I’ll start with my reading so far in 2026, which has been heavily influenced by a single obsession: the Great Basin.

If a book is about the Great Basin, set in the Great Basin, adjacent to the Great Basin, or can be connected to the Great Basin through an elaborate series of mental gymnastics, it’s on my list.

Still, I’ve managed to sneak in some excellent fiction and non-fiction outside that orbit —

North Woods: Daniel Mason —

Wow.

One of the most original works of fiction I can remember reading in a long time. Basically a collection of interconnected stories about a single landscape unfolding across centuries.

Salt Stones: Helen Whybrow —

I listened to this book while driving around the Great Basin over the past few weeks.

Then I found myself repeatedly taking screenshots of passages I wanted to revisit when I got home to my physical copy.

Though I don’t live on a farm or own sheep, I was hooked from the very beginning. Wonderful, magnetic, thoughtful prose. And Whybrow is on Substack!

Believing in Place: Richard Francaviglia

This book isn’t for everyone, but as someone writing about identity and belonging in the Great Basin, I found it fascinating.

Endangered Pleasures: Barbara Holland —

I have read this book almost every year for the past two decades.

The subtitle says it all: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences.

I read it to remind my type-A, die-by-my-to-do-list, future-focused personality to calm the fuck down. To stay present. To engage.

The book contains sixty-seven short essays celebrating everything from cigarettes to the morning paper to whistling and Christmas.

Its opening line (written in 1995) remains a siren call:

Subtly, in little ways, joy has been leaking out of our lives.

Subscribe now

A Collection of My Favorite Books

A few ground rules:

1. I didn’t include any books I’ve read in the last few years. I like to give books time to marinate before adding them to a best-of list. Sportswriter Bill Simmons once argued that the Oscars should be awarded five years after a film comes out. I feel the same way about books.

2. I only allowed one title per author per list. In light of this, I left a lot of wonderful books off. My apologies to Claire Keegan, Robert Macfarlane, Terry Tempest Williams, Charles Bukowski, David Sedaris, John McPhee, and Murakami.

3. None of these lists are in order (though I do mention some all-time favorites).

4. Please, please, please share your favorites in the comments. Tell me what I’m missing. Tell me what I should read next. Tell me why my choices are ridiculous. I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

Favorite Pulitzer Fiction Winners:

One of the best days every year is the day they announce the Pulitzer winners for fiction. I have a collection of almost every Pulitzer winner since 1918 and have been slowly working my way through them.

Lonesome Dove is my favorite novel ever written.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is probably second.

Olive Kitteridge is probably third.

• Breathing Lessons

• Old Man and the Sea

• Beloved

• All the Light We Cannot See

• Grapes of Wrath

• Orphan Masters Son

• Overstory

• The Road

• Lonesome Dove

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

• Olive Kitteridge

Favorite Fiction (that didn’t win the Pulitzer):

I read Atlas Shrugged on a forty-four-hour train ride through China in 2007. Between long stretches of reading, I got drunk on sake with the Chinese family sharing our compartment. It’s still one of my sweetest memories from that year-long trip around the world.

Claire Keegan and Raymond Carver. All my love to them for EVERYTHING they have blessed us with.

Boy Swallows Universe is the most fun I’ve had reading a novel in the last half decade.

• Atlas Shrugged

• Antarctica

• Where I’m Calling From

• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

• Hello Beautiful

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

• Misery

• Slaughterhouse Five

• East of Eden

• Ham on Rye

• All Families Are Psychotic

• Freedom

• The History of Love

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Favorite Non-Fiction:

David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” remains my favorite piece of non-fiction writing. Genius.

Okay, I broke my own rule by including Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year. What a book.

Shop Class as Soulcraft changed my life, even if parts of it can be a little tedious.

And it was painfully difficult to choose only one Klosterman title. The same goes for Sedaris.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

• There’s Always This Year

• Shop Class As Soul Craft

• A Walk in the Woods

• Between the World and Me

• Fools Rush In

• Tiny Beautiful Things

• Mountain City

• Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Piffs

• When You Are Engulfed in Flames

• Devotions

• Eating Animals

• Open

• Uncommon Ground

Favorite Nature(ish) Non-Fiction:

I’ve read every one of these books at least twice.

Several (The Solace of Open Spaces, Living Mountain, A Sand County Almanac, and Encounters with the Archdruid) I’ve read half a dozen times.

Each occupies a permanent corner of my brain that I visit almost daily.

The River You Touch is a masterpiece about family, fishing, and fatherhood.

And if you’re interested in rivers and reciprocity, go read Totem Salmon. One of the most underrated nature books out there.

• A Sand County Almanac

• The Wild Places

• Solace of Open Spaces

• The Anthropology of Turquoise

• In Defense of Public Lands

• The Long-legged House

• The Living Mountain

• Refuge

• Braiding Sweetgrass

• Totem Salmon

• Encounters with the Archdruid

• The River You Touch

• The Search for the Genuine

Favorite Books On Writing:

I’ve learned and grown so much as a writer thanks to these books.

I return to each of them during different seasons of my writing life, and I can’t imagine my journey without them.

(not pictured but on the list: Stephen King’s On Writing)

• Fires

• The Writing Life

• On Writing

• Bird by Bird

• Draft No. 4

• Novelist As A Vocation

• Life Work

• Storycraft

• The Art of the Personal Essay

• On Writing

I really, really, can’t wait to hear from you. Please share your favorites!

All the best to the book lovers out there.

See you next week.

Josh

Suddenly the lake appears. Pyramid Lake. Kooyooe Panunadu to the Northern Paiute, the largest remnant of Lake Lahontan, which covered most of Northern Nevada 12,500 years ago. A geological millisecond in the timeline we find ourselves in.

Anaho Island is perfectly lit by a falling sun. 6:58pm. I stop the car right on the road, step out, place my camera on a tripod and take a few photos.

7:41 p.m. A few miles before Gerlach, a pair of pronghorn stand just beyond the shadow. Male and female.

