[ACOUSTIC GUITAR MUSIC] {DAVID YETMAN} East of the Cascade Range of the western U.S is a vast, largely empty interior.

It's an arid land of skinny ranges that stretch north to south with intervening valleys.

Much of it is known as the Great Basin ideal for a long road trip through a land of mountains and valleys rich in ores and mines, often abandoned and roaming herds of wild horses.

[MUSIC FADES] {ANNOUNCER} Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey [MUSIC] The Guilford Fund.

Arch and Laura Brown.

And Hugh and Joyce Bell.

[THEME SONG PLAYING] [GENTLE MUSIC BEGINS] {DAVID} The Great Basin begins southeast of Mount Hood and east of the Cascades, including southeastern Oregon, most of Nevada, western Utah, and parts of eastern California and western Arizona.

This is Mount Hood, the highest point in Oregon.

A little over 11,000 feet It's a volcano.

It's one of a long series of volcanoes that make up the Cascade Range.

It's a skinny, long range with a lot of high peaks.

To the west is the coast, the Oregon coast.

One of the most famous in the world because it has long, long, straight beaches and gets enough rainfall to make lush vegetation.

Most Oregonians live to the west of the Cascades to the east of the Cascades is a very different country.

The Cascades take most of the moisture out of the atmosphere and leave it on the west side.

By the time it gets to the east side, it gets drier and drier, and off to the east we come into the Basin Range Province, which is semi-arid to arid [UPLIFTING MUSIC] We're about four to five hours to the southeast of Bend The town of Frenchglen is, on the map, it's the first place you run into.

It's not really named after the French language, but after two gentlemen Mr.French and Doctor Glen, who back in 1872, bought 1500 head of cattle into this area.

And the effects were immediately known and continue today.

But like so many other small towns in southern Oregon, this is southeastern Oregon, are few and far between.

It's probably 40 to 50 miles to the next town, and that's part of the way it is here at the edge of Basin and Range in southeastern Oregon.

[ORCHESTRAL MUSIC RISING] Not far up here, I'm supposed to meet, Jim Delmore, who's, coming down here from Bend.

He's a real outdoor enthusiast who has become very attached to the herds of wild horses here.

Numerous photographers come here looking for the herds of the wild horses.

The group that we hope to see here is called the South Steens Herd.

[MUSIC RISES] {JIM DELMORE} Right now, I would say they probably number in the 200 plus range.

{DAVID} That many?

{JIM} Yeah, just a year or so ago it was upwards of a thousand And then, uh, and then they gathered them so that they could put them up for adoption.

And they those people take them out and they will train them and so that they can ride them.

{DAVID} How many herds are there around here?

{JIM} There's another group, probably about 20 air miles south of here.

And they are called the Kigers.

They say that the Kigers have Spanish DNA and, Spanish blood from the conquistadores horses.

They're just - they're pretty amazing animals.

They - they figure out how to survive out here along with everything else.

And they - it's got everything they need out here.

Food, cover and water.

[BIRD TWEETING] [MUSIC SOFTENS] {JIM} The BLM will come by.

They will, use helicopters and catch pens and stuff like that, and they'll gather them because they breed prolifically.

The band that she came from is called the South Steens Band.

South of Frenchglen, probably.

And several different bands in there.

She was actually seen by her owner, who was a horse photographer.

She had taken just tons and tons of pictures over the over the course of a year before, before they gathered her and she put in to adopt her Since she was about, probably eight months old.

{DAVID} And how old is she now?

{JIM} She's three and a half, she'll be four in March.

So distinctive markings that she had was her blaze.

[ACOUSTIC GUITAR MUSIC] And then she's got kind of a bullseye on her butt.

[DAVID] Well I see.

{LAUGHS} {JIM} And it's been like that since she was a foal.

When they gather them, they do a freeze brand, but it's a bunch of arrows and symbols that can tell you the day she was gathered and the area that she was gathered.

I started coming out here when I was a kid.

But in the last few years, I've probably been out here at least ten times.

And it's just it's a magical place.

{DAVID} So something that appeals to the horses, appeals to Jim as well?

{JIM} Yes, It's quite magical for sure [CAMERA SHUTTER SOUNDS] [UPLIFTING MUSIC] [MUSIC ENDS] {DAVID} This really is the big empty But mile after mile after mile, you see lava flows, very short grasses, juniper trees, a few pinyon pines, not very many.

