Visions Of The Colorado Plateau

Conceived after years of explorations, this is an homage to the wonderful Colorado plateau.Photographed in black & white, through 100 large photos, the book reveals the soul of this land in six different chapters.Not to be missed by anyone who has visited or is interested in the American Southwest.

The Colorado River Basin’s importance cannot be overstated. Its living river system supplies water to roughly forty million people, contains Grand Canyon National Park, Bears Ears National Monument, and wide swaths of other public lands, and encompasses ancestral homelands of twenty-nine Native American tribes. John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran, explorer, scientist, and adept federal administrator, articulated a vision for Euro-American colonization of the “Arid Region” that has indelibly shaped the basin—a pattern that looms large not only in western history, but also in contemporary environmental and social policy. One hundred and fifty years after Powell’s epic 1869 Colorado River Exploring Expedition, this volume revisits Powell’s vision, examining its historical character and its relative influence on the Colorado River Basin’s cultural and physical landscape in modern times. In three parts, the volume unpacks Powell’s ideas on water, public lands, and Native Americans—ideas at once innovative, complex, and contradictory. With an eye toward climate change and a host of related challenges facing the basin, the volume turns to the future, reflecting on how—if at all—Powell’s legacy might inform our collective vision as we navigate a new “Great Unknown.”

An overview of the Colorado Plateau's fossil remains of organisms that lived millions of years ago, featuring numerous illustrations and photographs.

"With a plethora of updates and insights into land conservation and management questions on the Colorado Plateau, The Colorado Plateau VI shows how new technologies for monitoring, spatial analysis, restoration, and collaboration improve our understanding, management, and conservation of outcomes at the appropriate landscape scale for the Colorado Plateau"--Provided by publisher.

Color photos of the Escalante and the Paria river canyons and the adjacent plateau into which these rivers, with the help of rain & wind, have sculpted surreal, brightly colored galleries. The text by Charles Bowden deals with Mormon heroes, the Hole-in-the-Rock migration, and with John D. Lee, infamous for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.