The sandalmaker comes awake with the dawn. Along the shore of the great lake it is not possible to sleep any longer even if she wanted to. The shorebirds are also awake with the dawn, their cacophony impossible to ignore. There are other calls from across the savannah: elephantine trumpeting, nickering of horses, grunting of camels… From the volcanic upland to the north of her encampment, the growl of a lion. Her band of H. sapiens is the apex predator on the savannah, but the small band needs to pay attention nonetheless. Lions and bears are present here; like her small band, they are drawn to the riches bestowed by the great lake. Both can be opportunists around the encampment, but it is the dire wolf who requires greater vigilance… Now two weeks past the autumnal equinox, 7500 BC, her day begins…
The Basin and Range of the American West is a fairly recent development in geologic time. Created by extensional tectonic forces, the earth’s crust has been stretched across a vast landscape that extends from the Big Bend region in SW Texas to the high sagebrush deserts of SE Oregon and SW Idaho. The result is a landscape of towering mountain ranges separated by broad, deep valleys. A common feature of the valleys is that they are areas of internal drainage; in other words, there is no outlet to the sea for water collecting there. In these broad valleys, huge lakes developed at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Ages. One was Fossil (Fort Rock) Lake (1000 square miles, 200′ depth) in SE Oregon…
The sandalmaker’s people were first in the region sometime between 11,000 and 9,500 years ago; the oldest sagebrush bark sandals from the Fossil Lake area are dated at 9,000 years ago. The great lakes they encountered were populated by an array of seemingly fantastical Pleistocene creatures: elephants, mammoths, mastodons, bears, lions, wolves, two species of camel and one of dromedary, at least three species of horse, tapirs and sloths. Uncountable waterfowl at the water’s edge, fish in the lake…riches to be had…
1000 AD, in the middle of what climatologists, archeologists and historians refer to as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA: 800 – 1350 AD). It’s a 500 year drought period across the Great Basin and the great lakes are smaller now, their original fill from massive ice melting at the end of the Pleistocene reduced to snowmelt runoff from the great mountain ranges. The high sagebrush desert is otherwise limited to scant rainfall… Others are now here, the Paiute, Shoshone, Modoc and Klamath. Nomadic hunter/gatherers, they nevertheless cleave to the lakes as much as possible. The waterfowl are still abundant, as is the tui chub, the minnow-family fish found there. But other things are dramatically different. More-recognizable ungulates are now present. Elk, seasonal travelers between high and low country, are found in the mountainous region rimming the north end of the Great Basin. However, the high sagebrush desert is better suited to deer, and especially Antilocapra americana, the Pronghorn Antelope.
How did they go?… How did that vibrant, vast, diverse Pleistocene fauna go extinct? They were gone within about 2,000 years after the end of the Ice Ages. It was a dramatic climate change to be sure, but so many genera made the transition… I’m thinking about Equus, the horse. The earliest fossils are from the Pliocene of North America, yet they went extinct in North America and had to be reintroduced from Europe?… A question that haunts: How much were we responsible?…
Thirty-five mph feels about right. The dirt road across the Catlow Valley seems washboarded over its entire 50-some mile length. Crossing the line into Lake County I’m now angling SW toward Hart Mountain and the heart of the refuge. Scanning the high desert in front, I’m hoping for a glimpse of one (or more) Antilocapra americana. Then, out of the corner of my eye, some motion… And there he is, to the south but on a converging course toward the refuge. He has overhauled me (the fastest land animal in North America, he can hit 60 mph) and is starting to pull ahead. I could slow, but in the moment that seems as inappropriate as speeding up…he’s made his calculation… He muscles his way past with about 20 yards to spare… Utterly magnificent, bigger than expected, broader through the shoulders, powerfully muscular at shoulder and hip, his run across the desert is fluid, yet…commanding.
What is this transcendent moment, this connection? If nothing else, ponder our fascination with what the next exhibit might reveal at the city zoo. Better, sit for a moment and watch people’s behavior at the petting zoo (we even have petting tanks at the aquarium). For others the moment occurs with an encounter in the wild. “In the wild…”. What does that mean on a planet now with no place beyond our reach?…
Even so… Hart Mountain and Sheldon National Wildlife Refuges on the high sagebrush desert exist because by 1900 the millions of pronghorns that once ranged across the Great Basin had been reduced to 15,000. They are now back to about 1 million, but…
On the edge of the Warner Rim, afternoon sun over the Warner Valley. This was another of the great late Pleistocene lakes. To the W-NW are Lake Abert and Summer Lake, the remains of ancestral Lake Chewaucan. To the N-NW of that, the Fort Rock and Christmas Valley region, the abandoned bed of Fossil Lake. The waterfowl are here, the green headed mallards, redheads and canvasbacks, the great canada honkers…just not in the numbers observed by Fremont during his 2nd survey of the American West…
Pondering Kittredge (appropriate, sitting on this rim), it seems certain that we have a strong, visceral connection with life around us. Dunne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind”. It is also true that the extinction of a species diminishes us because we are involved, life-connected. And this compelling sense that we must take more care…
The explorer, paleontologist and biologist George Gaylord Simpson was once asked: “How much smarter are we than the caveman?”. His reply: “We’re not”. Since we are in his country, the last words belong to Kittredge, commenting on the diminishment of life around him: “It’s like watching our invulnerabilities vanish. Of all our myriad duties, preservation has to be central”.
