Edward Abbey's classic portrait of canyon country, solitude, and wilderness, influential to the identity and mythology of the Colorado Plateau.
Abbey rolls up to the Arches ranger station in a government pickup, moves into a trailer, and starts keeping a journal. It is not a ranger's journal. The ranger's journal in his head has weather observations and truck mileage in it. The journal he's actually writing is about wind, and the way light hits slickrock at seven in the morning, and tourists, and snakes, and whether a place has moral standing in its own right and what a ranger's job might be if it does.
That's Desert Solitaire. It's partly a nature book. It's partly a polemic. In significant parts, it is frankly a standup routine about the Park Service. Abbey moves between those registers in a single paragraph — sometimes a single sentence — and the whole book's durability is in that tonal instability. He writes reverently about a juniper canyon and then immediately cracks a joke about RVs. Both moves land, because he's done the noticing-work that makes the anger sound like something more than anger.
I hand this to people the first time they ask where to start on Abbey, because this is the one that set the voice. He's the reason a certain kind of paragraph in a certain kind of trip report sounds the way it does. If you've ever written a line about a morning at camp and felt like it had somebody else's fingerprints on it, those are probably Abbey's fingerprints, pressed in there pretty deep. He figured out how to be spiritually serious about canyon country without getting precious, and we've all been borrowing the move ever since, whether we admit it or not.
The book isn't perfect. The Hayduke chapter points toward The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Abbey's politics have corners that've aged harder than the nature writing. But the core of it — a ranger's logbook that turns into an argument about what the desert is for — is as strong as it was in 1968. The Glen Canyon chapter alone is a small elegy that still does what elegies are supposed to do. It's also the most useful piece in the book for anyone floating the Colorado today, because it names what was lost, and how, and who chose it.
Read it the first time you camp alone in canyon country. Read it again after you've been down the river. The second read is different. The argument hasn't changed. You have.
