Burning Man bills itself as the biggest "Leave No Trace" event in the world. This means that after revelers have dismantled the geodesic domes, giant duckies, and steampunk ships that form their temporary city in Nevada, they get down on their hands and knees to scour the white alkaline sand for every last cigarette butt and sequin. But in the end, 80,000 people still leave a mark.
"Sure, by October, there's no trash left on the surface of the Black Rock Desert," says Michael Light. "But boy, are there a lot of traces."
Those traces are glaringly visible in Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville, Light's latest book in his long-term aerial survey Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West. It captures the monumental city grid etched into the Nevada desert, as well as spiraling vehicle tracks cut into Utah's salt flats. They echo other lines humans have made in recent centuries—wagon trails blazed across the North American prairie, Apollo mission rover paths plowed through moon dust.
"They're quite exuberant and beautiful from the air," Light says.
The landscapes sit in the Great Basin, a roughly 200,000-square-mile region between the Sierra Nevadas and the Western Rockies that writer William L. Fox calls "the major void in our continental imagination." It's a unique environment formed millions of years ago when mountain streams drained into Pleistocene pluvial lakes—the biggest being Lahontan and Bonneville. Those lakes eventually receded, leaving mud flats, sagebrush slopes, and other alien-looking terrain. Visiting in the late 1800s, the naturalist John Muir described it as "smooth lake-like ground" that "sweeps on indefinitely, growing more and more dim in the glowing sunshine." He found "no singing water, no green sod, no moist nook to rest in."
Muir bemoaned the mining that had already altered the landscape, though it was nothing compared to what would come. Today, Utah's Bingham Copper Mine boasts a 2.5-mile-wide abyss as deep as some mountains are high. Nevada's nuclear testing site is pocked with craters that bring new meaning to the word "void." Both figure into Light's previous archival and aerial works, and they make the marks in Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville seem as whimsical as skate lines on a frozen lake.
He shot them from the pilot's seat of his single engine plane during eight trips to the Great Basin in 2017 and 2018. If that seems risky, fear not. His great uncle, the surgeon Richard Light, once steered a seaplane 29,000 miles around the globe, and his father navigated A-24 bombers over Europe during World War II. Inspired, Light started soloing in gliders at age 14—which he credits with teaching him how air works. "If you learn to fly with an engineless aircraft, you really learn to fly," he says. "You have a profound sense of what a plane will and won't do."
Light prefers taking off in early morning or late afternoon when the sun is lazy and low, throwing the landscape into textured relief. It's still incredibly bright—the lakebed salts and alkali sediments are highly reflective, and it can be hard to distinguish surface patterns. But inevitably a strange glyph or shape appears, and he begins circling left, easing the plane to an altitude often less than two football fields off the ground. His digital Hasselblad, pointed out the pilot's windowless side, can take up to 600 pictures during a two-hour flight. Later, Light digitally bumps up contrast to reveal even the faintest tracks and lines.
They're mesmerizing, unconscious byproducts of human activity, which these days dominates even the most indomitable landscapes on the planet. As Light puts it, "Even in the emptiest, most open spaces, we're out there."
Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville is out now from Radius Books.
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