Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

Desert Solitaire was written by Edward Abbey, and if you like the Southwestern Deserts you'll enjoy this book. I read it when I was going through Utah and Arizona. It provides alot of counter-culture ideas, and it should be the ecologists handbook. Abbey was a very liberal thinker and it shows in his writing, but I think that this book influenced what I think of conservation. I suggest this book immenseley.

Published in 1968 and written by American West author Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire is a collection of short stories chronicling Abbey’s adventures in and on the desert during three seasons as a seasonal park ranger at Arches National Monument.

CONTENTS

• Author’s Introduction
• The First Morning
• Solitaire
• The Serpents of Paradise
• Cliffrose and Bayonets
• Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks
• Rocks
• Cowboys and Indians
• Coyboys and Indians II
• Water
• The Heat of Noon: Rock and Tree and Cloud
• The Moon-Eyed Horse
• Down the River
• Havasu
• The Dead Man at Grandview Point
• Tukuhnikivats, the Island in the Desert
• Episodes and Visions
• Terra Incognita: Into the Maze
• Bedrock and Paradox

Dedicated for Josh and Aaron

Desert Solitaire is the preferred Abbey work to read after one has successfully hiked to a point in the desert where civilization can no longer be seen.