UNR Magazine The High Sierra Rambler

Fresh AIR in Great Basin: Where Creativity and Conservation Meet

Story by Taylor Moore, featured in the University of Nevada, Reno's student paper, The High Sierra Rambler, pages 44-47

If a tree stands in a forest and nobody’s around, does it sing? It does if composer Marko Bajzer has anything to do with it. Bajzer was the 2023 artist-in-residence (AIR) at Great Basin National Park, where he attached electrodes to Bristlecone Pine trees to track electrical changes throughout the day as the trees photosynthesized. He used this data as part of an ongoing project to compose a symphonic suite with moments representing different national parks, all made possible through the immersion offered by AIR programs.

Great Basin is nearing two decades of its AIR program, which allows artists of all varieties the chance to apply to live for several weeks in the park and produce art inspired by  the landscape. These artists are provided camping equipment or living quarters during their residency, giving them the freedom to move through the park following their creativity. For Bajzer, the environment of the park played a strong role in his composing.

“Music and nature have been very intertwined to me,” Bajzer said. “A lot of my most meaningful, cathartic and emotional experiences of my life were listening to pieces of music in their geographic terrains.”

Inspired by his time at Great Basin, Bajzer wrote the movement “Sacrifice of Prometheus,” which the Reno Philharmonic premiered in March. This programmatic piece portrays the calls of the ghost of Prometheus; a Bristlecone Pine tree that, upon its felling in 1962, was thought to be the oldest known living thing at almost 5,000-years-old. The death of Prometheus showed the world that these trees were older than anyone knew, but Bajzer points out that Prometheus can never be brought back to life. His observations about nature’s sacrifice for humanity’s gain pushed Bajzer to explore one of the deepest questions from his residency: Do humans have to destroy nature in order to preserve it?

“At the climax of this piece, the spirit of Prometheus asks, ‘What have you done to me?’” Bajzer said. “How many more times are we going to be asked this question? The decisions that we make echo for centuries to come, so it is really critical that we make the right decisions.” Here, Bajzer echoes another goal of AIR programs – conservation. Artists have played an integral role in the conservation of America’s natural beauty since Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872 and the National Park Service (NPS) was established in 1916. It was painters like Thomas Moran and John William Casilear whose work was presented to Congress, inspiring efforts to create and conserve public land. It was writers like John Muir and Ralph Waldo Emerson who presented the broader world with the beauty of the American landscape. Without the arduous work of artists, who knows how many of America’s 63 national parks would exist today.

“There are artists' fingerprints all over the stories of many national parks,” Bajzer said.“The more you can reframe things in different ways — through literature, through visual arts, through music — the more you can connect with the concept of conservation and the idea of the parks.”

Meghan Catherine Dragon was the winter 2025 artist-in-residence and she is working to convey the meaning of national parks not through song, but through her paintings, centered on line work and patterns. She lived with park rangers in Baker, Nevada, a mere five miles from the park, and spent much of her time walking along frozen paths and observing the winter environment.

“One thing I noticed quite a bit when I was hiking around were the animal tracks in the snow,” Dragon said. “So I created this map of the park filled with all the winter plants I observed and the tracks on all the trails I hiked.” Along with her map, Dragon spent time depicting the Northern Saw-whet Owl, an inhabitant of the Great Basin region, and Townsend’s big-eared bat, which lives in the Lehman Caves in the park. Her inspiration came from the minute details in the park, the textures and patterns contained in the landscape, which she attempts to portray through her paintings.

“I want my work to inspire people to get outside and to look a little closer at some of the things they normally just walk by,” she said. “Art can help open people's eyes to new things. It can inspire people's own creativity. And it can highlight the beauty of the natural world and show why we want to keep it, preserve it and protect it.”

A primary goal of the AIR program is not only to benefit the artists, but also the public. Artists are asked to donate a piece of work they produced during their time at the park, and they also provide public programs related to their art. During her residency, Dragon hosted three of these events. The Great Basin National Park Foundation (GBNPF), a nonprofit organization that works with the NPS, is deeply involved in the AIR program and assists both the artists and the park during the residency.

“I love Wallace Stegner’s quote where he said our national parks are ‘America’s greatest idea,’” Aviva O’Neil, GBNPF executive director said. “The idea that these places belong to all of us is so unique in the world and is something that we should be proud of and that we should maintain.”

O’Neil assuages some of the fear over the future of the AIR program at Great Basin. While national parks, including Great Basin NP, are currently threatened with large reductions to staff under President Donald Trump’s administration, the role of the GBNPF in the program does provide some stability. In 2020, they helped modernize the program and took over the brunt of the organizational work to remove some strain from the already understaffed park, but challenges presented by a force reduction of up to 30 percent are still dire.

“We hope our residency program is going to be resilient because we lift so much of the load off the NPS,” O’Neil said. “It is known that NPS staffing levels have been stagnant for a couple decades while visitation has increased, so we are worried further cuts will mean parks won’t have the staffing to complete their mission. Parks in that situation will have to worry about basic operations, so extraneous programs like AIRs are very much at risk in many national parks.”

Dragon was in the midst of her residency when many national park employees got the news of their layoffs. Suddenly a community which had embraced her for weeks was thrown into turmoil.

“When I first arrived at Great Basin I was really expected to connect to nature, and I absolutely did, but I was really surprised by how much of an impact the people had,” Dragon said. “It was such a difficult time and yet the park rangers were so supportive to me and helpful. It was really heartbreaking to see people who do so much to protect these places lose their jobs. This is their passion, this is their dream, they have so much knowledge to share and there's so much power in education.”

Bajzer, who has participated in four AIR programs with plans for more in the future, understands the purpose of national parks better than most. From music made of bubbling hot springs in California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park to melodies taken from the water of Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park, he is dedicated to telling the stories of these parks to any who will listen.

“The idea that nature is something to be conserved and enjoyed versus an adversary to be conquered started in America,” he said. “The idea that this land should be accessible, that our nation's treasures should be accessible to all of the public and not just the upper class is an American ideal. We owe it to ourselves and our future to preserve it.”