59. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

"The desert says nothing. Completely passive, acted upon but never acting,
the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation."


"“In the desert,” wrote Balzac, somewhere, “there is all and there is nothing. God is there and man is not.”"

I am surprised how much I loved this book. I learned so much about this part of the country. He was a ranger in the 50s in Arches National Park. It contains his hikes and contemplations about "progress" and tourism ruining the beauty of the region The only thing that would have made this better would be to have pictures of the places he describes. I made the best of it by looking them up on the internet as I read. 

This is a book I never would have picked up, but he writes well. He has a few political "rants," but I did not mind. 

It was also very interesting to read this book at the same time I was reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee because he talks about the different Native Americans in the area.