Though I encounter them on nearly every trip to the Great Basin, their presence still gives me pause. They are the second-fastest land animal on Earth, still carrying the speed and endurance that evolved to outrun American cheetahs and other Ice Age predators. Unlike cheetahs, however, they can sustain those speeds over long distances — the marathoners of the animal world. Every encounter feels a little improbable, as if a fragment of the Pleistocene has wandered into the present.

Stop, tripod, camera, the whole routine again.

It should be noted here that in the 79 miles between Fernley and Gerlach, I did not pass a single car. On a holiday weekend.

Richard Nixon once called our public lands the “breathing space of the nation.” Out here, I understand where he was coming from.

The land exhales. Inhales. Humans are notably absent almost everywhere I go.

How do we carry the weight of environmental degradation, corporate hijacking of our public lands, and narrowing protections for our brethren in the animal and plant kingdoms … alongside the solitude and space of places like the Great Basin?

I spend part of every weekday reading about these threats and wrapping my head around the details. From time to time, I even see them on the land. But when I walk for miles across the sagebrush sea, I don’t feel them.

For more than a decade, I’ve struggled with how to write from within this paradox. Should these lands be sung as hymns, love letters to sagebrush and silence? Or should they be sounded as alarms, warnings against the forces that would commodify, scar, and sell them?

I don’t know. My next book will live somewhere in between.

8:18 p.m. I turn onto Soldier Meadow Road. I made a deal with myself long ago to never drive on an unknown road into an unknown landscape at night. I debate whether to pitch camp at a turnout, then throw caution to the wind. It’s 46.7 miles to my destination. I reset the odometer on my trusty 2009 Highlander — 218,607 miles and counting — as a precaution against getting lost.

Small rocks puncturing through the surface greet my tires with an unwelcome hello. The road is made up of a lethal concoction of finely packed silt, clay minerals, quartz dust, and volcanic rocks, all of which creates conditions for some very slow driving.

8:26 p.m. A flock of fifteen geese idles on a salty dry lake, as if confused by the lack of water.

Average speed is currently 11 miles per hour, which puts me reaching my destination in roughly four hours and fifteen minutes.

The sun has fallen off the horizon, but a jet’s contrails are still lit, painting the sky in a flash of glowing orange.

Over the speakers, Robin Wall Kimmerer keeps me company, her voice like a soothing lullaby.

Ever present to the east is the famous Black Rock Playa, where every August a Burning Man is set alight in flames. Tonight, though, only a few RVs and a van or two. As darkness settles over the basin, artificial lights flicker on across the playa while celestial lights emerge overhead, each appearing one by one in the gathering dark. Winnebago, Venus, van, Jupiter. Every so often a pair of headlights streaks across the open playa like a shooting star, appearing suddenly before dissolving back into the night.

Headlights on high beam. Dodging potholes. Accelerating over washboard straights. Hoping my highway tires survive the night. The firewood crate in the back sounds like a snare drum. Water sloshes in a five-gallon container.

Thirteen-ish miles in, the protruding rocks give way to clay and suddenly I’m driving 40 miles an hour and it feels like a hundred. My hands tighten around the wheel.

Loose curves appear out of nowhere while Kimmerer waxes poetically about reciprocity. As I fishtail through the bends, she remarks that “nature herself is a moving target.”

Blessed Kimmerer and I are in sync.

I roll down all the windows on a straightaway and switch off the headlights.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

Back on.

Yeeeehhhaaaawwww, I scream into the night.

9:24 p.m.

In case you’ve never been to the Silver State, here’s something you should know:

The sheer number of insects is staggering. It reminds me of the bugs hitting my 1988 Volkswagen Jetta on summer nights in Michigan back in the late 1990s.

The windshield is a bloodbath. Eventually I run out of washer fluid and surrender to the accumulating splats, each one a little further obstruction to my view.

A few miles later, black specks begin appearing on the road, then increase in density until half the pavement is covered, like a busy anthill. I come to a stop, open the door, and find a two-inch-long Mormon cricket sitting there, dark red and armored, its antennae waving in the air like radio wires.

There appear to be millions of them marching across the road to the west, a living river flowing through the shadscale. Scientists believe these migrations are driven in part by cannibalism. Individuals that slow down risk being consumed by those behind them. Watching them stream across the basin, it’s hard not to feel as though the landscape itself has begun to move.

I wonder: how fast they’d overtake me if I laid down across the road?

Jackrabbits dart through the darkness. Kangaroo rats flash through the headlights. Somehow I manage to dodge the mammals while my windshield and tires carry the splatter of insects.

10:29 p.m. Arrival.

I pry my hands off the wheel to find them frozen in a curled-up position after two hours and eleven minutes of sensory overload.

Campfire.

Bedtime.

5:52 a.m.

One of the small joys of arriving somewhere new after dark is waking up inside a landscape you’ve never seen before…

⬇︎

It’s the season of saving money. HVAC systems haven’t been run in weeks and likely won’t be until late July — a small financial mercy in a city now flirting with six-dollar gasoline.

The northern mockingbirds continue their singing on every block in my neighborhood. I don’t know if these guys are still looking for a mate after months of incessant calling, but I have officially given up searching for nests, tracking down females, and hoping to witness a tiny fledgling emerge dramatically into the world from a hidden nest.

I’ve also decided against abandoning my current career in order to become a full-time mockingbird researcher.

Just enjoy them, man, says my inner better half.

[I also might buy this postcard. Okay, I did.]

Saying Goodbye to Desert Season

Over the past six months, we’ve traveled together across the Mojave, Sonoran, and Colorado deserts of the American Southwest. But every desert season eventually comes to an end, and though people live in the desert — and though the temperatures haven’t yet reached their true boiling point — every May my body, brain, and spirit begin quietly saying goodbye.

See you in November…

In light of this seasonal ritual, I wanted to open up this year’s desert dispatches to all subscribers below — both as a way to revisit the journey and as a thank you for being here.

