I recently read Desert Solitaire which the article references in closing. It’s kinda controversial but interesting read.

If you have a thing for Lake Mead then you really need to read the Edward Abbey books Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang. Very beautiful part of the world and I am glad to see you have a passion for getting the maps right.

Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire - captures the beauty and importance of our natural world. Reminds us we can live simply and the idiocracy of trashing our own planet. (often compared Thoreau's Walden - also a must read)

There's a great book called Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey where he talks about the old national parks that were free, and where driving was banned. You had to hike/bike/horse your way in, and people came to spend long periods traveling through the parks.

He watched as the park services started building roads through national parks, and more parking lots, and how that changed absolutely everything. It also has a lot of old stories about the area. It's an amazing book.

Cadillac Desert is one of the great American books of the twentieth century. I wish I could make everyone in my region read it.

And Ed Abbey wrote some great books, too. Desert Solitaire is always worth rereading. Last time I was camping at the Maze I took in a couple evening sunsets enjoying that book again.

I was born just 6 years before Edward Abbey died. He wrote about this problem long before I was even born. This problem is not new, and some of its causes have been well known for a long time.

He argues that the major problem is that the parks are too easy to visit. If you make people get out of their cars and walk a bit, you might stand to preserve some kind of semi-natural experience. If you pave a road to the rim of the Grand Canyon, it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are going to drive right up to it, get out, take a picture, and drive on to the next overlook. As I'm not going to do his words or argument justice, I'd encourage anybody interested in this to pick up a copy of Desert Solitaire.

If you do, and you find his argument convincing, your next task is to figure out how to sustain the communities that have come to depend on tourist revenue. I'm not talking about the seasonal folks that work for the NPS or a concessionaire, I mean the people who actually live in these places year-round.

You should know that Abbey is not writing from a disinterested viewpoint. He wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang, after all. Still, I find his words both lucid and prescient.

A few fiction choices:

  * The Alchemist - the closest thing in my life to a religious text.  Just a beautiful story that I can recall at any time for some calm.

  * Desert Solitaire - just read this recently and it gave me an entirely new outlook on the relationship between humans and nature. 

  * Don Quixote - I was blown away by how a book that is ~600 years old could make me laugh and keep me interested.  Changed how I think about people 'a long time ago' since they could enjoy the same books I do.

  * House of Leaves - this one just split open my brain in an irreversible way, sort of like how you hear people describe certain drugs.

Looks like I might have to revisit the South West via words alone. Thanks for the recommend. Powell's book looks good too, with a touch of Shackleton grit to it.

I too second Desert Solitaire as a must read, it is not a novel like Monkey Wrench Gang, it made me think again about values of freedom and what it is to be alive without having to suspend one's belief in a way that pure fiction demands.

I also recommend walking down the Grand Canyon and up the other side carrying very little and without knowing what is going to happen to you. By very little I mean a light snack, some water and a picnic rug to sleep on (under the stars at the bottom of the Canyon).

Oh, hi there, it is good to see other thruhikers here indeed!:)

Yes, I can imagine that being the case, I'm actually reading Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, mostly about the times he worked in Archs National Park and it sounds just like that.

Fun fact you might share - I stumbled upon Edward Abbey following a quote I saw on a blaze in NorCal (which carried bullet hole, obviously, but it actually what made this quote stand out to me): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5bbY00X4AA_eeu.jpg:large

It was misattributed I think, I later found out these were Abbey's words.

For anyone who wishes to explore some of the ideas presented in this article about wilderness, I would recommend Michael Pollan's essay "The Idea of a Garden".

I read Pollan's essay as part of a discussion about wilderness ethics and it has stuck with me for years. It can be found in his book, Second Nature.

If you are still reading this comment, I would also recommend Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. It takes a more irascible approach to some of the ideas of wilderness ethics, but is is a damn-good, swashbuckling time.

Here's a list we maintain at work: http://blog.greenmountainengineering.com/greenmountain_engin...

I contributed Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder and Desert Solitaire by Ed Abbey, among others.

For nonfiction: Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact by Vaclav Smil