America’s Intermountain West is a vast, mysterious place. It’s hard to say what really goes on among these basins and ranges, improbably sculpted rocks, wind-blasted deserts, and winding dirt roads. The human habitations usually seem off in ways than range from endearing to spooky. The animals are sparse and secretive. Any chance to experience a slice of the inner West’s real personality is a can’t-miss gift, despite the heat, cold, and skin-cracking dry that it will invariably require.
My brother Alex and I got just such a chance from an unlikely source: a bird called the Greater Sage Grouse. These are essentially much more badass chickens who inhabit the high sagebrush steppe that dominates the West’s dry basins. For most of the year they are impossible to find, silently foraging among hip-high bushes in massive open lands. Once a year, though, they throw all caution to the wind and gather for month-long ragers of strutting, dancing, and mating.
These hormone-fueled bacchanals are called leks. At pre-arranged but seemingly random spots on the remote high steppe, male grouse puff themselves up to epic proportions to impress females, who calmly sit and watch. Eventually each female makes her pick and the two go off to mate somewhere in the sage. The female then goes off to lay the eggs and raise the chicks, while the male unceremoniously heads back to the lek and starts showing off for the next female.
For birders, leks are must-see entertainment and the year’s only chance to see the grouse. Because they only happen down far-out tracks in the deep West, they also force birders to meet the region’s distinctive landscapes and people. Not wanting to miss such a rich buffet, we hit the road to the Eastern Sierras, site of the few leks in California.
The Bay to the Barrens
The six-hour drive from the Bay Area to Mono Lake passes through four distinct worlds. Picturesque fog-drenched hills and dense development turn to the fruit groves and small towns of the impossibly flat Central Valley. Then the road climbs into the Sierras, building gradually from gentle hills to granite alpine tracts. The final stage is the most startling: the land simply drops off a cliff, revealing an endless, inhospitable vista of arid valleys and rugged ranges. Welcome to California’s slice of the Intermountain West.
The highway brought us down into the sagebrush steppe. We reached Bridgeport, the biggest town in the area. Its biggest building is a “Food Market” with half the letters peeled off the sign, but its stunning Sierra views are all the infrastructure it needs. The gas price had jumped alarmingly, a clear sign of a remote land. We continued south towards Mono Lake, the wild heart of the region.
A few valleys and passes later, the road curved and revealed Mono Lake spread out below in all its otherworldly beauty. The lake looks like it belongs in Tibet or Bolivia, not the Golden State. Steep mountain walls rise to its west, while immense treeless land undulates to the east. No rivers flow out of the lake. Its salt water supports no fish, but thriving brine shrimp and flies support a thriving ecosystem that attracts huge flocks of migrating seabirds in the right season. A jet-black island formed by a volcano crater and bizarre salt pillars called Tufa provide a distinctive look. A highway guardrail at the first lake viewpoint has stickers displaying every possible Western road trip opinion, from “No Hanging Belays” to “Go Back to the Playa, Yuppie Scum” to “I’d rather be here now.”
In short, Mono Lake is the perfect spiritual heart of this dry, beautiful hinterland.
Alex had scouted out a perfect campsite on a previous trip. It was a patch of open sand in the sagebrush on a tabeland above the lake, offering a panoramic mountain view. Best of all, it followed in the great Inner West tradition of being completely free and unregulated. We crushed a 50-cent-a-can Keystone Lights and settled in for a cold night on the windy plain.
A ticket to the discotheque
We woke up at the familiar birding time of 4:30am and drove out in pitch dark. Our goal was a highly regarded lek a few hours away, and we had to be there around dawn when the grouse party hardest. After many miles on a dirt road far from anywhere, we skidded to a halt in the middle of the sagebrush. There was nothing to distinguish the spot from the rest of the steppe stretching miles off in every direction, but we trusted Alex’s research and set off into the sage.
The sun was still below the horizon when we heard the first soft popping sounds from over a ridge. Pay dirt! The top of the ridge revealed tiny shapes a quarter-mile away in the dim pre-dawn. We quickly got binocs on the birds and there was no possible confusion. From this distance, we could see what looked like an open sandy areas full of spiky brown-and-white beach balls zooming around aggressively. Only one thing in the natural world looks like this: a grouse lek.
The birds came into focus bit by bit as we crawled forward on our hands and knees. At first only the zooming shapes were visible, but then we saw how the males stopped and threw their upper body back and forth in a ridiculous strut while making the popping sounds. Their spiky, stiffly raised tales and impressively puffed chests made them look more like some alien assault machines than birds. Farther forward, we spotted the first few female, smaller and colorful, calmly watching proceedings.
Focusing on one male was inevitably hilarious. He would strut around, shoving away other males and chasing after females, until a female stopped to watch his show. He would eagerly strut his chest and display the huge yellow air sacks that produce the pops. Every single time, the female would respond by turning and walking away. Completely undeterred, the male would just find another female and repeat the process.