Paid subscribers continue to receive full archive access and help support the reporting, photography, and fieldwork that make this project possible. 🙏

Subscribe now

Dispatch #31 - Cadiz Dunes Wilderness, CA

Dispatch #32 - McCain Valley, CA

Dispatch #34 - Gold Butte National Monument, NV

Dispatch #35 - Whitney Pocket, NV

Dispatch #37 - The Trona Pinnacles, CA

Dispatch #39 - Amboy Crater, CA

Dispatch #40 - US Route 95, AZ

Dispatch #41 - Amargosa River, CA

Dispatch #42 - Mecca Hills Wilderness, CA

Dispatch #43 - Chuckwalla National Monument, CA

Dispatch #44 - Algodones Dunes, CA

Dispatch #47 - Santa Rosa National Monument, CA

BLM Campgrounds in the Mojave Desert:

I have already covered the BLM campgrounds in California’s Eastern Sierra in Dispatch #5, but now to close out the season, I wanted to shift to some of my favorites in California’s Mojave (and Colorado) deserts.

BEFORE YOU GO:

— No reservations: All these BLM campgrounds are first-come, first-served, with nightly fees ranging from free to $6.

— Most sites provide basic amenities, including vault toilets, fire rings, shade structures, picnic tables, and occasionally a very charming lantern holder.

— Come prepared: Many sites lack potable water or trash service, so I always bring a five-gallon water container, extra toilet paper, and heavy-duty trash bags.

All photos below were taken at or within a few miles from these campgrounds.

#1: Sawtooth Canyon: 13 Sites: Free

#2: Afton Canyon: 22 Sites: $6

#3: Rainbow Basin: 22 Sites: $6

#4: Cottonwood: 25 Sites: $6

#5: Corn Springs: 9 Sites: $6

#6: Snaggletooth: Dispersed: Free

#7: Trona Pinnacles: Dispersed: Free

Hope everyone has a nice holiday weekend.

Josh

Subscribe now

They fall at the slightest breeze. I tilt my tongue toward them as they drop, the way I once did snowflakes growing up in Michigan — cold water then, something faintly sweet now…

Read more

I’m really proud of how it came together. It’s hard to overstate what a privilege it was to spend time with this community — to share space, listen, and learn from people wh…

Read more

I wouldn’t call it writer’s block.

Feels more like Substack block.

I love getting to highlight the beauty and complexity of BLM-managed public lands (and will continue doing this), but this week I can’t se…

Read more

This year marks five in a row:

2022: Severe drought. Soda Lake a salt crusted, unwatered moonscape. A few sunflowers in the Temblors, pockets of silver lupine in the Calientes. Highlight: Watching a San Joaquin kit fox mother and her three kits playing on the valley floor (I haven’t seen any sin…

Read more

If the amount of morning birdsong is any indication, everyone is feeling the intoxicating concoction of relief mixed with joy.

Some quick hits:

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK:

I ended March by going from ninety-two degrees in LA to one hundred and three in Death Valley (108, if my Prius had a say). I was there guiding a heat-resilient group through the park’s extremes. It was my first time seeing Lake Manly with actual water, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

I took off my shoes and socks and walked out as far as I could, my feet stinging against the salt-crusted surface. I stood there, looking across the water and up 11,000 feet to Telescope Peak, and for a moment, everything else fell away. I hate to be overly sentimental, but I wanted to weep.

And in the middle of the storm tornado hurricane of bad news hitting public lands, the species that depend on them, and the agencies that manage them, it helped to remember:

THERE IS WATER IN LAKE MANLY.

I’ll keep shouting this from the rooftops, but the honest-to-goodness best remedy for handling that hurricane is simple: spend an hour, an afternoon, a weekend outside. Away from social media. Away from screens.

Whether it’s a national park or your local city park, block out time for a long walk. I don’t need to list the benefits — you already know them. But there’s something else, too: being outside makes you want to protect the outside. Nature has a sneaky way of speaking up for itself.

My roll of film from the Valley of Death got pretty butchered in the lab, but here are a few moody, pixelated shots from the trip:

Subscribe now

DESERT VOICES: Writers Gathering

This coming Saturday (April 18) I’ll be a featured guest at a writers gathering in Joshua Tree at the famous High Desert Test Sites campus. My friend and fellow Heyday author, Obi Kaufmann, and I will be leading a panel together.

Desert Voices is for storytellers of all kinds: poets, essayists, journalers, songwriters, and “I’ve been meaning to write more” people. It’s a full day of prose and poetry workshops, readings, and panels inspired by the Mojave and Colorado Deserts.

Would love to meet up out there! TICKETS HERE

🗓️ Saturday, April 18 | 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM

ALGODONES DUNES:

Have you heard of the Algodones dune system? At eight miles wide and forty miles long, it’s one of the largest dune fields in North America, stretching from east of the Salton Sea, over Interstate 8, and into Mexico. Within it lies the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, a managed portion overseen by the BLM. It’s here that off-highway vehicles are permitted, and where the landscape feels most shaped by use—the most visited, the most developed, and, for many, the most familiar version of the dunes.

I first visited in early 2021 while working on The Enduring Wild. It was, in every sense, a strange time to be out there. Covid was surging. Vaccines were still on the horizon. January 6 was less than a month old. The mask wars were deepening. Angst was the mood of the day.

In a sea of motorhomes, dune buggies, and flags flying high from RV roofs — “Fuck Biden,” “TRUMP 2020” — I parked my van and set up camp for the weekend. I chose not to wear a mask, but the camera hanging from my neck gave me away. People stared. Faces tightened. Despite my best attempts at distanced conversation, not a single person engaged.

When I prepared for my long dune walks, I added my computer and everything valuable to my backpack and hoped my van would be graffiti free upon my return.

I was there again recently to write a story about State Route 78 for the LA Times, which came out this week.

Thankfully, the mood was much lighter.

I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere as recreationally and floristically divided as the Algodones Dunes.

State Route 78 cuts through the heart of them like a line in the sand, separating two ways of using the same landscape. To the south lie the Imperial Sand Dunes, where dune buggies and motorcycles carve across bare slopes. To the north is the North Algodones Dunes Wilderness Area, where mechanized travel is prohibited and where sunflower, ephedra, and mesquite hold the sand in place (more than 400 species have been observed here on iNaturalist).

