NPT Reviews of Books and other Material

This is a book I wish I had encountered, quite literally, decades ago. Now in its fifth edition, The Geysers of Yellowstone by T. Scott Bryan is an encyclopedia of the park's roughly 1,000 geysers.

Most of us go to Yellowstone National Park for the wildlife, the scenery, the amazing geothermal features, or simply for outdoor adventure. Early Euro-Americans visiting the area were amazed by natural features like geyser basins and hot springs on a scale encountered nowhere else in their travels. Ultimately this place became the world’s first national park, but for millennia it had been a place of human spiritual and subsistence importance.

Youngsters are essential to the future of national parks, for they will be tomorrow’s advocates and possibly even stewards. But taking children who can barely ride a bike or aren’t old enough for their learner’s permit for driving into a national park can seem daunting. Hiking in Yellowstone’s backcountry with grizzly bears? Exploring the somewhat technical route to Angels Landing in Zion?

There are multiple wonderful things that Douglas Lorain brings to 100 Classic Hikes: Montana. Good descriptions and beautiful photography are crucial to any guidebook, and they’re plentiful here. Toss in a little attitude, and you have a guidebook that strives to give you the lowdown truthfully, not simply to fill pages.

America’s grand introduction to the West came through the paintings of Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, William Henry Jackson, and others. They captured the landscapes with big, moving imagery that drew the world’s attention to canyon country, the Great Plains, towering, snowcapped mountains, and deep chasms.

I first heard Allen Steck’s name when I was flying and climbing in the Owen’s Valley of California in the early 1980s. His exploits, along with Norman Clyde, Doug Robinson, Galen Rowell and John Salathe, were legendary. Known by the moniker, the Slim Fox, the mountains have been his home.

Retired from college teaching, still healing from combat in Vietnam, Joe Wilkins found peace and solace in some of the most remote wilderness in the United States – Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. For a dozen years he volunteered for the National Park Service, accompanying rangers on patrols into remote corners of this 8,472,566-acre preserve in northern Alaska. He took many photos and kept careful notes of the places and people he encountered in his travels there, and in this photo-memoir he shares his experience of this remote and remarkable landscape.

This is a big book on a big subject, written prior to the election of Donald Trump and the intensified war on science that has resulted. The author does not concern himself specifically with national parks but with the overriding effects of the rejection of science on politics, policy, and democracy.

This is not a book for light reading. It is, though, one that takes a historical approach to examining the hallmarks of the Southwestern landscape. Canyon de Chelly, El Morro, Rainbow Bridge, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and the Grand Canyon are among the destinations to which we are reintroduced through the writings of the first non-natives who encountered.