Register to join us for this special virtual program on Sep 15, 2026 6:00 PM Pacific Time
Stephen Trimble’s 1989 book, The Sagebrush Ocean, became the essential introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin Desert and has been in print all these years. Now Trimble has updated the text and taken many new photographs for a 35th anniversary edition. The book won the Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation for Trimble, and his authoritative and lyrical voice and evocative photographs continue to illuminate this landscape of sun-struck playas, salt flats, rugged canyons, and wind-swept tundra.
Today, the once-vast “sagebrush ocean” is an endangered sea, as environmental changes and human development have diminished it by half. This heartbreaking decline drives Trimble’s updated text, but he blends loss with reverence for what remains—and urgent insight into what’s at stake. Striking color photographs, many newly added, bring the quiet grandeur of the desert to life. Trimble is also co-editing a literary field guide (art/ecology/poetry) for the Great Basin, emphasizing Indigenous literature and art.
In this presentation, he’ll share his photographs of this vast bioregion and place Great Basin National Park in context. Please join us for this special program in honor of Great Basin National Park's 40th anniversary.
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Meet our Presenter:
Stephen Trimble was born in Denver, his family’s base for roaming the West with his geologist father. A liberal arts education at Colorado College led to work as a national park ranger and museum press director. An MS in ecology and evolutionary biology informs his natural history writing. As writer, editor, and photographer, Trimble has published twenty-five award-winning books during nearly fifty years of paying attention to the landscapes and peoples of the Desert West.
The Max C. Fleischmann Series in Great Basin Natural History was Trimble’s first big project when he began free-lancing in the early 1980s. He was primary photographer for the series and wrote and photographed the overview volume, the original edition of The Sagebrush Ocean. Published in 1989, the book won the Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation from the Sierra Club and the Earle A. Chiles Award from the High Desert Museum. Trimble is thrilled to have the chance to revise the text and venture into the Great Basin once again to photograph for this thirty-fifth anniversary edition.
Trimble speaks and writes frequently as a conservation advocate and has taught writing at the University of Utah, where he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at the Tanner Humanities Center during the centennial of Stegner’s birth. In 2019, Trimble was honored as one of Utah’s fifteen most influential artists. He makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah. For more about his work, see www.stephentrimble.net.