The following poem was inspired during our trip into the Table Mountain Wilderness. I was joined on this last leg of the Silver State Expedition by Terri Goldberg of Baltimore, Maryland, and Brad Johnston of Cleveland, Ohio.

Table Mountain Dance

We walked across a verdant sagebrush plain cut by canyons and punctuated by a palette of lupine and penstemon, paintbrush, and buckwheat.

We watched as dust devils danced on the playa far below, sending plumes of alkali skyward against a cloudless, deep blue Nevada sky.

We rested in the shade of aspens whose bark told the story of shepherds long gone, and a century long past.

We dined on a bluff overlooking the Toiyabe Range, and for dessert, we watched the horizon . . .

. . turn to yellow

. . . turn to orange

. . . .turn to crimson

. . . . .turn to purple

. . . . . .turn to dusk

. . . . . . .turn to a night of a billion stars.

We listened to the distant howls of a coyote we could not see, and saw a night sky streaked with the trail of shooting stars we could not hear.

We wandered Table Mountain in search of wilderness, and we found it in the bugle of an elk, the prancing of a muledeer, the smell of sage, the trembling of an aspen leaf, the cascading of a spring, the flight of an owl, and the feel of a Great Basin wind blowing through our souls.

Our dance on Table Mountain, while sweet, was short, and we left the mountain as we arrived, via the steep eastern escarpment above the Little Fish Lake Valley. As we crested the ridge on the final day, we stopped one last time to view the plateau we had called home, as if by staring at the scene before us, we would be able to somehow bottle the view, to be opened at some later date, when the crush of civilization became too much for us, and we needed a momentary reprieve.

The mountain was left in the custody of the elk, and coyote, the muledeer, and the grouse, the sage and the wind, where their dance could continue on a grand stage, in a place where the music never ends.

Keith Tondrick, Mt. Jackson, VA