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Is that natural terracing, or from mining or cattle?

It's natural--those are Lake Lahontan shoreline benches. This was one of my geology shots--

I knew most of the Great Basin was once a huge lake, but hadn't really thought about what I was seeing (other than the salt flats in places) that was evidence of that lake. This comment, and the one about tufa, will help me begin to recognize evidence of the lake.

Two large lakes intermittently covered much of the eastern and western sides of the Great Basin--Lake Lahontan in the west, and Lake Bonneville in the east. There were also a great many smaller lakes in the basins in between and to the north and south. The lakes waxed and waned, even drying up completely, in tandem with the Pleistocene glacial advances and retreats. There are prominent Lahontan features around Sand Mountain, and I used to tell classes on field trips that the lake will fill again on the next glacial advance and now's the time to get in on the ground floor for lakefront property. Never had any takers... ;)

Anyway, as you "get your eyeballs calibrated" (as a prof of mine used to say), you'll see lots of old lake-related features across the Great Basin, shoreline terraces in particular. They're those nice parallel benches as in this photo.

One classic reference is Mifflin and Wheat, "Pluvial lakes and estimated pluvial climates of Nevada", Nev. Bureau of Mines & Geology Bull. 94, 1979. Unfortunately, it's not yet one of their publications that NBMG has put online.