The desert country along the Columbia River is one of the West s least-known desert places one that most people don t even drive through unless they are unusually curious travelers. The Hanford Reach is the last free stretch of the river between the McNary and Priest Rapids Dams, a place boasting a varied landscape of floodplains, wetlands, deserts, orchards and nuclear reactors. This is not a place that people think to visit. Known primarily for hosting the country s most toxic nuclear outpost, it is public land that barely exists in public consciousness. But because the Reach has...

The northwestern edge of North America is a final edge to settle on a finite planet. Where does mankind go from here? Where else have we not settled, altered, and consumed ? Author Susan Zwinger suspects that we have saved this wild edge for last because its geography is punched, exploded, ground, and drenched. Its forest of enormous trees once created a boundary difficult to penetrate, let alone farm. Yet, today this wildness is under threat, as civilization bores its way into even this remote edge.