It’s a tale of two natures.

Here the road becomes a boundary between different ways of moving through — and loving — the same landscape: speed and stillness, noise and silence, crowds and solitude.

I tend to choose walking over riding, but places like this always bring me back to something my friend Andrew says:

“I’m an equal opportunity recreationist.”

I try to hold onto that out here. To make space for the many ways people love a landscape, even when those ways don’t look like mine. Because in the end, we need all of us — walkers and riders, solitude seekers and thrill chasers — fighting to protect these places, even if we don’t always agree on how to experience them.

I’ll be back in your inbox bright and early next Sunday, with more scenes and tales from BLM lands in the desert (only a few more weeks of desert season!).

Josh

In the past week, it seems he has finally found a mate and the two have really been putting on a show. They tag-team the ravens with the kind of pestering a middle schooler might use on an older sibling - slicing through the air, briefly catching a wing before pivoting away. The ravens, twenty-five times their size, seem as amused as they are annoyed.

Our neighborhood coyote also seems to have partnered up. I’ve seen them together twice this week, sauntering down the middle of the street, cool and confident like a species that has, against all odds, adapted.

With daylight saving time back, my 5am walks are once again shrouded in darkness. And silence! The yippy-barking dogs and their owners that temporarily shatter it stay inside until daylight. In their place, other, quieter signals emerge: the first coffee makers glowing in kitchen windows, runners in headlamps, their red and white beams bouncing in rhythm with their steps. They nod as they pass with a twinkle in their eye, as if they too are grateful for the hush.

The pleasure of walking in the early morning darkness, in the middle of a metropolis that pulses and vibrates, tightening into a living current of movement and compression once the sun rises, feels like moving through a secret spell.

C H U C K W A L L A

NATIONAL

M O N U M E N T

PART 2

[PART 1 HERE]

Subscribe now

I have spent a lot of time wandering this small patch of land over the years, learning its contours both on foot and on the map. Its shape is an imperfect circle, 9.6 miles in circumference, enclosing roughly 3,382 acres of rocky ridges, sandy washes, and hidden oases centered around Corn Springs, a loop of green where trees, shrubs, cacti, and wildflowers hold their ground against the desert.

The dark yellow marks BLM land designated as Wilderness, the highest level of protection we have for land in the United States. The aqua square is California State Lands. The small gray parcels are privately owned, held by miners who laid claims here long ago.

And that light patch of yellow where I’ve been roaming, the area roughly encircled in red on the map, was BLM land without formal protections.

That changed with the creation of Chuckwalla National Monument. More than 624,270 acres in California’s southeast corner now carry a shared name and a shared protection, bringing together long-designated Wilderness with 375,747 acres of previously unprotected BLM land.

In The Way Around, a wonderful meditation on movement and presence, Nicholas Triolo centers his book on a practice called kora, a form of moving prayer, or circumambulation, that takes shape through walking in circles. He describes it as something made physical:

Encircling offers an opportunity to bear witness to a place...from every vantage point, an honorable surveillance to be with and to fully attend, to accompany every exposure and perspective and behavior.

Over time, he suggests, kora becomes a form of knowing.

That is what this place has become for me. I’ve walked these acres in three seasons, practicing kora — returning, watching, taking note. Wandering the circle is a lesson in endurance, sweat, and blood, where shade is scarce.

I have been up and down the rocky ranges, half on faint trails and half clambering over boulders until the patch of fabric between my knee and the Mesozoic granite has worn through to bloodstained skin. Formidable teddy bear cholla covers entire hillsides, and weaving through them feels like navigating a high-stakes maze, each obstacle poised to impale with needles nearly impossible to remove. Along the north and west perimeter, the Corn Springs and Irish washes offer level ground, but the deep sand makes your calves burn with every step.

This enclave of land rises from 1,600 feet at the Corn Springs Campground to 3,040 feet on a flattened, unnamed ridge where a few stone outcrops stand like sentinels. One winter I climbed to the top and watched the land unfurl in every direction. Compressed ranges stretched outward, separated by narrow washes running north to south, dotted with thousands of house-sized slabs of stone. The ground itself was strewn with millions of coarse-grained fragments, scattered as if a primordial meteor had exploded mid-air before striking earth.

After a pulse of rain, apricot mallow, golden suncups, scorpionweed, and brittlebush paint the washes. Four hundred and eight species have been logged on iNaturalist, from the usual suspects of reptiles and arachnids to the most unlikely cast of fungi, including my personal favorite, the shaggy mane.

The question that drives Triolo’s wandering and threads through the narrative spine of his book is one I have been thinking about ever since:

“How are the shapes we follow in life also shaping us?”

I think about that question on my morning walks at home, tracing the same streets before the city wakes. The same corners. The same trees. The same slow unfolding of light. I think about it, too, in my small corner of Chuckwalla, moving over the same mountains, following the same washes, always returning to a tent pitched in the same place.

It would be easy to call this routine. But I’m beginning to understand that something else is happening. The circle is not just something I move through. It is something that is shaping me in return.

If there has been a dominant shape in my life, it has been a straight line. Forward, upward, forward, upward, new, new, new, rarely looking back down the line.

But this new shape I’ve been following has been slowly eroding that forward momentum, asking me to return. To look again. To notice what I missed the first time. And in that return, something shifts. The landscape deepens. The familiar becomes newly visible.

The circle, it turns out, is not a path that leads somewhere else. It is a way of staying.

Subscribe now

Thank you all for being here. I’ll leave you with a little short film I stitched together during one of my many returns to Chuckwalla.

Around and around,

Josh

Whether you’re here to support a writer, or to support a writer and receive personalized travel advice, or simply to look at photographs from the margins of public lands — or some combination of all three — I am deeply grateful for the pocketbook nod of approval.