Just south of Frenchglen is a loop drive that goes over Steens Mountain.

It's the largest block faulted mountain in southeastern Oregon.

[BIRD TWEETING] Steens mountain, which is a massive volcano, is a very slow upward movement to climb to the top.

One odd thing about Steens Mountain is as though it's well over 9000 feet high.

There are no pines, no firs.

There are only junipers, aspen, and pinyon pines.

Why aren't there any coniferous forests on the top of Steens Mountain?

Nobody has a good answer.

One of the things about Basin and Range area where we are is that the mountains are what's called “block faulted.” as the earth has been pulled apart, the earth cracks and great portions drop down, and others pull up.

The blocks pull up, some blocks go down, another valley; blocks go up.

And the one, the blocks that go up, then, as a stretching continues, tend to tilt.

And one of the things we find here, this is very often is one side is very gradual.

The other side tends to be steep.

And we're looking here into Kiger Gorge.

And that is a steep drop off of solid lava, which shows that this is just one big heap of lava.

[CALM MUSIC BEGINS] As the mountains pull apart, they form basins between them.

And in the case of the Great Basin where we are, these basins have no outlet to the sea.

So water collects in them from time to time, and they form little lakes in the bottom that dry out.

That's why it's called the Great Basin.

The basins have no exit to the sea.

[MUSIC RISES] We've just come over the state line between Oregon and Nevada, the little town of Denio which wouldn't appear on most maps, but it's important because we're now in Nevada.

The highway goes between the parallel ranges, stays down in the basins.

Otherwise they're going to climb up, winding over the mountains.

So we're going south.

We're heading back to my home state of Arizona.

It's a long way to go, but in the meantime, we get to enjoy the vast, nearly empty spaces in the Great Basin.

Specifically, Nevada.

[MUSIC CONTINUES] In the basins, when water accumulates, it carries with it a lot of salt from the mountains.

And over the centuries, it accumulates more and more and the water evaporates, but it leaves behind all those dissolved salts.

And this is a salt flat that is a result of the Basin and range phenomenon and a very dry climate.

[MUSIC CONTINUES] Two million years ago, during the great ice ages that began, there were massive lakes between the ranges.

And what we can see up here is the ancient level of the lake, standing a few hundred feet above where we are standing right now.

That's how high the level of the lake was for hundreds and hundreds of years, until gradually the climate dried, it warmed, and the water did not come in in such a great quantity, the lake level fell.

And today, up the road we have this much smaller Walker Lake.

[MUSIC CONTINUES] Walker Lake is a classic remnant classic remnant lake from the Pleistocene.

That age of the - of the glaciers, and it once was several hundred feet deep.

Now it's fairly large.

But it's just a shallow its former self.

It's a lot of water.

It's a big lake.

It's probably ten miles long.

[MUSIC ENDS] The town of Hawthorne, Nevada is small and not very pretentious.

It's not even incorporated, but it holds a very important place in American history.

It's the place where all the artillery for the Pacific theater and World War two was stored here and then shipped off to the Pacific, and it has become a place where artillery is still stored and munitions are sent to decommission to make them less dangerous.

It is the largest such facility in the world, and there are 2500 bunkers, places where the ammo can be stored or research done.

It's a remarkably sophisticated place and a relatively unpretentious site.

[PENSIVE MUSIC] Its about 100 miles from Hawthorne to Tonopah, which is an old mining town 6000 feet There's huge mining history there.

[MUSIC CONTINUES] The state of Nevada is the largest producer of gold in the United States today a great deal of wealth is still extracted from the soil in Nevada.

But the history of mining goes back quite a while and really goes back to the gold strike in California.

The Forty-niners of 1849, and that brought miners from all over the world.

The number of miners, competition got too great, decided to spread out, and they came into Nevada.

And the the discovery of the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, sparked a huge silver rush throughout the West and actually throughout the world.

{JEFF MARTIN} We're going go check out several veins of silver that are still in the ground.

So you can actually see what it looks like.

So back in May of 1900, a gentleman by the name of Jim Butler was on his way to a place called South Klondike, which was actually about ten miles from our location here.

He stopped and he stayed the night at the springs, which were close by.

