An Isolated Mountain-Range on Athas:

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For the many unnamed mountain-ranges, this is what they might be like:

It’s a video of two hiking on the Great Basin Ranges around Nevada and Utah.

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This definitely would resemble Athas, as this is the area used by the creators to base their original map. To the southeast of this area (Ipabah Peak/Red Mountain) you can see the lake that becomes Makla and Castle Dale (Urik) and just south of that you can see the Dragons Bowl depression.

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Yeah … I’ve always thought a lot of Athas’ deserts and mountains are strongly inspired by the US Southwest. That might just be my bias since I’ve never been to the Sahara or Australian Outback, but I think there are some real connections, like the abundance of cactus (which is pretty much a Western Hemisphere thing) and the Forest Ridge/White Mountains as “sky islands” of forest above the desert below.

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I’ve been to the Patagonia; it looks like the Nevada-Desert, but next to a giant ocean.

I have to remember, in Dark Sun, there’s a bright, red-star illuminating the desert which, makes it different than any desert here on Earth.

Also, I like this mountain range because I am toying with the idea of mountain-oasis; high-land mountains with forests and vegetation, in a desert; they’re like islands in the desert for a map.

I’ve got American-Conquest and it comes with a really detailed map-editor; I could make this mountain-range, but, I kinda suck and making mountains in that editor; I have to get better compared to what the developers could make.

And just so you know, Arizona was once connected to Australian about 750 million years ago and a piece broke off, so, there’s a little bit of the Outback in Arizona.

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My mental image of the Forest Ridge is very much that of the forested mountains of the US southwest, or of some parts of Mexico.

However, the description in Wanderer’s Journal is quite different than the one in Verdant Passage. Wanderer’s Journal says “a jungle of tall fir and birch trees”, which sounds very much like real mountain forests, but Verdant Passage has weird jointed-trunked conifers and spherical-trunked palm trees.

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Here’s my backyard.

I also occasionally work in eastern Utah and Northern NM. Lets just say I can describe Athas fairly wel…

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