The Black Rock Desert

It is the only absolute desert in North America, a four-hundred-square-mile dry lake bed so desolate that nothing ever grows there. Vast and featureless, Nevada's Black Rock Desert defies visual measurement - much to the consternation of off-roaders who venture out onto this playa only to run out of gas before reaching the other side. It is the largest flat area on the continent, where the sound barrier was broken in a car. And it is a place of total silence - not even birds or insects live here - except when thousands of humans congregate for the Burning Man Festival on Labor Day weekend.
Writer and poet William Fox has demonstrated his familiarity with the Great Basin in such books as Mapping the Empty, just as Mark Klett has been documenting the landscape of the American West in his photographic studies. Now these artists turn their combined talents to an appreciation of this desolate corner of North America, where the only change in scenery comes with the shifting patterns of cracks in the earth after seasonal rains.
The Black Rock Desert is an introspective guide to a place so daunting that few dare to venture there alone. For anyone seeking to understand how and why we perceive these deserts the way we do, this book charts the rugged intersection of the American landscape and the human spirit.