West of the Four Corners and east of the Colorado River, in southeastern Utah, a unique one-hundred-mile-long, two-hundred-foot-high, serrated cliff cuts the sky. Whether viewed as barrier wall or sheltering sanctuary, Comb Ridge has helped define life and culture in this region for thousands of years. Today, the area it crosses is still relatively remote, though an important part of a scenic complex of popular tourist destinations that includes Natural Bridges National Monument and Grand Gulch just to the west, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Lake Powell a bit farther west, Canyonlands National Park to the north, Hovenweep National Monument to the east, and the San Juan River and Monument Valley to the south. Prehistorically Comb Ridge split an intensively used Ancient Puebloan homeland. It later had similar cultural--both spiritual and practical--significance to Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos and played a crucial role in the history of European American settlement. To tell the story of this rock that is unlike any other rock in the world and the diverse people whose lives it has affected, Robert S. McPherson, author of multiple books on Navajos and on the Four Corners region, draws on the findings of a major, federally funded project to research the cultural history of Comb Ridge. He carries the story forward to contention over present and future uses of Comb Ridge and the spectacular country surrounding it.

A personal and historical exploration of the Bears Ears country and the fight to save a national monument. The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by the Trump administration in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. It’s also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by Jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s. In The Bears Ears, acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes readers on a tour of his favorite place on earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he’s explored for the last twenty-five years.

Tells the story of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation and its legacy of sickness and government neglect, documenting one of the darker chapters in 20th century American history. --From publisher description.

"Solid history and archaeology combines with an understated call to preserve Bears Ears—all of it, not just a sliver." —KIRKUS REVIEWS FOREWORD INDIES WINNER, EDITOR'S CHOICE PRIZE NONFICTION For more than twelve thousand years, the redrock landscape of southeastern Utah has shaped the lives of everyone who calls it home. R. E. Burrillo takes readers on a journey of discovery through the stories and controversies that make this place so unique, from traces of its earliest inhabitants through its role in shaping the study of archaeology itself—and into the modern battle over its protection. R. E. BURRILLO is an archaeologist and conservation advocate. His writing has appeared in Archaeology Southwest, Colorado Plateau Advocate, the Salt Lake Tribune, and elsewhere. He splits his time between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Flagstaff, Arizona.

Dramatic geographical formations tower over the Four Corners country in the southwestern United States. The mountains, cliffs, and sandstone spires, familiar landmarks for anglo travelers, orient Navajos both physically and spiritually. In Sacred Land, Sacred View, Robert McPherson describes the mythological significance of these landmarks. Navajos read their environment as a spiritual text: the gods created the physical world to help, teach, and protect people through an integrated system of beliefs represented in nature. The author observes that the Middle East is of "no greater import to Christians than the Dine's holy land is to Navajos." He continues: "Sacred mountains circumscribe the land, containing the junction of the San Juan River and Mancos Creek, where Born for Water invoked supernatural aid to overcome danger and death and where, at the Bear's Ears formation, good triumphed over evil." The more one learns about the Dine, the more one inevitably admires their way of perceiving and interpreting what lies just beyond the focus of human vision. Their renowned respect for nature and way of living in harmony with the environment derive from their religious traditions.

This book is intended as an introduction to Southwestern Archaeology, for casual visitors. The book will guide you around a site in Sherlock Holmes fashion, giving you very real tools for understanding cliff dwellings. The Cliff Dwellings Speak also introduces readers to the descendants of the cliff dwellers -- the Pueblo people of the Southwest who still live there today. The book is highly illustrated with black and white photographs and engravings from rare antique books. Using copious illustrations, Field Guides in some chapters show the reader what to look for, and what it might mean. The Cliff Dwellings Speak is unique and is very different from any other book regarding understanding the Greater American Southwest (views of Native American, Anasazi, ruins at Mesa Verde, Colorado; landscape images of Colorado).

In late 2016, President Barack Obama designated 1.35 million acres of public lands in southeastern Utah as Bears Ears National Monument. On December 4, 2017, President Donald Trump shrank the monument by 85 percent. A land rich in human history and unsurpassed in natural beauty, Bears Ears is at the heart of a national debate over the future of public lands. Through the stories of twenty individuals, and informed by interviews with more than seventy people, Voices from Bears Ears captures the passions of those who fought to protect Bears Ears and those who opposed the monument as a federal “land grab” that threatened to rob them of their economic future. It gives voice to those who have felt silenced, ignored, or disrespected. It shares stories of those who celebrate a growing movement by Indigenous peoples to protect ancestral lands and culture, and those who speak devotedly about their Mormon heritage. What unites these individuals is a reverence for a homeland that defines their cultural and spiritual identity, and therein lies hope for finding common ground. Journalist Rebecca Robinson provides context and perspective for understanding the ongoing debate and humanizes the abstract issues at the center of the debate. Interwoven with these stories are photographs of the interviewees and the land they consider sacred by photographer Stephen E. Strom. Through word and image, Robinson and Strom allow us to both hear and see the people whose lives are intertwined with this special place.