Each month, roughly $412.40 arrives through paid subscriptions. Tha…

Read more

He lifts awkwardly from the tip of the carrotwood, flapping and singing, lands, and does it again for hours. His long tail tilts sharply upward, as if hinged separately from the rest of him, flicking and settling with its own urgency.

CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP, he sings.

The effort!

There is no way to be certain, but the hummingbirds seem pissed. This tree has been theirs for years. They sit on the electrical lines and stare across at the performance.

Can you believe this guy? one says to the other.

Meanwhile, an unkindness of ravens1 works the grassy football field beyond the tree. They come and go, taking flight from the tall pines, paying no attention to the dancing bird.

A lone coyote has been sauntering by this winter, just before the sun comes up. Our neighbor’s tiny dog barks from the window with nothing to lose, an empty hold-me-back kind of gesture, as if it wouldn’t die in a single move.

The coyote keeps the feral cat population in hiding and in check, giving this mockingbird and his soon to be mate and their soon to be offspring a fighting chance.

Elsewhere on the block, our neighbor’s California poppies have opened into a late-winter blaze. Bees move through them one by one, stumbling inside each flower as if intoxicated.

🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶

Subscribe now

If I were to tell you about a “wild and scenic river,” what kind of images would that conjure? Raging rapids careening through granite boulders? A broad tributary sliding beneath evergreen forests? That is what I used to picture when I heard the phrase. My grandiose idealism defined wild as untamed and scenic as the kind of picturesque beauty that is universally praised and accepted.

But the reality of what qualifies as “wild and scenic” is far more surprising.

There are only ten federally designated, BLM-managed wild and scenic rivers in California — just 124.2 miles in total length.

The second longest of these runs through the heart of the Mojave Desert, past a famous valley named Death and a mountain range named Funeral, where summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits for months on end.

The diminutive Amargosa River.

For much of its 185-mile journey, the Amargosa travels underground, slipping beneath desert washes and forgotten highways. When it does surface, it often appears modest — narrow enough to leap across, shallow enough to keep your shorts dry.

But where it rises in its namesake canyon, its perennial waters nourish willow and mesquite thickets dense enough to hide a Gambel’s quail and lush enough to sustain flycatchers and sparrows that depend on the improbable persistence of water. Overhead, ravens drift across the canyon rim, patient as the current is slow.

Today, the Amargosa Conservancy works alongside tribes, agencies, and local advocates, whose restoration efforts and advocacy help ensure that this fragile ribbon of water continues to flow.

My first encounter with the river left such an impression that I made it the focus of the opening essay in my book, The Enduring Wild.

I was here again recently for a story I wrote for the LA Times about Highway 127, the lonely stretch of road between Baker and the Nevada line, where the desert feels less like backdrop and more like protagonist. The Amargosa threads quietly through that story, too, slipping beneath the asphalt.

Access to the canyon is through the beautiful oasis at the China Ranch Date Farm, where trails wander from the back parking lot all the way out to the river. While you’re there, you might as well grab a date shake.

The Amargosa may not appear on many guidebooks and compared to more famous California rivers, it makes little noise. But here, in the parched desert, its very existence feels like a miracle — a quiet oasis of persistence and improbable life.

CAN’T STOP. WON’T STOP.

The mockingbird sings it from a carrotwood on my block.

The river sings it too.

Josh

Subscribe now

Woke up in a state of frenzy, my dreams speaking falsehoods about losing the hundreds of photographs snapped during the day for a story I’m working on.

I opened my eyes in the morning darkness, overheated, sweat running like streams across my chest, and squirmed free from the mummy bag. Found my camera by headlamp and flipped it on to see all the photos intact.

Let out a long sigh of relief and fell back onto my pillow.

Ripped off my jacket and shirt.

Wide awake. Thoughts spin.

The tent lies less than a mile east of the last remnants of the Gila River before it unceremoniously meets the Colorado, just outside Yuma, Arizona. The two rivers at this point in their journeys have been siphoned, dammed, diverted, and tapped along their descent, their currents parceled into fields and cities until what arrives at the confluence is not the rivers themselves, but the fragile remnants of what is left.

Robert Macfarlane recently wrote a book that asked a question - Is A River Alive?

Here at the Gila, I’d say barely.

Train after train rumbles past, the Gila Mountains rising behind, double-stacked containers and pressurized tank cars moving east toward El Paso, then on to Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, and elsewhere — crisscrossing the middle of the country from Duluth to Brownsville, Chicago to New Orleans — carrying oil for our vehicles and the ordinary cargo of modern life: clothes, tools, toys — the quiet inventory of factories half a world away.

The river flows west, dwindling with every mile, while the trains run east, slowly unloading cargo, and I can’t help but feel I’m existing at a strange metaphorical crossroads of exhaustion and distribution. The river is emptied so life can continue. The trains carry what the modern world requires.

I lie awake between what is taken and what is used.

I’m camped on a tiny patch of public land among a sea of RVs, trailers, trucks, buses, vans, cars, and tents. Just steps away, U.S. Route 95 hums without pause.

A shallow pond sits nearby, ringed with invasive tamarisk. The water has the color of old machinery, a dark brown slurry that hints at oil and chemicals from another era. Still, the phainopepla gather here - glossy black, red eyes, making a raucous.

Wildflowers dot the landscape and look almost out of place, sprouting defiantly straight out of rock. It feels important to name them, one by one, to acknowledge the unlikely abundance rising from ground that seemed, at first glance, empty of life.

Apricot mallow flashes orange, brittlebush mustard, creosote bursts yellow. Its cousin, the California fagonbush (!), blooms lavender.

There are desert sunflowers, olive-colored desert holly, phacelia, the diminutive rock daisy, and the small white blooms of the mysterious pebble pincushion — each flower a tight tuft of pale filaments rising from a green cup.

The desert is one long surprise.

I’m here working on a long form story for RE:PUBLIC, an independent newsroom committed to telling the stories of America’s public lands at a moment when both the landscapes and the journalism meant to protect them stand on fragile ground.

