Comb Ridge is an eighty-mile monocline running from Utah into Arizona, dense with Ancestral Puebloan sites, and nobody had ever traversed the whole thing on foot. Roberts did it with Greg Child and Vaughn Hadenfeldt — three men in their fifties and sixties, hauling water in the heat, finding ruins and panels along the way, arguing about the route and about each other. It’s an expedition book and an archaeology book at once, and the friction between three strong-willed friends on a long walk might be a good part of what makes it work. I know all of them (or, as David has passed, knew) and I can just hear the bickering. It sounded like a hell trip but it made for a solid book.
Sandstone Spine: Seeking the Anasazi on the First Traverse of Comb Ridge