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...