I left the pavement behind and drove past a munitions testing and disposal range with a rather worrying sign that read “KEEP MOVING: DO NOT LEAVE ROAD SURFACE”. Whether I had to keep moving for my own safety or to provide a more challenging target to bored marksmen was unclear. My next survey was in the Newfoundland Mountains, an isolated mountain range in the salt flats of western Utah. Getting there meant driving 50 miles of dirt roads in various degrees of disrepair.
After the munitions range came the next challenge: a service road of crushed rock that ran parallel to a railroad. In front of me was a smudge on the horizon that had to be the mountain range, the road straight as an arrow. I could see where I had to go, and I could see that I wasn’t there yet.
To my left and right were nothing but white salt flats with the occasional puddle of Caribbean blue water. Strange shapes rose from the lake, creatures with long curved necks that I thought at first were swans but were actually old fenceposts or pieces of machinery that had become covered in salt. The road was made of crushed stone and was riddled with washboards, giving me a maximum speed of 15 miles per hour or risk a flat tire and/or liquifying my internal organs. The only indicator I was moving at all was the feeling that my kidneys were going to jolt out of my ears with every bump.
After an hour and a half, the monotony of the drive broke for some mild excitement: I had to turn onto a different road. Objectively it wasn’t very exciting, but after staring at the horizon for an hour and a half I welcomed any scrap of entertainment I could get. (I Spy had gotten very boring very quickly.) I had been a little worried about missing my turn and having to reverse back down the causeway, but as it was the only other road I had seen in 25 miles I needn’t have been too concerned.
I drove another 10 miles along the dirt road until I was next to my transect and set up camp on a greasewood flat at the foot of the hills. It was a strange and unnerving landscape. The mountains were barren, made of dark boulders with fossilized worms and shells in them. Sparse shrubs and the lone blade of grass made up the . The mountain range was an island in a sea of salt flats and I felt like a castaway washed up on its shores.
Normally I feel very comfortable in remote places. This one was so remote that it gave me the uncanny feeling of being the last human on the planet, as though I were the lone survivor after some cataclysmic event. It filled me with a sense of dread. If something happened to me here—a mechanical issue with the car, an injury—it would be a long time before someone could come to help me. If it rained, the roads would turn into soup, and I would be stuck for days until it dried out again. The fact that I had reached the place with no problems apart from a stiff back from sitting for so long was irrelevant. The great thing about anxiety is that the thing you’re dreading doesn’t need to happen for it to make you miserable.
It became clear during my survey that even though this place was remote and looked barren, it was far from lifeless. A flock of migrating western tanagers landed on a rock outcrop, splashes of yellow and red against the browns and blacks of the rocks. An American kestrel perched on a rock outcrop to survey its domain and a golden eagle flew between the boulders in search of jackrabbits.
An abandoned prairie dog town nearby was now home to a family of burrowing owls. When I worked as an environmental consultant, I did my fair share of burrowing owl surveys in the Denver metro area. This consisted of playing a recording of a burrowing owl song with the idea that if there were any resident owls, they would come see what was going on (owls are always looking for the latest gossip). After listening to that recording ad nauseum, I can recognize those toots anywhere. The official recording ends with a human voice yelling “STOP!” , which is useful for the field tech conducting the survey but not so useful if you want to see a burrowing owl.
The other common species was the black-throated sparrow, whose song sounds uncannily like the Austin Powers theme song. This makes sense as, much like the International Man of Mystery himself, the black-throated sparrow is exceptionally handsome.
On a ridge in the distance stood two bighorn sheep. I watched them working their way along a scree slope until they vanished into the moonscape so effectively that I wondered if I had seen them at all. Maybe that was the kind of mirage that biologists see— instead of cities, we see wildlife.
I was very pleased with myself when I started the drive back to the rest of the world. I had done all 16 points of the survey, avoided any snake bites, and seen a place that few other people ever had (the summit register at Desert Peak, the high point, had only been signed five times in the past three years). My joyful mood, much like my left rear tire, popped and deflated when I ran over a sharp rock shortly after I got back on the causeway.
Changing the tire wasn’t the issue. The Bird Conservancy had given all the field techs hail blankets to protect our windshields during hail storms. It worked equally well to protect me from the hot road surface and made crawling under the car to position the jack feel nearly luxurious. The problem was that I still had a good 40 miles of rough dirt road to drive before I reached the pavement again, and if I got a second flat tire it was going to be a very long time until someone could come out to bring me a spare. I had no desire to sit on the salt flats and desiccate in the sun while cargo trains blasted by me. I drove extra slowly on the way back to make sure that didn’t happen and made it back without further incident. When I turned onto the gravel road from the causeway, I looked in the rearview mirror one last time. The Newfoundland Mountains were nothing but a smudge on the horizon again.