For Edward Abbey

I just finished reading a book by Edward Abbey called "Desert Solitaire". It's essentially based on his year of being a park ranger in what is now Arches National Park (really about a lot more than that, but that's enough for the sake of this blog). His first year of service as a ranger was in the late 1950's when the park wasn't even a national park yet and didn't even have a paved road into it.

This is an image of the area in Arches where he stayed in a small aluminum trailer and under a canvas roofed structure when it was too hot to stay inside. The image doesn't portray the size and scale of the area very well; it's almost impossible to do that. Just to put it into proportion, I've recently read that the "small" round top of Balanced Rock (off to the far right side of the image) weighs 7 million pounds!

Balanced Rock, Arches National Park

It's this size, the fact that you can see for what seems like forever, that keeps Denise and me coming back to this area. You can't do that in Michigan where we live. You don't get that same feeling. Sky like this doesn't happen at home.

Edward Abbey not only got to see it, he got to live in it. Read his book and you'll see how much he appreciated it.

.