Thanks Edward Abbey

(Delicate Arch)

"A weird, lovely, fantastic object of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us - like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness - that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures." -EA

Edward Abbey spent two seasons working in Arches National Monument in the 1950s and nearly a decade later, wrote of his experiences in the Utah high desert. His book, Desert Solitaire, is one of the most honest, lyric, cynical, eye-opening nature novels I've ever read. Abbey was a surly poet, a reclusive philosopher, a passionate environmentalist, a damned good story teller. If you all haven't read him yet, buy this book today!

I started reading Desert Solitaire in New Mexico and finished it my first night camping in Arches (in my tent, by the light of my headlamp - yes I'm a bit of a dork). Was surprising to see so much of what I've been feeling during this trip reflected so eloquently yet so simply in a book published a decade before I was born. It made me see Arches through the eyes of a man truly in love with the land he fought to preserve. Though much of the park is scarred by the paved roads he detested and a long line of "air-conditioned wheelchairs" winds its way through the park, Arches, for me, still seems "the center of the world, God's navel, Abbey's country, the red wasteland."

Edward Abbey:
http://www.abbeyweb.net/