For thirty years, David Roberts made annual pilgrimages from his home in Massachusetts to Four Corners canyon country, land he loved passionately. The last time we almost crossed paths in person, he was renting a house in Bluff and I knocked on his door, but he was appropriately and unsurprisingly out in the field. The book he was working on was his last on the region before he died. Half is the archaeology and his own walking — the Cedar Mesa sites, Grand Gulch, the panels, the places he kept returning to. The other half is the history of how this became conflict ground: cattle, uranium, pothunting families, the 2009 raids that devastated the Blanding community, five tribes proposing a monument, Obama designating it, Trump cutting it by eighty-five percent. He knows most of the people on every side and doesn’t flatten any of them.