Stephen Trimble spent the past five years updating his classic book on the natural history of the Great Basin Desert, “The Sagebrush Ocean” —
which won the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation.
Steve is thrilled to have the chance to revise the text and venture into the Great Basin once again to photograph for this thirty-fifth anniversary edition. Today, the once-vast “sagebrush ocean” is an endangered sea, as environmental changes and human development have diminished it by half. This heartbreaking decline drives Steve’s updated text, but he blends loss with reverence for what remains—and urgent insight into what’s at stake in this landscape of sun-struck playas, surprising wetlands, remote canyons, and wind-swept tundra. In this presentation, he’ll introduce the essential ecology and spirit of the Great Basin Desert, tell stories from his fieldwork as writer and photographer, and share photographs he has gathered over four decades of wandering and exploring our vast sagebrush ocean.
This is an in-person presentation at Pictureline’s store/studio-facility (thank you Jens & company!) and Steve will be signing books for purchase.
Stephen Trimble Bio:
Stephen Trimble was born in Denver, his family’s base for roaming the West with his geologist father. A liberal arts education at Colorado College led to work as a national park ranger (at Arches and Capitol Reef) and museum press director. An M.S. in ecology and evolutionary biology informs his natural history writing. As writer, editor, and photographer, Trimble has published twenty-five award-winning books during nearly fifty years of paying attention to the landscapes and peoples of the Desert West.
The University of Nevada Press’s Max C. Fleischmann Series in Great Basin Natural History was Trimble’s first big project when he began free-lancing in the early 1980s. He was primary photographer for the series and wrote and photographed the overview volume, the original edition of The Sagebrush Ocean. Published in 1989, the book won the Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation from the Sierra Club and the Earle A. Chiles Award from the High Desert Museum. Trimble is thrilled to have the chance to revise the text and venture into the Great Basin once again to photograph for this thirty-fifth anniversary edition.
Trimble speaks and writes frequently as a conservation advocate and has taught writing at the University of Utah, where he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at the Tanner Humanities Center during the centennial of Stegner’s birth. In 2019, Trimble was honored as one of Utah’s fifteen most influential artists. He makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah. For more about his work, see www.stephentrimble.net
