Desert Solitaire

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,… show more.

This is the book that made Edward Abbey and Arches National Park famous and is considered the Walden (from Henry David Thoreau) of the Desert Southwest.

Essay by essay, Abbey shows us Arches, Canyonlands National Park, and more of the Desert Southwest through stunningly lyrical and brilliant writing. An American classic and also the book that introduced me to Edward Abbey.

After I read this book, I was hooked on Abbey and desperate to explore the Desert Southwest.

Edward Abbey was the dean of ranger writing, the ranger’s ranger, a man who inspired countless others to join the ranks of the “pine pigs” and dedicate their lives to protecting what’s left of the nation’s wilderness. Published in 1968, Desert Solitaire chronicles his single season with the National Park Service in Utah’s Arches National Park. Despite his short career, “Cactus Ed” managed to glean profound insight into the workings of the NPS, how Americans used their national parks, and how endangered were the country’s wild places – even a half-century ago. He documented it all in his trademark curmudgeonly… show more.

Edward Abbey’s deep exploration of the wilderness of the desert Southwest is on one hand inspiring and enlightening, and on the other disturbing, as Abbey can come across as a total jerk. Go to any site with reviews of this book and you will find everything from one star diatribes to five star reviews that talk about how his descriptions of nature and his own analysis of self are spot on and have changed their lives. I invite you to check it out and see what you think. For me I agree with both sides, but the good parts are… show more.

I first fell in love with the Utah desert on a spring break camping trip while in college. Of course, we had to visit “the Maze” district of Canyonlands, where we spent a glorious week chasing the ghost of Edward Abbey. Few people have captured the wild spirit of this region as well as Abbey, the curmudgeonly ranger who valued wildness over just about anything else. Desert Solitaire is Abbey’s love story to the canyon country of Utah and a damning indictment of industrial tourism. This book should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to learn more… show more.

When I sit down to write and the words won’t come, I often seek inspiration by sinking into Desert Solitaire’s rarified expositions of nature. An easterner who went west and fell in love with the Great American Desert, Edward Abbey became a fervent voice for a wonderland that most others maligned as a wasteland. Writing principally about the environment of Arches National Park, where he worked as a seasonal ranger, Abbey was overtly hostile toward modern America’s habitual destruction of wilderness, the “only paradise we need.” While illuminating the true essence of the desert, his essays convey for readers… show more.

You either love or hate Ed Abbey. His fierce love of wilderness made him a passionate, angry man. A former park ranger become an environmental activist and monkey-wrencher, he won the Pulitzer Prize for this collection of essays. The chapter on floating the Glen Canyon before the dam was completed is worth the price of the book. He points up the need for cutting through sappy and romantic thinking about wilderness. Wild places teach us resistance and irreverence in the face of mindless commercialism.

Abbey is one of two authors who make me want to put down the book and take a hike. I am an avid reader, and the ability of Abbey to make me want to take a hike instead of reading further is impressive. Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s account of serving as a park ranger in Arches National Monument, pays homage to wildlands everywhere. Abbey’s breakout book is a testimonial to his writing and, more importantly, to his critical thinking.

The book struck a chord because I worked in a remote national park (Kluane National Park and Reserve, along the Yukon/Alaskan border) early in my career as Abbey did. Like him, I was incensed by the push to exploit wilderness more for the enjoyment of people than for the plants and animals that dwell there. What makes this book stand out is that it is lyrical as well as angry. It makes you laugh and want to do something to right the wrongs that have been done to nature.

Abbey was an exuberant, high-spirited nature lover, slightly nuts, who worked as a park ranger in the early 1960s at Arches National Monument. This book is a brilliant evocation of the desert landscape, and an explanation of why he wanted the area not to be developed for motorized tourists.  Abbey also wrote fantasies about sabotaging road-building and mining projects, which made him an inspirational figure to the protest movement EarthFirst! His writing is always thought-provoking, even when, as often happened, he was wrong.