Fifty Miles from Home: Riding the Long Circle on a Nevada Family Ranch - Tapa dura

For more than a decade, photographer Linda Dufurrena has recorded with powerful eloquence the rugged, heartbreakingly beautiful landscape of northern Nevada and the patterns of life on the Dufurrena family ranch in the Quinn River Valley. Her work has appeared in magazines and has been widely exhibited, but now, for the first time, more than 100 of her finest photographs are collected in book form. Accompanied by a brilliant essay by her daughter-in-law, teacher and writer Carolyn Dufurrena, that discusses the rhythms of the land and of life on the ranch, the photographs in Fifty Miles from Home vividly depict the heart of the West and its fabled ranch culture. Within the fifty-mile circle of territory over which the Dufurrena family ranch operates - territory ranging from the edges of the barren Black Rock Desert to high, aspen-filled mountain basins - Linda and Carolyn Dufurrena follow the annual cycle of ranch work and the seasonal changes of the surrounding landscape. Life in this remote Nevada backcountry is shaped by the challenges of the austere Great Basin desert around the ranch and by the time-honored skills of generations of ranch families. We witness in Linda Dufurrena's magnificent color photographs the seasons of lambing and cattle drives; the work of cowboys and sheepherders; the animals around the ranch, from orphan lambs to horses; and the close-knit ranch community of the multigenerational Dufurrena family and its hired workers. And around the ranch, in every direction, are vistas of breathtaking beauty as the natural landscape evolves through the seasons, as flowers bloom and storms pass overhead.

Linda Dufurrena is a widely exhibited and published Nevada photographer who specializes in depictions of rural Nevada scenery and of traditional ranch life. Carolyn Dufurrena is a writer and teacher who came to Nevada as a geologist. Her articles on ranch life and regional topics have appeared in Range Magazine, and her poetry and essays have been anthologized.