We watched for over two hours as dawn rose over the mountains and thawed out our fingers; during that time, not a single male ever tired out.
Perhaps the most fascinating moment came when all the grouse suddenly stopped dancing and crouched down in the short grass. In a few seconds, they were almost invisible. There was no obvious reason and we worried that we had spooked them by coming too close. At least a full minute later, though, a muscular bald eagle soared a thousand feet above the steppe, and we had our answer. It was incredible that the grouse managed not only to see the eagle long before we could, but somehow communicate the danger to each other within seconds. Clearly, the grouse know how to protect their weird and wonderful customs from natural predators.
Humans, on the other hand, pose a serious threat to leks like this one. This is true not only for the Greater Sage Grouse but for the four other species of grouse-type birds in America’s open lands as well. The same grouse come to the same lek every year, passing the exact location down through generations. The grouse need these spaces to bring forth the next generation, and destruction of the habitat can cause stop whole groups of grouse from breeding. It would be a tragedy if we wiped out this wonderfully unique bit of grassland heritage from our country.
On a positive note, this particular lek was clearly thriving, with at least 30 males and 9 females at the party. Gotta love that ratio.
Eastern Sierra Explorations
By the time the dawn turned from purple to pink to gold on the mountains, we had had our fill of grouse voyeurism. The hike back to the car produced the other two thirds of the sagebrush trifecta, with Sagebrush Sparrows flitting down low and a Sage Thrasher singing from an outcropping. Leaving on the dirt road, we were surprised to find a river steaming with geothermal heat in the cool air; a magical landmark that seemed to invite us back.
We headed to the Mammoth Lakes area for a quick hike and slammed into culture shock. Mammoth, flush with money from skiers coming in from the coast, seems a world away from the dusty hamlets of the Eastern Sierra. There were fancy gear shops, a Starbucks built like a log cabin, and plenty of brightly garbed Los Angeles elites ready for a day on the slopes.
You’re never far from rough edges in the Eastern Sierra, though. Our hike up into the Inyo Craters featured an unclear trail, surprising effects of altitude, and a difficult scramble up volcanic silt to the crater summit. The long views and nesting black-backed woodpecker were absolutely worth it.
The rest of the day consisted of a true Western bushwhack. The road from Mono Lake up to Yosemite via Tioga Pass was still closed by snow, so we simply scrambled up a perilously steep hillside to a bench at 10,000 feet in front of Mount Dana. Most of the 2,500-foot vertical was in slippery snow and all of it was off-trail. The view east from the top went on forever across Nevada’s Martian basins. The descent was the highlight as we were able to ski most of the way down on our boots. Evening brought us back to our patch of paradise above Mono Lake, and we passed out deeply satisfied with our successful grouse hunt.
The Western winds had dried us out after only two nights, but we decided we had one more adventure in us and drove up towards the Desolation Wilderness near the famous tourist haunt of Lake Tahoe. The route took us out of Lee Vining, the only village on Mono Lake’s shore. We paid respect to the tough locals who had faced down the City of Los Angeles itself, winning a lawsuit to stop LA from sucking the lake dry across the hundreds of miles of pipeline needed to feed the urban beast. More isolated homestead whipped by the windows, then the Nevada border with its immediate casino signs and cheap gas. Another steep pass delivered us to South Lake Tahoe.
South Lake Tahoe could be a cultural study of its own. It is a combined ski and casino town within easy driving distance of the incredibly diverse Bay Area. Flashy-dressing college kids swerved into traffic on rented bicycles. A full multi-generational Punjabi family took in the lake. A textbook sketchy-looking gambling guy stared out from under a casino’s awning.
We powered through, en route to the Desolation. This awesome name is due to the glaciers that scoured the land ten thousand years ago, leaving it as mostly open granite even to the present day. The trail wound past countless pristine lakes, all covered by ice, and culminated in a summit whose icy winds threatened to blow us down a thousand-foot slope. The landscape, full of hanging valleys, rounded outcroppings, and scooped-out lakes, had an entrancing complexity. We made it back to the car by dark, crushed one more Keystone each, and rolled down the mountains back to the Bay.
Without the grouse and their sagebrush discotheque, I would have never visited this wonderful slice of the world. I am grateful to the grouse, and deeply fearful that we will quickly boot them off the land if we ever find a business use for these scrubby steppes. They deserve to be there, and I am certain that no human use of the land could come close to the magic they perform every spring.***
Notes: I do not want to make the lek’s exact location public, but it is not a guarded secret. Contact me and I will share the GPS if your heart is pure. Also, my brother Alex Henry is a genuinely high-level birder. Check out some press coverage of him at this link and feel free to hit him up with specific bird questions.