Book excerpt: Singing Grass, Burning Sage is a celebration in photos and text of eastern Washington's arid lands--a region that encompasses the heart of the Columbia River Basin, and supports a shrub-steppe environment dominated by sagebrush and bunchgrass. Formed by massive basalt flows that pulsed across the Basin, sculpted by ceaseless winds, and scoured by the cataclysmic Lake Missoula floods at the climax of our most recent Ice Age, this landscape offers some of the most spectacular geologic vistas in the world. The vast spaces of this wide domain are full of wonder and surprise, as that raw rock provides the setting for a dramatic interplay of human and natural history.