Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. I'm going to call this piece a photo essay of Nevada.

Kind of like the magazine Arizona Highways, except it's Nevada and there are no photos only

audios. Interviews with people I met driving around out there over a period of years, decades, the basin and range.

It's the least populated region in the lower 48,

a desert with 150 mountain ranges separating a hundred basins.

Not valleys with a river running through, but basins where the water that comes down from

the mountains either sinks into the ground or evaporates into the air.

It's a harsh environment, good in some areas for wide-ranging cattle and sheep, but not much else. There used to be valuable minerals like gold and silver in the mountains, but most of those mines closed a long time ago.

This land is so desolate and remote that we used to use it for testing

nuclear bombs. In the 1950s and 60s we blew up a hundred nuclear bombs out

there in the open air, just 100 miles north of Las Vegas

at the Nevada test site.

Now the test site has an Air Force base where people pilot drones that drop bombs on the other side of the world.

To me, Nevada, the Basin and Range is a topography of violence and loneliness.

My name is Ed Grusvich and we're at the Squaw Valley Ranch.

Yolkonda.

Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. These are dehorners.

These are emasculators for cutting their nuts off.

This is where you change their mind from ass to grass.

Oh, you bet. Oh.

Did you bet.

Oh!

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