Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches in the late fifties, alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road, before the pavement came. This is what he made of it, and it isn’t a nature book so much as a man arguing. He’ll give you a juniper or a gopher snake in prose nobody has matched, then turn around and lay into the Park Service for building roads, into tourists who won’t leave the car, into the dams drowning the canyons. There’s a chapter on a Glen Canyon float trip taken just before the water came up that is the best thing in it.
Desert Solitaire