And during the night his burros wandered off, and in the morning he got up and he tracked them right up onto the side of the mountain here.

When he found him, he was kind of upset.

Picked up a rock to throw at one of them, and he found that the rock was unusually heavy running through this entire down slope of the mountain, through this whole area.

eight to ten very large outcropping quartz veins falling off the top and laying everywhere on the ground.

High grade silver flow carrying gold.

So he literally was just picking it up off the ground {DAVID} You know, you would know.

I mean, it makes sense that you would know when you pick up a rock and it's really heavy {JEFF} Yeah, especially if you have a lot of rock laying around and you could do a comparison.

Well, these are about the same size, but this one weighs two times or three times more than this one.

Some things with it.

These were all active volcanoes many, many years ago.

Blowing off the ash would go up into the air, it would come back down, settle on the ground, and over time it would resolidify into what they call tuff.

But running through the tuff are these quartz veins.

Three, four and five.

Pretty obvious right here.

And the colors that you can see in it.

A lot of rust iron staining, which is a good sign.

There's a little bit of yellow, which is sulfur, which is also a good sign.

But looking at the clo- at those quartz veins, the closeness and the color in it, you're going to see the darkness the grays and the blacks.

Thats all silver.

At the behest of his wife, who's- “we need to go do something about this.” So eventually they came out.

Jim and Belle, his wife started to locate their claims out here, right on the side of the mountain.

While they were out here locating their claims, Jim had his wife, Belle locate her own.

And she located and named what she called the Mizpah.

And the Mizpah turned out to be the richest and most productive vein in the entire area.

{DAVID} And that's why we see Mizpah all over Tonopah.

{JEFF} That's right.

This bridge goes right over the original Mizpah mine.

[ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC PLAYING] It will give you a really good idea how the leasers the first guys in just started breaking rock right on the surface of these veins and chasing them in.

So this vein is actually mined out at over 1500 feet.

The leasers, the first guys in {DAVID} So it went that way?

{JEFF} Oh, this goes all the way down and underneath the center of town {DAVID} Oh I see, it settled down there {JEFF} Yeah, and all the way out through the backside of the mountain here you can see that they're standing on their sacks, and these are all- And they look like, sand bags, but they're not.

They're they're sacks of high grade ore, yeah {DAVID} The basic difference between gold and silver is not just that gold is more valuable, but gold appears freely as gold in ore, in placer mines, in dust And it's quite identifiable as gold because gold is gold, beautiful metal, silver is almost always found in combination, in ores chemically bound to other elements.

So you don't see nuggets of silver Gold: nuggets.

Silver: ore {JEFF} Tonopah, as far as the silver production goes over 60 years, 175 million ounces of silver, youre looking at eight billion dollars in today's dollars 8 billion in gold, too.

Jim Butler's discovery here in May of 1900 followed up two years later by the Goldfield discovery.

It kind of brought jobs back to central Nevada and helped boost the economy and get it started again.

Right over here, we have this silver top mine.

This was another great producer.

Most old mine sites, everything as far as machinery goes is usually gone.

{DAVID} Yeah, rusted out or removed {JEFF} Yeah, absolutely.

We're fortunate that this had such a long life.

You know, if you think about the Tonopah Mining Company taking over in 1902 and operating on this property till 1948, there was a short pause.

Howard Hughes bought the property in the mid 60s.

And then they were going up and down again till almost 81.

So, the fact that this had a long life is probably a reason why this is all still here.

{DAVID} I always think of the early mines as being primitive, but this is sophisticated stuff from 125 years ago, and at that time mining was highly mechanized.

We don't recognize today the ingenuity of the, uh of the companies and the workers to use this huge equipment that moved thousands and thousands of tons of ore and made, uh, it made the operations possible.

[MUSIC FADES] Tonopah is at 6000 feet and it can get pretty cold.

You can get below zero.

And from there, it's an hour and a half drive or so to Death Valley, where the temperature can get up to 130 or so, its- quite a contrast.

Death Valley, the lowest point is 280 feet below sea level.

[ACOUSTIC GUITAR TRACK BEGINS] The grandest basin of all, in the Great Basin is the biggest and deepest Death Valley.

Scientists who have studied Death Valley realize that here is a point where the western United States is being torn apart, rifted, and the California portion is moving away from the Nevada portion and the bottom is dropping out.

