By Jack Smith

“The desert is a lot like beer; it’s an acquired taste.” That’s what a friend of mine told me some years ago. I think he may have been onto something. However, these northern cold desert areas of Wyoming are neither a smooth lager nor an easy-drinking American pilsner. Rather, I seem to be continually thinking of a bitter pale ale as I sit on the cracked gray clay sipping warm water from my water bottle. It is a hot day in early June and I am in the middle of the Honeycombs wildlands in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Although I am only 20 miles from the city of Worland, I feel I could be a thousand miles or a hundred and fifty years away from any western population center.

By Jeri Lewis Edwards

How could you have known we would
become utterly, inexplicably lost
without that misplaced map?

And that razor cut trail cloaked in dust,
talus, edged felsite, gneissic-banded rubble.
We witnessed those tumbled stones—
they weren’t cairns from your past,
no markers to guide us.

I hope the following paints a sunnier portrait of the desert. 

The Oregon Badlands Wilderness is a 29,000-acre protected area in the high desert administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The desert’s hardy flora roots itself into the land’s shield volcano, which came into being 80,000 years ago when a lava tube running underneath the ground sprung a leak. Lava oozing north, south, east, and west created the badlands.

The sandy, light colored soil that the raccoon prints are imbedded in comes from thousands of years of eroded lava. At various locations in the badlands, there are elevated volcanic rock formations—ships in the sagebrush sea—that allow for unobstructed views of the Cascade volcanoes to the west and the vast desert to the east.