Читать книгу Shaped by Snow. Defending the Future of Winter онлайн

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I glance at the sky above me. It’s a blue so rich it’s as though the mountains exist within a sapphire. I grab the crinkly thing and stuff it in my bag.

The Wasatch Mountain Range sits on the boundaries of three prominent geological features of the American West: the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. The Wasatch crowns the Colorado Plateau, the high-elevation desert where I believe the heart of the American West resides. Shaped like an actual heart flipped on its side, the plateau is sliced open by the Colorado River, which moves massive amounts of matter that stains its water red through the ecosystem and out into the west, like an artery carrying blood through a body. Running north to south, the Wasatch is the most western range of the Rocky Mountains and the most eastern range in the basin and range pattern of the Great Basin, which spans from Utah to Eastern California, Southern Idaho to Northern Mexico. As the spine of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, the mountains are a sanctuary for mountain flora and fauna, residents of the Rocky Mountain ecosystem who depend upon the mineral-rich soil and constant water supply that the mountains offer in the Great Basin Desert.