Word: sagebrush
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Range after rocky range, the mountains of northern Nevada soar above the arid flats. From the air their sagebrush cloaks seem as soft as crumpled velvet. Suddenly a series of gigantic holes looms below, so huge that if they were the size of anthills, the ore trucks and bulldozers scurrying over them would be the smallest of ants. "Some people see these holes and think they're hideous," muses John Livermore, a tall, lanky exploration geologist from Reno. "Others think how wonderful it is that man can do something...
...pair of male ground squirrels are enacting an annual ritual. Chirping madly, the rivals dash at each other, tails raised, seeking to establish hegemony over the turf that will become a summer home for mate and offspring. The battle is fierce but short; the loser scuttles off into the sagebrush. The victor preens on hind legs, surveying a domain where shoots of bluebunch wheatgrass, Idaho fescue and larkspur have begun to sprout. It is springtime in the Rockies, and Yellowstone National Park is emerging from hibernation -- and recovering from the most troubled time in its 117-year history...
...reason for the confusing signals from the control tower became clear once our plane touched down on the rain-drenched runway, littered with wind- blown bits of sagebrush. The narrow ribbon of tarmac at Zvartnots airfield looked like a crowded parking lot: an American military C-141, its tail marked with a large Stars and Stripes, an Algerian transport plane, a commercial Austrian airliner -- in all, about 15 foreign planes, not counting a regular fleet of Soviet Ilyushin 76s and Tupelev 154s. Hundreds of dark-clad figures milled about. The usual tight military control that exists at every Soviet airport...
...extent that anyone can define it, Santa Fe style is largely a matter of shape and shading -- the colors of sagebrush and ashes, watery blues and rose and clay. The sand-castle city of its birth is a town without right angles, where whitewashed walls and doorways and fireplaces bend and curve, hand shaped from clay. Sometimes, as translated by non-Hispanic designers like Architect David Kellen, the style becomes an "abstraction of a Mexican type of design...
Before the presidential campaign goes ballistic, a modest piece of advice for George Bush and Michael Dukakis: Fire your pollsters, banish your gurus and spend a week in Crook County, the crystal ball of presidential politics. Since this isolated county was created in 1882 in sagebrush-strewn central Oregon, its inhabitants have successfully picked 26 consecutive winners, from Grover Cleveland to Ronald Reagan...