The narrative will follow the growing nomadic community of people who have moved into homes on wheels, and utilizing public lands as legal places to camp and congregate. Over the past few weeks, the reporting has taken me from two BLM Long-Term Visitor Areas, where tens of thousands gather, to here in the quarry at a small VanAid gathering. It’s a pop-up community where hobby mechanics, woodworkers, and long-time nomads share tools, labor, and hard-won knowledge with those whose rigs — and lives — could use a lift. These are people arriving not only in search of warmth, but of belonging, stability, dignity, and, at times, help.

The shape of the story is still emerging, but the incredible people I’ve met along the way are already giving it form.

Meanwhile, back in my tent.

Drops of rain pitter patter on the fly.

Sometime after four am, I fell asleep.

Josh

When you’re deep in the underground lair of writing a book — way, way, way down many flights of stairs, in a sterile, windowless room— just you and a computer, alone, staring at the inevitable blank screen, you’re really just willing yourself to write another sentence, and then a hundred words, and then a few thousand more, until you finally reach the 45,000 words you promised your publisher.

The last thing you’re thinking about during those years underground is winning an award.

But it happened! And I’m deeply grateful for this emblem that will now live on the second printing of the book.

If you don’t already have a copy, please consider picking one up. 🫶

• MY WEBSITE (Signed + Free Postcards)

• BOOKSHOP.ORG

• THE BIG A

Also (and my apologies for the giant font) -

If you’ve felt some semblance of joy or solace or inspiration from my book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. These links make it extremely easy! 🙏 Let’s get the algolords on the side of land protection and progress!!

Finally, thanks to all of the wonderful independent booksellers who voted for my book (and congrats to the book Cruising J Town, which I tied with!).

Okay, that’s all.

Back to the desert…

You first spot the Amboy Crater from Route 66 as a dark speck rising from the flat Mojave floor. At that distance it barely registers, a small interruption in an otherwise endless horizon. But mile by mile, it grows as you pass ghost towns with names like Klondike, Siberia, and Bagdad, until the black cinder cone dominates the landscape, looming in full view, as if it could wake up at any moment.

Nearly 79,000 years ago, it did exactly that. Molten lava erupted from what is now a quiet, extinct volcano, spilling across the desert and carving out the basalt plains that still surround the cone today. The most dramatic remnant of that eruption is the breach on the crater’s western side, where lava once surged outward. Now, that break in the cone serves as the gateway into the crater itself.

The hike to Amboy Crater is roughly four miles round trip, depending on how much time you spend wandering inside the cone, or whether you decide to circle the razor-thin rim at the top. The trail follows a well-maintained footpath through creosote bush, desert holly, and, in spring, bursts of sunflowers. Charred fragments of basaltic rock litter the ground, reminders that this seemingly still place was once violently alive.

As you approach the crater’s edge, the scale snaps into focus. What looked like a simple mound from the highway suddenly drops away beneath your feet, revealing a vast, bowl-shaped interior. Walking down into the crater feels strangely intimate, like stepping into the hollowed-out heart of the earth. It’s dreamy and otherworldly to realize you’re standing inside the center of an extinct volcano, tracing the contours left behind by fire and time.

This is a place where geology is not abstract or academic. It’s physical, immediate, and deeply humbling. You don’t just learn about volcanic history here; you walk into it.

Getting There:

Amboy Crater sits just off historic Route 66, roughly halfway between Barstow and Needles. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck famously called Route 66 the “Mother Road,” the artery that carried people west in search of something better. As the road approaches its centennial in 2026, this quiet corner of the Mojave feels like a reminder of what the highway has always promised: not just motion, but encounter.

Twenty miles southeast of the crater lie the million undulations of the Cadiz Dunes — my favorite dune field in California, explored in Dispatch #31. Together, these ancient lava fields and shifting sand dunes sit within the 1.6-million-acre Mojave Trails National Monument, offering two vastly different expressions of deep time within the same desert landscape.

Amboy Crater is also one of the most accessible and well-managed BLM sites I’ve visited in years of exploring public lands. There are pit toilets, picnic tables, shade structures, interpretive signs, and even — gasp — a paved road leading from Route 66 to the parking lot.

Camping is allowed, though with some limitations. Dispersed tent camping is permitted nearby, and self-contained vehicles can camp in the overflow parking lot. And, as always in the Mojave, water is essential (no matter when you’re visiting).

I’ll be back in two weeks with more tales from the desert. We have rivers to explore and bighorn sheep to encounter, among other Mojave treasures.

Josh

Subscribe now

Cheers, we said in unison.

Earlier that evening, darkness had settled over eastern Nevada as we turned onto the final road that would take us to the cabin, home of Delaine Spilsbury and her son Rick of the Ely Shoshone (Newe).

Down the last stretch of asphalt we went until we came upon something standing in the middle of the road. I let off the gas, coasted, and then braked as the shape remained motionless. We came to a stop ten yards out, and there before us stood a great horned owl. Broad-chested and still, ear tufts lifted, yellow eyes catching the headlights without flinching. It held the road as if it owned it, unmoved as we waited.

[And, yes, for those following closely, this was the same experience I had in another part of Nevada, on another backroad, last September.]

As we dished up our elk chili later that night, I asked Delaine —eighty-eight years young! — if seeing the owl meant anything.

Uh-oh. It’s a bad omen, she said. Not good!

Then she cracked a smirk and looked at Rick. They both started laughing.

Just kidding.

Thus began a hilarious and meaningful three days together…

Bahsahwahbee is a valley in eastern Nevada, on public land managed by the BLM, where water rises unexpectedly from the ground, feeding a rare grove of Rocky Mountain juniper whose roots braid through wet soil in a landscape otherwise defined by aridity. Springs surface and disappear again, sustaining the grove through years of drought and heat. For the Newe, these trees are not simply old; they are alive with meaning, a gathering place where ceremony, memory, and relationship have long taken root.

For Delaine and Rick, this is where family history is held in one place. For generations, Newe families gathered here for ceremony and seasonal life, drawn by water and hunting grounds ripe with elk, mule deer, and pronghorn.

