**"Sharp as the needles on a pinyon pine, these essays will make you rethink your view of the American West. Meloy's wise and unexpected observations are a pure delight."—MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNEThe late writer and naturalist Ellen Meloy wrote and recorded a series of audio essays** for KUER, NPR Utah in the 1990s. Every few months, she would travel to their Salt Lake City studios from her red rock home of Bluff to read an essay or two. With understated humor and sh...

In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape.From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains,...

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 p...

In Sandstone Seduction, Katie Lee collects her most creative writing, written over her lifetime, telling us about the events that shaped her life, and her encounters with water and rock. As always, her writing is deeply personal, remarkably candid, and abundantly frank. Katie Lee speaks her mind; she does not hold back. She listened to the water and absorbed its lessons for more than sixty years; she knows well that we have a lot to learn about the flow of our lives.

Writer and naturalist Ellen Meloy and photographer Stephen Strom met in the fall of 2004 and began planning a collaborative book of images and prose expressing their shared love of the desert. Two months later, Meloy died suddenly at her home in southern Utah. Over the years to follow, Strom called on Meloy's writing to put his new photographs to words. The collaboration seemed to deepen over time, and it comes to fruition in This Desert Hides Nothing.

From the award-winning author Eating Stone . "A painful juxtaposition of natural beauty and warrior wastelands." — The New York Times Book ReviewFeeling disconnected from the wildly beautiful desert that she has known intimately for twenty years, award-winning writer Ellen Meloy embarks on a search for home that is historical, scientific, and spiritual. Her "Map of the Known Universe," devised to...

• Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction• Nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award.During Charlotte Gill’s 20 years working as a tree planter she encountered hundreds of clear-cuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest...

This memoir of life in the American desert by the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang is a nature writing classic on par with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey recounts his many escapades, adventures, and epiphanies as an Arches National Park ranger outside Moab, Utah. Brimming with arresting insights, impassioned arguments for wilderness conservation, and a raconteur's wit, it is one of Abbey's most critically ...

From the irrepressible author of Trout Bum and The View from Rat Lake comes an engaging, humorous, often profound examination of life's greatest mysteries: sex, death, and fly-fishing.John Gierach's quest takes us from his quiet home water (an ordinary, run-of-the-mill trout stream where fly-fishing can be a casual affair) to Utah's famous Green River, and to unknown creeks throughout the Western states and Canada. We're introduced to a lively gro...

Naturalist Craig Childs's "utterly memorable and fantastic" study of the desert's dangerous beauty is based on years of adventures in the deserts of the American West (Washington Post).Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned explorers. Craig Childs, who has spent years in the deserts of the American West as an adventurer, a river guide, and a field instructor in natural history, has devel...

Two volumes of fiction from the National Book Award–winning author of Arctic Dreams : "Lopez feels a deep spiritual connection to the natural world." — San Francisco ChronicleTo National Book Award–winning author Barry Lopez, the desert and the river are landscapes alive with poetry, mystery, seduction, and enchantment. In these two works of fiction, the narrator responds viscerally and emotional...

National Book Award–winning author Barry Lopez explores the challenges and joys of the human experience through the frame of the natural world in fourteen arresting and extraordinary essays.In Crossing Open Ground, award-winning literary writer Barry Lopez offers prescient, beautiful, and thought-provoking reflections on how the natural world can define and illuminate our sense of self. Whether he's traversing the Arctic tundra or the deserts of the Americ...