Scott Conover - Ash Meadows

One of the most intense encounters with wilderness was last summer during my internship at Ash Meadows national wildlife refuge. Over the course of July and August, I helped with a field research study of predatory bats in the most breathtaking landscape I've ever witnessed. The nature of the work involved hiking over a vast expanse of desert and oases, usually averaging about 10 miles a day. At night we would catch the bats in nets as they came out of the mountains to feed. At dusk the air would become alive with every type of bird, bat and insect imaginable. All of them swooped in to take drinks from the crystal-blue springs that poured their waters into a patch of lush vegetation. After netting some bats, we shaved their little backs and glued radio transmitters on them, and released them back to their nocturnal activities. Sometimes we wouldn't get a bat four hours, so we would break out a case of PBR and stare at the stars. I've never seen stars like those -- the entire sky awash with sparkling points of light. The milky way stretched from horizon to horizon like a ghostly cloud. I think I saw more shooting stars in my first night there than I had in my entire life. One of them lit up the entire sky and blazed across the entire skyline. We could here the coyotes at night. The howls would get closer and closer until... silence. After a moment or two the bushes would rustle, but I guess we didn't seem that tasty so they moved on.

In the morning the chase began. After a treacherous 4x4 truck ride across the refuge, we set out on foot into the hills and mountains of jagged, baking rocks interspersed with razor sharp cacti and noxious creosote bushes. With our directional antennae we set out to find the roosts of our bats. Climbing up the mountain, I would always get that Miley Cirus song stuck in my head - "Its not whats waiting on the other side - Its the climb". As cheesy as that sounds its so true. It was such a cathartic experience to be under the mercy a place like that. There were was no shade, and even if we were lucky enough to find an overhanging rock it was still like a brick oven, radiating back the heat from the sun. One day after a few hours climbing a 4 foot wide ridge with a drop of several hundred feet on each side, we startled a golden eagle from its nest right beneath its feet. With a seven foot wingspan, it glided effortlessly over the valley. A few days later hiking in a canyon nearby we came across a flock of bighorn sheep. They scampered around the canyon that had taken us all morning to hike, and then bounded up a sheer cliff face.

After a month of truly dwelling in that beautiful place, I really felt like I knew it. In Spanish, they say they know a place or a city after they've lived there. That's how I felt. I felt the power of the earth, and I learned to both respect it and cherish it. Everyone in our society is so removed from the wilderness, a very few individuals are able to truly dwell in the little remaining wilderness left on earth. To me its a tragedy that people judge the value of the wilderness based on a contrived abstraction in their minds instead of bothering to experiencing it for themselves. I think if more people took the time to embrace the wonder of nature, more people would be more interested in preserving it.