Even though I’m from humid DC, I’ve been drawn to the desert since I first set foot there as a kid on a family road trip. Now, I’m lucky enough to live in Utah, home to some of the world’s most legendary desert landscapes. One reason I love the desert is the otherworldly scenery: uncanny arches, bizarre hoodoos, and sand dunes you could disappear into. Before your eyes, layers of geologic time unfold in epochs. The desert is a great place for contemplating the past and future—and for great adventures, with endless sandstone walls to climb, slick rock to bike, and sagebrush-lined trails to hike.
I wrote
Moon Zion & Bryce: With Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Grand Staircase-Escalante & Moab
You would probably recognize the landscape of Monument Valley from classic Westerns and other films. Stagecoach, the HBO series Westworld, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Forrest Gump are just a few! But aside from a film set, this iconic setting is, first and foremost, the home of the Navajo people.
Based on extensive interviews with Navajo residents of Monument Valley, this book weaves together a portrait of the place and people, from Indigenous cultural traditions and the dawn of Hollywood to mining and the significance of the monuments themselves.
This novel considers what will happen when the Southwest runs out of water, a very real possibility, especially with climate change, and something I care about as a Utah resident.
It pulls you into the action right away and keeps you on your toes until the very end, weaving together the narratives of a few different characters, including a journalist, a refugee from Texas, and a henchman (aka “the water knife”) who’s paid to destroy rival water supplies.
An alum of Oberlin College (like me!), Paolo Bacigalupi is a master of telling engaging stories about possible futures defined by climate change. I highly recommend this thoughtful novel and his other books!
From the international bestselling author of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning The Windup Girl, comes an electrifying thriller set in a world on the edge of collapse.
WATER IS POWER
The American Southwest has been decimated by drought, Nevada and Arizona skirmish over dwindling shares of the Colorado River, while California watches.
When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Las Vegas water knife Angel Velasquez is sent to investigate.
With a wallet full of identities and a tricked-out Tesla, Angel arrows south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape…
This beautiful nonfiction book is a chronicle of four seasons spent following the desert bighorn sheep who live throughout the Southwest.
Even if you’re thinking, “Hmm, I’m really not that interested in sheep,” this book transcends its subject, weaving together science, imaginative observation, and personal reflection. She probes deeper, contemplating how humans connect with the more wild creatures on the animal spectrum.
The late Ellen Meloy was a lyrical writer, and all of her books are worth a read, but I especially love this book. Here’s a quote to give you a taste of her writing: “Each time I look into the eye of an animal...I find myself staring into a mirror of my own imagination.”
Long believed to be disappearing and possibly even extinct, the Southwestern bighorn sheep of Utah’s canyonlands have made a surprising comeback. Naturalist Ellen Meloy tracks a band of these majestic creatures through backcountry hikes, downriver floats, and travels across the Southwest. Alone in the wilderness, Meloy chronicles her communion with the bighorns and laments the growing severance of man from nature, a severance that she feels has left us spiritually hungry. Wry, quirky and perceptive, Eating Stone is a brillant and wholly original tribute to the natural world.
Organized by the roads of Utah, this book helps you make sense of what you’re looking at out the window and along the trail. This is an essential guide to keep in your car if you’re road-tripping through the state!
Written by the late female geologist Halka Chronic and her two daughters, this book has great maps, photos, and writing that will turn you into an armchair geologist in no time and give you a deeper appreciation for the mountains, canyons, spires, and more formations of the Utah desert and beyond.
Arches National Park. Bryce Canyon. Zion. When one thinks of Utah, it�s rocks and iconic landforms�preserved in a nearly endless list of national parks and monuments�come immediately to mind. Perhaps more so than any other state, Utah is built for geologic exploration, and geologists/authors Felicie Williams, Lucy Chronic, and Halka Chronic are its expert tour guides. The Beehive State is splitting at the seams with wondrous geological contrast. Utah�s high mountains, showcasing the results of what happens as the Earth bends, folds, and breaks itself apart, run like a backbone down the center of the state. To the east, the…
The late Edward Abbey might be a controversial figure, but you can’t write about desert literature without mentioning this iconic book.
In this book, Abbey captures his experience as a winter caretaker of Arches National Park (before it was a national park and before the road in was paved). In 18 chapters that read like short stories, he chronicles long days on horseback, jaw-dropping tales of flash floods, journeys up remote canyons, and more adventures that do an uncanny job of conveying the spirit of the desert and what it was like to explore it mid-century.
Abbey’s writing is blunt, colorful, and engaging, and this book is a romp of a read.
'My favourite book about the wilderness' Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
In this shimmering masterpiece of American nature writing, Edward Abbey ventures alone into the canyonlands of Moab, Utah, to work as a seasonal ranger for the United States National Park Service.
Living out of a trailer, Abbey captures in rapt, poetic prose the landscape of the desert; a world of terracotta earth, empty skies, arching rock formations, cliffrose, juniper, pinyon pine and sand sage. His summers become spirit quests, taking him in search of wild horses and Ancient Puebloan petroglyphs, up mountains and across tribal lands, and down the…
This book is my guide to Southern Utah, including Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Moab, and more.
Get insider tips, ideas for avoiding the crowds, and recommendations for hiking, camping, biking, climbing, sightseeing, dining, lodging, and more based on my experience living in Utah for seven years.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
