Barry Lopez, William Kittredge, John McPhee, Mark Strand, Ann Zwinger, and fifteen other prominent novelists, nature writers, and poets offer writings as testimony in the face of assaults on government-protected lands. Originally published and presented to Congress last fall, this book serves as a valuable introduction to the current crisis America faces.

• Only the best hikes selected from a state with an abundance of trail riches • Utah is a national destination for hikers • Hikes range from easy day hikes to more challenging backpacking trips 100 Classic Hikes: Utah expands Mountaineers Books' most popular hiking guidebook series. Like the other titles in the series, this new addition is coffee-table quality and makes a great gift for long-time Utah hikers, as well as for new arrivals and vacationers. Featuring full-color photographs and maps, 100 Classic Hikes: Utah covers the best and most popular hikes in the state, providing a range of trail options. The "Hikes at a Glance" table makes it simple to quickly find hike length, difficulty, when to go, and special highlights of the outing you seek. This is a full-state guidebook organized by region. The North Central region includes the Wasatch Mountains along with Antelope Island State Park, House Range, and Deseret Peak Wilderness Area, while the Northeast features the high Uintas, Bear River Range, Flaming Gorge, and Dinosaur National Monument. Southern Utah features many of the nation’s premier national parks and monuments. The Southeast region includes hikes around Moab, Arches National Park, Grand Gulch, Canyonlands National Park, Natural Bridges, and more. South Central covers Capitol Reef, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Kodachrome, Horseshoe Canyon unit of Canyonlands, and other areas. Finally, the famed Southwest part of the state features Bryce Canyon National Park, Cedar Breaks National Monument, Zion National Park, Snow Canyon, and beyond.

Open Midnight weaves two parallel stories about the great wilderness—Brooke Williams’s year alone with his dog ground truthing wilderness maps of southern Utah, and that of his great-great-great-grandfather, who in 1863 made his way with a group of Mormons from England across the wilderness almost to Utah, dying a week short. The book is also about two levels of history—personal, as represented by William Williams, and collective, as represented by Charles Darwin, who lived in Shrewsbury, England, at about the same time as Williams. As Brooke Williams begins researching the story of his oldest known ancestor, he realizes that he has few facts. He wonders if a handful of dates can tell the story of a life, writing, “If those points were stars in the sky, we would connect them to make a constellation, which is what I’ve made with his life by creating the parts missing from his story.” Thus William Williams becomes a kind of spiritual guide, a shamanlike consciousness that accompanies the author on his wilderness and life journeys, and that appears at pivotal points when the author is required to choose a certain course. The mysterious presence of his ancestor inspires the author to create imagined scenes in which Williams meets Darwin in Shrewsbury, sowing something central in the DNA that eventually passes to Brooke Williams, whose life has been devoted to nature and wilderness. Brooke Williams’s inventive and vivid prose pushes boundaries and investigates new ways toward knowledge and experience, inviting readers to think unconventionally about how we experience reality, spirituality, and the wild. The author draws on Jungian psychology to relate how our consciousness of the wild is culturally embedded in our psyche, and how a deep connection to the wild can promote emotional and psychological well-being. Williams's narrative goes beyond a call for conservation, but in the vein of writers like Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, David Abram, the author argues passionately for the importance of wildness is to the human soul. Reading Williams's inspired prose provides a measure of hope for protecting the beautiful places that we all need to thrive. Open Midnight is grounded in the present by Williams’s descriptions of the Utah lands he explores. He beautifully evokes the feeling of being solitary in the wild, at home in the deepest sense, in the presence of the sublime. In doing so, he conveys what Gary Snyder calls “a practice of the wild” more completely than any other work. Williams also relates an insider’s view of negotiations about wilderness protection. As an advocate working for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, he represents a minority in meetings designed to open wilderness lands to roads and hunting. He portrays the mindset of the majority of Utah’s citizens, who argue passionately for their rights to use their lands however they wish. The phrase “open midnight,” as Williams sees it, evokes the time between dusk and dawn, between where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the unconscious where all possibilities are hidden.

"The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations. This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage"--

A guide to hiking trails in Utah's national parks and wilderness areas, illustrated with 320 full color photographs and trail maps.

With trips along soaring mountains to high-walled canyons and plunging river gorges, Utah Byways is the ideal guide for adventurous travelers who want to explore the stateÕs extensive network of backcountry roads. This fully updated edition presents 65 trips in UtahÕs spectacular preserved areas such as Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Arches National Parks, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Other adventures follow the routes of the Transcontinental Railroad and the Pony Express. Detailed descriptions are augmented with full-page photographs and two-color maps of each trip. Icons next to each description indicate options for non-driving activities along each route, such as biking, wildlife viewing, camping, hiking, visiting historic sites, and more. Spiral-bound.