An unprecedented collection of photographs celebrating one of America’s great treasures, now available in a midsize format. Straddling the borders of Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico is a magnificent wilderness known as the Colorado Plateau. Encompassing more than 130,000 square miles, this spectacular tableland of rock, canyon, and desert covers the greatest concentration of national parks—ten, including Bryce Canyon, Zion, Arches, Canyonlands, and Grand Canyon—national monuments, state parks, wilderness areas, Bureau of Land Management holdings, and Native American tribal lands in America. Canyon Wilderness of the Southwest presents more than 200 photographs accompanied by quotations from authors, travelers, and nature enthusiasts. Featuring the most extraordinary collection of multicolored landforms found anywhere on earth, this remarkable assemblage of geologic diversity and spectacular beauty attracts more than ten million visitors annually. Jon Ortner’s photographs reflect the power and stunning beauty of these incomparable monuments, presenting a wonderland of colored stone.

* More than 100 hikes included * Includes lesser-visited Dinosaur National Monument, Salinas National Monument, Snow Canyon State Park, and northern San Rafael Swel, as well as the major parks and wilderness areas * Includes trips in more recently designated national monuments and wilderness areas such as Grand Staircase-Escalante, Canyons of the Ancients, Black Ridge Canyons, and more Hiking the Southwest Canyon Country will take you from the Colorado Plateau to the Grand Canyon to the banks of the Rio Grande. Perfect for hikers off all levels, this guidebook features trips that highlight the dramatic scenery of the Four Corners Region, from waterfalls and natural bridges to slot canyons. Each itinerary offers options such as day hikes, backpacking trips, scenic drives, raft trips, and visits to archaeological sites. You'll find a "Best Places Adventure Chart" that compares features of hikes such as rock art, arches, and serene rivers.

Next to Yosemite and the High Sierra, the Southwest was closest to Ansel Adams' heart. It was there, in the early 1930s, that he met photographer Paul Strand and decided to make photography his life's work. In his words, "wherever one goes in the Southwest one encounters magic, strength, and beauty." In The Grand Canyon and the Southwest, Adam's little known images of the Grand Canyon make up roughly one quarter of the photographs selected and edited by his longtime editor, Andrea Stillman. The varied images portray the balance of desolation and stark beauty in the Southwestern landscape, from Texas to California. The pictures are complemented by an introduction by Andrea Stillman and a selection of Adams' vivid letters about the region. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz he writes, "It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite . . ."

Professional illustrator Fian Arroyo portrays 65 of the region's most famous settings in national parks, monuments, recreation areas, and more, creating ideal coloring pages for hours of meditative, stress-reducing fun.

George Corning Fraser, who lived in the days before automobile travel became a way of life, was an easterner who loved to vacation on horseback in the American Southwest. No mere tourist, he sought out the most remote and forbidding landscapes he could find: the seldom-visited country north of the Grand Canyon, the vast slickrock expanses of the Navajo Reservation, and sites such as Zion Canyon and Capitol Reef before they became national parks. An amateur geologist, Fraser penned his own memorable observations of the region’s landforms and jotted down engaging accounts of local ranchers, sheepherders, and villagers. Frederick H. Swanson has edited Fraser’s voluminous journals into a single volume covering three trips taken from 1914 to 1916. As Fraser wades the bone-chilling waters of the Zion Narrows, crosses the Grand Canyon in midsummer heat, and rides through the trackless forest of the Aquarius Plateau, he conveys impressions of the land that will fascinate any reader who wonders what the canyon country was like before it became a popular tourist destination—and one that will inform historians interested in early accounts of the region. Accompanied by a selection of photographs taken by Fraser and his fellow travelers, Journeys in the Canyon Lands brings to life the Southwest’s breathtaking backcountry on the brink of discovery.

Framing Meinzer's work in elegant historic context, preeminent Panhandle historian Frederick W. Rathjen gives us a rare appreciation of the topographic majesty of the Periman Red Beds that 230 to 280 million years ago lay below a shallow sea and through subsequent millennia and riverine deposit, erosion, and redeposit would gain 'variegated walls and formations of gray, yellow, maroon, lavender and orange shown most conspicuously in the lovely Spanish Skirts."

An exuberant, hands-on fly-on-the-wall account that combines the thrill of canyoneering and rock climbing with the intellectual sleuthing of archaeology to explore the Anasazi. David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi—the name means “enemy ancestors” in Navajo—who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism. Roberts’s book is full of up-to-date thinking on the culture of the ancient people who lived in the harsh desert country of the Southwest.