April’s Reads Have Taken Me to the Colorado Mountains, Wyoming’s Red Desert and a Brazilian Tepui!
Friday, when I finished Book 18 of 2016 Breaking Wild, by Dianne Les Becquets. I started thinking about how reading let’s one explore the far reaches of the world without leaving the comfort of your home. Via my April reads I’ve visited Antarctica and the jungles of northern Brazil in The 6th Extinction from James Rollins, at one end of the world. While Peter May’s Entry Island has taken me to Entry island located in the Gulf of St Lawrence in the northern hemisphere! .
As I thought, I remembered that C.J Box’s Off the Grid, Joe Pickett and Nate Romanowski battled evil doers in the Red Desert of southwest Wyoming near the Colorado border. I wondered how close that desert was from the mountains around Rio Mesa and Rangely, Colorado where Amy Raye Latour was lost in the wilds in Breaking Wild. Hmm, it seems that there is no direct route between the two locations but the two locations are only two hundred plus miles apart!! The map below shows the approximate location of the two sites.
Wait, another setting for the action in The 6th Extinction is Mono Lake, California. Checking Google maps I see that Mono Lake is located a little over 700 miles southeast of Rangely, Colorado!
I found both the Red Desert in Wyoming and Mono Lake in California very interesting and went to Wikipedia to find out more about them. First the Red Desert, from Wikipedia..
The Red Desert is a high altitude desert and sagebrush steppe located in south central Wyoming, comprising approximately 9,320 square miles (24,000 km²). Among the natural features in the Red Desert region are the Great Divide Basin, a unique endorheic drainage basin formed by a division in the Continental Divide, and the Killpecker Sand Dunes, the largest living dune system in the United States. In the 19th century, the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails tracked through the northern and western regions of the Red Desert after crossing the Continental Divide at South Pass. Today, busy Interstate 80 bisects the desert’s southern region while gas field roads cross the desert.Read More
The Killpecker Sand Dunes of the Red Desert support a wide range of wildlife and vegetation, ranging from elk who use the adjoining sagebrush steppe for shelter to aquatic organisms that thrive in snowmelt ponds. Photo by the Bureau of Land Management.
Not exactly the way I picture Wyoming!!
The 6th Extinction begins with an explosion in a research facility near Mono Lake. The research being conducted at the facility revolves around extremophiles organisms that thrive and live in conditions that are normally considered inhospitable to life, such as Mono Lake. FromWikipedia…..
Mono Lake (/ˈmoʊnoʊ/ moh-noh) is a large, shallow saline soda lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in an endorheic basin. The lack of an outlet causes high levels of salts to accumulate in the lake. These salts also make the lake water alkaline.
This desert lake has an unusually productive ecosystem based on brine shrimp that thrive in its waters, and provides critical nesting habitat for two million annual migratory birds that feed on the shrimp and blackflies (that also feed on the shrimp).[2][3]
The human history of Mono Lake is associated with its productive ecosystem. The native Kutzadika’a people derived nutrition from the pupae of the alkali flies that live in the lake. When the city of Los Angeles diverted water from the lake, it lowered the lake level, which imperiled the migratory birds. The Mono Lake Committee formed in response and won a legal battle that forced Los Angeles to partially restore the lake level. Read More
Another setting in The 6th Extinction is a tepui in northern Brazil. While James Rollins discusses what a tepui is in the story, I went to Wikipiedia to find out more about these geologic formations…..
A tepui /ˈtɛpwi/, or tepuy (Spanish: [teˈpui]), is a table-top mountain or mesa found in the Guiana Highlands of South America, especially in Venezuela and western Guyana. The word tepui means “house of the gods” in the native tongue of the Pemon, the indigenous people who inhabit the Gran Sabana.
Tepuis tend to be found as isolated entities rather than in connected ranges, which makes them the host of a unique array of endemic plant and animal species. Some of the most outstanding tepuis are Neblina, Autana, Auyantepui and Mount Roraima. They are typically composed of sheer blocks of Precambrian quartz arenite sandstone that rise abruptly from the jungle, giving rise to spectacular natural scenery. Auyantepui is the source of Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall.
The photograph below is a photo of Kukenan tepui.
“Photo by Paolo Costa Baldi. License: GFDL/CC-BY-SA 3.0”
So these are a few of the places that I’ve visited in the last month thanks to the world of reading. What interesting places have you recently visited via the books you’ve read?