As with so many places in this country, the story of Bahsahwahbee also holds profound loss and systematic removal, carried out through repeated acts of violence. In 1859 and again in 1863, U.S. soldiers carried out massacres here, killing men, women, and children during ceremonial gatherings. The horror returned in 1897, when vigilantes attacked a fall encampment, killing nearly everyone present. Only two young girls survived by hiding in the surrounding hills through the night.

One of them was Delaine’s grandmother.

What struck me most from my time last week were the springs — what tribes refer to as the “milk of Mother Earth,” still rising from the ground that holds this tragic history. There are more than a hundred of these seeps scattered across the valley, each in a different stage of contribution. Seeing one up close is a marvel. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

The water doesn’t rush or spill; it rises. Pressed upward by underground pressure, it filters through sand and silt, loosening the surface grain by grain. Small pulses gather and spread, sending shallow ripples across the pool before settling again. The movement is continuous but restrained, a steady emergence shaped by permeability and gravity.

When Delaine walks the grove today, she isn’t recounting history so much as keeping company with it. The junipers are not monuments but relatives, living bodies rooted in the same soil that holds her ancestors’ remains. To return here, again and again, is not an act of remembrance alone, but of care — a refusal to let home be reduced to tragedy, or erased altogether.

Part of that refusal is the work being carried forward by the Ely and Duckwater Shoshone and the Goshute to protect Bahsahwahbee in perpetuity through National Monument designation.

There is much more to say about these sacred lands and the fight to protect them — from threats like groundwater pumping to supply Las Vegas, solar development, and mining — and this dispatch is only one small part of a longer telling. I was here visiting alongside my friend Jeremy Seifert, a documentary filmmaker. I’m currently writing a long-form essay about this place, while Jeremy is working on a short film that follows their ongoing fight to protect it.

After three days of shared meals, drinks, conversations, and laughter, there were plenty of hugs to go around. We pulled out of their driveway, determined in whatever ways we can to add our voices to theirs.

Hope everyone out there is doing well. I’ll be back in your inbox next week with more winter tales from the desert.

Josh

Subscribe now

I owe it all to some tufa spires.

In the months before this trip, my family had been hunkering down, waiting for the birth of our daughter in late November, then settling into her new life amid visits from family. The week before this trip, my older two kids and I had all been sick. From a blog entry I posted on 12/24/14.

It is 64 degrees on Christmas Eve and the sun is on its way down, hoping to clear the horizon before the dinner rush.

My five-year-old daughter has an ear infection, my two-year-old son has a fever and I’m doped up on just enough NyQuil to simultaneously make myself feel better and allow me to take care of the older kids while Kari and the baby hole up in our bedroom.

By the time the new year rolled around, my older kids and I were ready for a road trip and open skies. When all the campsites I knew about were already fully booked, I reached out to a friend who suggested we camp on some “BLM land.”

This was the very first time I had ever heard of the term.

I’m not sure which rabbit hole I fell into on the antiquated BLM website that led me to the Trona Pinnacles, but of all the tunnels I could have crawled into while looking for a place to camp, I’m sure glad it delivered us to those ethereal tufas.

We left Los Angeles on New Year’s Day, 2015 — my kids in car seats, my wife at home with our newborn. I remember thinking that no matter how this impromptu camping trip turned out, or what the Pinnacles looked like, we were going to have some kind of adventure. And that seemed to matter as much as anything.

Four hours later we arrived to the gravel entrance off Highway 178. We stretched, ran around, read the welcome signs, and then hopped back in our Element for the final six mile drive that would take us to the heart of the landscape.

The memory that lingers most vividly is the raucous laughter that ensued when I let my daughter ride shotgun without a seatbelt and let my son sit in my lap as we drove along the sandy road. We cranked up the music, probably Florence and the Machine, and whooped and hollered as we rolled and bumped and fishtailed our way through the Mojave. I remember the totality of joy written on their faces, like we had all just broken free of fevers and ear infections.

We spent the days hiking around the tufa spires, what my daughter affectionately called “drip sand castles” - bouncing on the surrounding salt flats, and spending a lot of time roaming and climbing among the abandoned train cars that dot the landscape.

The trip was akin to love at first sight.

When we got home, I immediately bought a 3x5 notebook and a stack of books about public lands. I started filling it with facts, quotes, and questions — trying to understand what these wild, quiet BLM lands were and why they mattered.

I posted a handful of photos from that trip on my personal Instagram, images that now live among the lost photographs from 2014 to 2018 that still haunt me (and why screenshots will have to suffice). I took them with my trusty Canon G10, which - HOLY HELL - I only just realized came out the same season (fall 2008) as the Canon 5D Mark II I currently shoot with.

The Trona Pinnacles

That first trip was personal and electric, but it would take time for me to understand that I was standing on the exposed floor of an ancient lake.

To roam among the pinnacles is to encounter the geological memory of that lake, one that once filled this corner of the California desert. The formations are tufa, a porous form of calcium carbonate that precipitates out of water. They are not carved by wind, but built slowly, molecule by molecule, beneath the surface of an inland sea. Between roughly 10,000 and 100,000 years ago, this basin held Lake Searles, a deep Pleistocene lake fed by runoff from the Sierra Nevada during wetter climatic periods. When the climate warmed and the water receded, the chemistry of that lake was left behind, hardened into spires.

Some read as towers or tombstones, others as ridges or cones, each shape a variation on the same long conversation between water and stone. Standing among them is to feel the invitation of geologic time.

In late March of 2021, my traveling partner and I watched one of the most spectacular sunsets and moonrises we have ever encountered. As the light shifted, the 500 tufas rising from the dry lakebed took on the oranges, purples, and pinks of the sky.

My friend Josiah made a beautiful 1-min film at Trona…

Getting There

Access is via Pinnacle Road off Highway 178, about twenty-three miles east of Ridgecrest, California, where a gravel entrance leads into the heart of the formations. I’ve driven this road in multiple seasons and have never had an issue with a high-clearance, two-wheel-drive vehicle. That said, conditions are highly dependent on weather and season, so it’s always wise to check in with the Ridgecrest BLM Field Office if you have questions (760-384-5400).

