invites readers to consider how the mind responds to a place so empty that it's both physically overpowering and psychically disorienting. Klett's photographs are austere yet innovative, admitting the vastness of the desert yet never letting us forget that traces of human passage and perception are ubiquitous. Fox's contemplative essays bring us news of both the natural desert and its cultural occupation, from the explorations of John C. FrŽmont to the exaltations of Burning Man. Together, Fox and Klett have forged an introspective guide to a place so daunting that few dare to venture there alone. For anyone seeking to understand how and why we perceive deserts the way we do, their book charts the rugged intersection of the American landscape and the human spirit.

Each August staff and volunteers begin to construct Black Rock City, a temporary city located in the hostile and haunting Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada. Every September nearly seventy thousand people occupy the city for Burning Man, an event that creates the sixth-largest population center in Nevada. By mid-September the infrastructure that supported the community is fully dismantled, and by October the land on which the city lay is scrubbed of evidence of its existence. The Archaeology of Burning Man examines this process of building, occupation, and destruction. For nearly a decade Carolyn L. White has employed archaeological methods to analyze the various aspects of life and community in and around Burning Man and Black Rock City. With a syncretic approach, this work in active-site archaeology provides both a theoretical basis and a practical demonstration of the potential of this new field to reexamine the most fundamental conceptions in the social sciences.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Veteran author Session S. Wheeler and award winning artist Craig Sheppard have come together to give the reader a taste of the history, and stark beauty of one of Nevada's most unique geological, and environmental features.

"Nevada's enigmatic Black Rock country, despite its apparent silence and isolation, is actually an area where natural forces are ceaselessly restless and life in many forms has endured for millennia. Its haunting landscape has been the focus of study and contemplation by scientists, explorers, outdoors aficionados, and artists. In black rock, photographer Peter Goin and geographer Paul F. Starrs explore this place from the viewpoints of their respective disciplines." "The Black Rock, a desert realm almost the size of Delaware but scarcely a hundred miles north of Reno, embraces mile-high vertical mountains and one of the earth's flattest, most barren salt pans; boiling hot springs and freezing winter cold; plants that have evolved to survive the severest drought and lush pockets of rich grasses. Its bewildering environments startle our senses with a raw physical intensity that comes through in Goin's photographs and Starrs's informed text. We observe the region from numerous perspectives - the Black Rock at ground level, from the skies above, in the geology below; witness the shaping roles of water, wind, and geothermal action in shaping it; and view the effects of human hands, from ancient Native Americans to nineteenth century explorers, ranchers, and miners, up through the congregants at today's Burning Man festivals. The result is a duet of visual and literary commentary on a region of stunning paradoxes and constant change and activity, where need and curiosity encounter the daunting, implacable forces of nature."--BOOK JACKET.

Nevada artist and Burning Man event co-founder Will Roger photographs the ever changing cityscape and transformation of Black Rock City as it changed throughout the years. The book contains a substantial collection of aerial photos as never seen before. A photographic collaboration between Will Roger and Burning Man architect Rod Garrett, Introduction by Burning Man co-founder Harley Dubois. Contributions from Independent scholar William Fox and Archaeologist Alexei Vranich, Available in hardback format, 216 pages.