The Redrock Chronicles

Utah's redrock canyon has some of the most spectacular terrain in America and the world. The lands lie at the heart of the Colorado Plateau - 130,000 square miles of uplifted rock surrounded on all sides by the remnants of once-active volcanoes. In this volume, the author focuses on southern Utah's unprotected lands, combining history, geography and photography to report the full story of the region. The account covers the area's violent geologic beginnings, the coming (and going) of pre-Puebloan peoples whose drawings still adorn rocks and caves there, the Mormon settlement of the 1840s and 50s, the uranium boom of the 1950s, the beginning of tourism and parkland protection in the 1930s, and the controversial modern movement to preserve millions of acres of wild Utah land in the National Wilderness Preservation System. T.H. Watkins takes readers on a tour of the Grand Staircase of the plateaus, moving from the wild triangle of Kaiparowits Plateau, with its erosion-sculptured mesas, tablelands, benchlands and canyons, to a more welcoming kind of wilderness that sits northeast, across the rolling desert scrubland of Harris Wash, in the red-walled canyon of the Escalante River.
Not simply a celebration however, the book concludes with the author's call for the preservation of the unprotected wilderness that gives the land its character and colour. He offers the legislative device of wilderness designation as the necessary means of saving this plateau country that is not marked by one or two scenic marvels, but by a kaleidoscope of geological diversity.