Zion
National Park has served as the stage set for more than twenty-five
movies, including, most notably, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It
is also a popular tourist destination, boasting a visitor log of more
than 2.5 million every year. During the summer months, tour buses
rattle their way into the park almost hourly. Sightseers crowd
polished-trestle-wood and river-rock inns, buy hand-woven bags imported
from Guatemala, and sip icy margaritas from the porch of an old bar
with a stunning view of irrigated Mexican primroses and glowing redrock
cliffs. While Zion National Park is a familiar vista to millions of
day-trippers and film viewers, few ever intimately experience the
unpredictable, often hostile, but always magnificent reality of this
rugged frontier.
Greer K. Chesher brings us the first personal and
in-depth look at Zion. In striking and elegant prose, she vividly
recounts experiences that only a park ranger and resident of the region
for more than two decades could have. She also lucidly explains the
area’s natural and geological wonders, including the dynamics
of Zion’s ecology, changes to plant and animal species
wrought through human technology, and what these changes mean for the
future. Beyond the region’s amazing array of flora and fauna,
she describes the landscape’s lasting imprint on settlers and
current residents, and explains the politics that have long surrounded
its protection. Award-winning photographer Michael Plyler, also a
resident of the region, captures the allure of the park in spectacular
images that illustrate the intimate details and geological wonder of
the place. These exquisite photographs make this book a stunning
pictorial as well as literary tribute to a place that is known to so
many but about which so little is truly understood.
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Zion Canyon
A
Storied Land
by
Greer K. Chesher
University
of Arizona Press, 2007.
Order
a copy
|
