The spring rains of 2004 had been good to the Red Desert. Alkali Draw was covered by a lush blanket of green grass and forbs, and the purples, blues and pink hues of phlox, lupine and evening primrose waved in the breeze as northern harriers soared over the sage, greasewood and rabbit-brush.

From our camp perched at Chicken Springs, where the Continental Divide snakes around Bush Rim over the distant Oregon Buttes, the setting sun caught the Pinnacles at such an angle that their yellow peaks gave the impression of ancient, worn pyramids.

As if on cue, a full russet moon began to rise over the Honeycomb badlands, and the crew of Arizona Public TV (The Desert Speaks program) whom we had guided for the last four days sprang into action. There was Tom, the director, always at a hundred places at once; Dan, the fast on the draw videographer; Fran, the sage, silent producer; Dave, the loquacious and quirky narrator; and Yar, the knowledgeable and eccentric naturalist. They were a perfect team.

As Dan clicked the “off” button on the camera, the team let out a series of good-natured exclamations. Indeed, it had been a good few days with tragedies avoided, glitches few (except a couple of flat tires), and some incredible adventures. Everyone was exhausted, yet ebullient. From the mad capers of camping with Charlie Wilson and his band of packgoats to panning for gold and stalking moose with Tom Bell near the Sweetwater River, to capturing the antics of antelope in the Great Divide Basin, it had been one heck of an adventure.

John Mionczynski, who was helping me guide the film crew, puffed on his pipe as he finished laying out his bivvy sack in the middle of the meadow.

“This area wasn’t nearly as popular as it is these days,” he intoned. “A bunch of us used to come down from Atlantic City and have a huge party every now and then, but not much else.”

We looked out over the Big Empty admiring the rising moon. “But it’s like no other place. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else,” he added.

“It’s kind of ironic. To try to protect a place, you have to let people know that it’s here in the first place,” I murmured quietly.

John smiled. “Yeah, you might be right. I don’t want to see more roads and gas rigs in this part of the desert either. But I hope that we don’t love it do death in the process.”

We sat for a while in silence.

The next morning after grabbing some coffee, we ran to set up a shot of John and Dave in John’s 50-year-old BMW motorcycle dangerously banking around a corner near the old South Pass-Superior Stage-Coach route.

The Desert Speaks

The Desert Speaks is an Emmy-award-winning television series produced by Arizona Public Television that explores desert regions around the world. The series included two episodes on the Red Desert: Goat Packing in the Red Desert and Wyoming's Red Desert. The goat packing show aired on Wyoming Public television this past spring, however the other episode, which briefly addressed development threats from oil and gas, was deemed too controversial and was not shown in Wyoming. To find out more or to order copies, go to the website.

John, decked out in a well-used aviator’s jacket and biker’s cap, bore the visage of a man in his element. Dave, tucked snuggly in the motorcycle’s sidecar wearing ski goggles and a WWI fighter pilot’s cap that John had loaned him, looked nothing short of a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The sight of Dave trying to maintain professional composure as he asked John questions was almost too much to bear. Perfect. John Cleese meets the Red Desert.

That day we took a two track along Bush Rim through tall grasses scraping the trucks’ underbellies; a ferruginous hawk soared above and a desert elk appeared briefly before sprinting into some stands of big sage. By dusk, we had visited the Tri-Territory Marker, Steamboat Mountain, the Boar’s Tusk, the White Mountain Petroglyphs and finally the Killpecker Sand Dunes.

In the evening, we all circled around the fire in the sea of the Sands and laughed. Yar and Dave gave us a brief version of the swinging east European jig, John played some Celtic and ragtime tunes on his squeeze-box, and Marian Doane, a representative of the Friends of the Red Desert Coalition who had acted as a third scout, briefly displayed a spadefoot toad she had extracted from her tent flap, drawn there by the late night dews.

At one point, Yar turned to us and said, “I’ve been to a lot of places in the world, a lot of deserts, but this one is really something. Really something.” From a team that had explored deserts from Arizona to Bolivia and beyond, his words were not flippantly spoken.

We all drank a final toast to the Red Desert and then retired into the dunes to a silent sleep in a landscape one could still, at least for now, call paradise.