For much of May, Sarah Cowles, a landscape architect from San Francisco, lived in a rust-colored construction trailer on the historic Wendover airbase. The trailer sits next to the hangar the Enola Gay flew out of and beside rows of military barracks. It belongs to the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a research organization interested in learning more about human's impact on the landscape based in Los Angeles, Calif. Cowles, who typically works among high rises of her fast-paced city, was in Wendover as an artist in residence at the CLUI working to interpret the Bonneville Salt Flats landscape.

For her project, Cowles said she is ultimately hoping to produce a "landscape documentary" on the Salt Flats, the Intrepid potash mining facility, the Bonneville Speedway and how those all interact with each other. What medium she will use to do that with -- whether a collection of drawings or writings -- is still unknown, she said.

"It's a way of explaining how landscape works out there," she said.

Cowles, along with dozens of others in the residence program each year, have come to Wendover since 1996 to research and interpret its landscapes and surrounding region. The Wendover facility houses the only residence program of the CLUI, which was founded in 1994 by Matt Coolidge, who has a background in landscape studies and contemporary art and is a faculty member at the California College of the Arts teaching "curatorial practice."

The center draws its roughly $100,000 annual budget mostly from grants from various foundations, as well as donations from individuals. The Wendover program, which began in 1996 and takes only a fraction of the total budget, has been supported on and off in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. The residency season runs from April to late November. There are usually one or two residents there at a time, and about a dozen over the course of a season. Residents typically stay between three to eight weeks. While the residence program is open to anyone -- artists, researchers, theorists -- who wishes to better understand the region, Coolidge said the application process is very competitive and they receive applications from all over the world.

"The reason we're at Wendover is to draw creative people to look at this startling and stunning and compelling environment through the agency of their medium, whether it's writers or filmmakers, painters, photographers, whatever," said Coolidge, program manager.

Those who participate in the residence program are expected to show their findings or project at exhibits at the Wendover complex, which is housed in military barracks on the airbase. There are currently several exhibits open to the public, including an installation of night photographs taken of the area around Wendover. Outside one of the barracks is a radio tower, which was the project of a former program resident, that can be set to various frequencies in the area. In another of the exhibit halls, an installation of photographs throughout the West called "Vacation: Memories of the American Landscape" by John Brinton Hogan is on display.

In addition, an orientation facility where people can find out about CLUI programs and learn about the region and various sites in the area is open on the airbase.

Coolidge said when searching for a place for a regional facility, Wendover fit the bill no matter how it was approached.

"When you're driving on I-80 between Tooele and Wendover it feels like there's 'nothing out there' and there's this sense of being this empty landscape, but it's the opposite," said Coolidge. "It's full of things, but it's just they're barely beyond the horizon or somehow hidden in plain sight. When you come over the hill from Nevada and enter the basin where the salt flats spread out before you, you also get that feeling that this is the place."

After getting to know more about the airbase, the history of Wendover and the industries that helped characterize the region, Coolidge said he and a few others with CLUI looked no further.

"It feels like a place of new beginnings and it feels like a place that has untold stories," he said. "It's wide-open, yet it's kind of mysterious and so superlative in terms of American landscape -- starting with pioneers migrating through the area, rocketry and speedway racing, and the layers and layers of activities that are both unique to the area but also significant to the development of the nation. It feels like an American place with a capital A -- an underappreciated significant region."

He added the work that participants in the residence program do out there is very much about the physical, cultural and social environment of the salt flats, Wendover and the Great Basin and that "they share through interpretations with as many people as want to listen."

swest@tooeletranscript.com