It's all part of the huge tectonic process that is most visible here.

Death Valley itself is only a little more than three million years old.

It has rocks one point seven billion years old.

But the rifting, the tearing apart that produce the valley only started a little more than three million years or so ago.

And it continues today, between ten and twenty thousand years ago when the glaciers were still melting, this valley filled up with water and formed what is known as Lake Manley, a hundred miles long, 600 feet deep.

In the last several thousand years it has dried out.

And the bottom, what we see now, is the former bottom of Lake Manley Death Valley is the hottest place in the United States, and nearly the driest.

The record high temperature in the world was set here about 100 years ago, 134°F.

Why is Death Valley so very, very dry?

There are several very high mountain ranges.

Those high ranges intercept all the motion and wring water out of it.

By the time the weather systems arrive in Death Valley, all the moisture has been sucked out of it, and there's nothing left to feed the low desert.

[CALM MUSIC CONITNUES] As the earth is torn apart, by the extension by the stretching from the west, the middle part of that tearing finally drops down as if you pulled two pieces of pizza apart from a third, and the middle one dropped down.

When that dropping occurs, everything collapses and the earth becomes stretched, folded, pushed, shoved, and faults appear everywhere.

[MUSIC ENDS] The Death Valley is an extreme example of the Great Basin.

Water flows into it, but never flows out.

But in Arizona, the valleys all drain into the Colorado River.

And that's the big difference between the Arizona Basin and Range and the Great Basin.

[BIRD TWEETING] This is the Colorado River downstream from Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.

The dam has removed a lot of the energy from many of the water that was upstream.

So it's fairly placid in here, but still there was enough energy over the last five to ten million years to carve out this canyon.

From here downstream, the river heads into the Gulf of California, but on either side, Basin and Range continues a range, a valley, a range, a valley.

It's all part of the huge Basin and Range province that constitutes the intermountain portion of the American Southwest.

[BANJO MUSIC PLAYING] Oatman has the distinction of being the only town in the United States where burros get the right of way, and they take great delight in slowing down traffic, frustrating everybody.

And it's got a lot of color to it.

Getting to it is half the fun because it's old Highway 66 The town of Oatman was actually founded at the beginning of the 20th century.

But before that there were a lot of prospectors around and they all had their burros.

And these guys are descendants of those burros.

Theyve become feral, theyve become wild.

But in Oatman, they're so used to people and getting fed that they hang around.

And this could be well called a, hotel for burros.

When the builders of Route 66 decided on a route through Arizona, they had to go through the Black Mountains in order to make it straight.

But it wasn't straight.

It was curvy.

It was the most dangerous part of the entire route from Chicago to L.A.

you get to see the best volcanic landscape in all of America by driving through.

But it's a ghost town, and the old buildings have proved most attractive, but it's now a major tourist attraction.

When we look at the landscape around Oatman, we find it hard to believe that prospectors actually discovered gold wandering through these hills.

And the mine eventually, although it was only open for 30 or 40 years, produced over what would now be more than a billion worth of gold and silver.

[WESTERN STYLE MUSIC CONTINUES] So it's show time for the burros If you want you can buy pellets here and feed the burros Although they're really, burros are a devious bunch.

[WESTERN STYLE MUSIC] Joshua trees are plants of the Mojave Desert, while Saguaros are plants of the Sonoran Desert.

There's one place in western Arizona where the two meet and they greet, and they go their separate ways on a highway called the Joshua Tree Parkway.

[CALM WESTERN MUSIC] [CRICKETS CHIRPING] Saguaro are found only where they can be protected from deep freezes.

Joshua trees can endure frost.

Sagebrush requires it, but Saguaros in the warm Sonoran Desert, the richest desert in the world.

Saguaro cacti are the most studied plant in all the southwestern United States.

The Saguaro is a special study because over millions of years it has adapted very unusually to the climatic conditions of extreme heat and even occasional cold.

A Saguaro cactus is found only in Arizona and northwestern Mexico.

From Oregon through Nevada and into Arizona, from Sagebrush, to Joshua trees to Saguaro cacti, this is all part of the Basin and Range Province in the interior West.

[MUSIC ENDS] [UPLIFTING MUSIC] {ANNOUNCER} Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

[MUSIC] The Guilford Fund.

Arch and Laura Brown.

And Hugh and Joyce Bell.