A key geological reference for understanding the uplift, stratigraphy, tectonics, and erosional history of the Colorado Plateau.
Baars's other book, the bigger and more ambitious one. Where Canyon Country is a field-friendly introduction, The Colorado Plateau: A Geologic History is the full regional synthesis — uplift history, stratigraphy from Precambrian to present, structural geology, erosional history, and the specific tectonic and depositional story that explains why the plateau looks like the plateau. This is the reference book you keep on the shelf when you want the complete answer, not the quick one.
Baars was a working geologist who spent his career on the plateau, and the book reflects that. He knows the specific outcrops he's talking about. He can walk you through a stratigraphic column and tell you which formation in it he has measured in the field. The result is a text that is more authoritative than the typical regional geology overview — you're getting it from somebody who did the work, not from somebody who summarized other people's work. That authority is worth the occasional dryness of the prose.
I use this book as a companion to McPhee's Annals. McPhee gives you the narrative geology of the continent. Baars gives you the specific geology of this one region. Together they fill in the picture: the plateau as a single coherent block of North American crust that has been doing specific geologic work for a long time, and that we can now read the history of, layer by layer, if we have the patience. Baars has the patience. He is teaching you to have it too.
The book is heavier going than Canyon Country. The prose is more technical. The reader it wants is somebody with at least a rough undergraduate-geology orientation, and if you don't have one, you'll be looking up terms. That said, most of the book is legible with enough effort, and the sections on uplift history and regional erosion are the clearest treatment of those topics I've seen for the Colorado Plateau specifically. Pair it with a good geologic map of the region and you can actually reason about the landscape you are in.
Keep it as a reference. Reach for it when a specific question comes up that the smaller Canyon Country can't answer. The two Baars volumes together constitute the best single-author introduction to the geology of this region that exists, and thirty years after publication, both still hold up as the standard you measure other regional geology books against.