There is a single pit toilet near the main area, but no water or trash service, so plan to haul out every last thing you bring in.

Dispersed camping is free anywhere you can find a suitable place to park your vehicle or pitch a tent, ideally in areas that have already been used. November through April are the best months to visit, when daytime temperatures are mild and the desert light stretches low across the valley.

Hopefully you’ll get the best moonrise of your life.

Signing off until next Sunday.

Josh

PS: A little sunrise time lapse I made in Trona one morning.

Everyone is sleeping. The temperature is slowly dropping. And for the first time in a month, the lights on the tree have gone out.

My youngest daughter is sound asleep next to me, choosing…

Read more

The prose, for one, is devastatingly good. Both writers were brimming with originality and experimenting with new forms, cutting their teeth on a rapidly shifting cultural landscape.

And then there’s the social commentary. The 90s were a turbulent, revolutionary moment, as cable television and the early internet began to fracture our attention spans, advertise their way into our pocketbooks, and slowly turn a nation of doers and makers and talkers into a nation of watchers and consumers — fed on stimulation that mimicked connection while quietly starving us of the nourishment that comes from sharing a room with another human.

They asked different questions, but circled the same deep-seated anxiety…

Wallace: How do we escape this?
Coupland: What does it look like while we’re stuck here?

In many ways, the writing of Jenny Odell and Jedidiah Jenkins feels like a continuation of this lineage — an evolved response to the same cultural unease.

In 1996, the writer David Lipsky traveled with Wallace during his book tour for Infinite Jest. At one point in the long, five-day conversation, Wallace waxed prophetically about the internet and disconnectedness:

At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.

DFW was both 1000% right and yet could not have imagined the scale or saturation of the technology and social media distraction we’d be living with thirty years later.

In the closely adapted movie version of this conversation between DFW and Lipsky, Wallace adds…

“I’m gonna have to leave the planet.”

Ultimately, Wallace left the planet — by suicide — in 2008.

Coupland, meanwhile, is still trucking along. I’ve found myself returning to his work thanks to a recent appearance in a New York Times piece, Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation? — a framing Wallace would no doubt have found objectionable and, when inevitably asked to participate, would have likely answered with a middle finger.

I say all of that to say this:

We need to build up some machinery.

The kind Wallace warned we’d need deep in our guts — something sturdy enough to fend off the ease, convenience, and deceptive pleasure of screens and everything they represent.

The working parts of my own machinery are built from acts of defiance, though unevenly practiced and constantly rebuilt:

• Ditching the motherf’ing phone at every conceivable chance. Leaving it at home when going out with friends. Putting it in my desk drawer for three-hour writing sessions. Exercising without it — without music, without podcasts.

• Phone-less walks in my neighborhood, long enough for the quiet to turn into noticing, into the long-lost art of daydreaming.

• READING.READING.READING.READING.

• Long games around the table with my family. Monopoly. Rummikub. Up and down the river. Gin rummy.

• And, of course, camping. Far enough from town for dark skies, quiet, and the recalibration that comes with a weekend without reception ⬇️

The road to Whitney Pocket, the unofficial gateway to the Gold Butte National Monument, is paved all the way from Interstate 15.

There are potholes, gravel bars, and undulations that resemble the final scenes in One Battle After Another, but any vehicle could manage just fine.

We arrived at a circular gravel turnout at dark, a few hours past sunset. No one else around.

Temperature: 41 degrees.

Reaching into my pack, I take out and then put on every single piece of clothing I brought. The bitter Michigan cold of my childhood and youth - a chill I once proudly believed made me a tough Michigander - has all but evaporated after twenty-two years living in annual warmth. 41 degrees feels like minus twenty.

A full moon hangs in the sky, so bright I don’t need a headlamp to set up my tent.

There are things to be done:

Arranging sleeping gear, making food, building a fire, and organizing camera gear for the morning.

I’m here with my pal Mason Voehl, thoughtful leader of the Amargosa Conservancy, who soon walks off into the night with his own camera and tripod.

My favorite shot of his, used with permission and further proof that even a full moon sky can tell a damn good story:

Subscribe now

Eventually, we are both sitting by the fire, doing nothing but watching the flames flicker and hiss on a windless night, the temperature dropping with each passing hour.

Doing our best to build up some machinery.

See you at sunrise, we say, as the cold pushes us toward our sleeping bags.

I’ll be back in your inbox next week for one final 2025 dispatch — my first annual YEAR IN REVIEW. A roundup of my favorite things: books, pods, essays, substacks, photos, films, trips, and humans.

From my crew to yours, wishing all of you a very merry holiday season.

With love,

Josh

I recently learned that The Enduring Wild has been named a finalist for the Golden Poppy Award. I’m deeply honored (and thrilled!) — to see the book recognized in this way.

If you’re looking for a meaningful Christmas gift for the outdoor-minded person in your life (or for yourself), I have 19 signed copies left for 2025. Each order includes a few pronghorn antelope postcards and free shipping. Orders placed by the 16th should arrive in time for Christmas!

→ order here ←

GOLD BUTTE NATIONAL MONUMENT:

I think it’s safe to say Mason Voehl and I spent the entirety of last weekend repeating the same phrases, all of them orbiting shock, awe, and surprise.

We were camping and walking in Gold Butte National Monument, tucked into the far southeastern corner of Nevada.

I’m still processing everything I carried home from Gold Butte — the notes, thoughts, feelings, and photographs - so this week I’m keeping it simple and sharing a small selection of images from our time there…

No doubt I’ll be circling back to Gold Butte in the near future.

Hope everyone has a great week. I’ll be back in your inbox next Sunday, bright and early.

Josh

Substack …

Read more

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. Truly. Your support not only helps sustain these dispatches (they average 11.25 hours each…yes…I keep track), but also buys me more time to work on my next book about BLM lands in Nevada.

We have also donated $415.78 to the only conservation non-profit dedicated solely to BLM lands - the Conservation L…

Read more