Wildfire Sweeps Past Sacred Sites — The Story in Pictures

This story first appeared in September 2017 in Indian Country Media Network. Northern Nevada high desert after the wildfire. T he pickup truck rocked over boulders and rolled through dips and rises in the rough dirt track, as we approached 3,200+ acres of ancient sacred sites, recently deeded to the Western Shoshone by the gold-mining company Klondex Mines. The northern Nevada landscape that photographer Joseph Zummo and I traversed, with Battle Mountain Band official Joseph Holley at the wheel, was a grim brown-black. A massive wildfire that swept through the high desert the previous month had left little more than charred tree trunks and tufts of grass to interrupt a view that ended in dark, distant mountains. Joseph Holley; surviving native plants seen at rear. The sacred sites we were seeking—prayer circles, shrines and more—are at the heart of an even larger cultural landscape encompassing tens of thousands of acres. Archaeologists have dated artifacts indicating t