George Corning Fraser, who lived in the days before automobile travel became a way of life, was an easterner who loved to vacation on horseback in the American Southwest. No mere tourist, he sought out the most remote and forbidding landscapes he could find: the seldom-visited country north of the Grand Canyon, the vast slickrock expanses of the Navajo Reservation, and sites such as Zion Canyon and Capitol Reef before they became national parks. An amateur geologist, Fraser penned his own memorable observations of the region’s landforms and jotted down engaging accounts of local ranchers, sheepherders, and villagers.
 
Frederick H. Swanson has edited Fraser’s voluminous journals into a single volume covering three trips taken from 1914 to 1916. As Fraser wades the bone-chilling waters of the Zion Narrows, crosses the Grand Canyon in midsummer heat, and rides through the trackless forest of the Aquarius Plateau, he conveys impressions of the land that will fascinate any reader who wonders what the canyon country was like before it became a popular tourist destination—and one that will inform historians interested in early accounts of the region. Accompanied by a selection of photographs taken by Fraser and his fellow travelers, Journeys in the Canyon Lands brings to life the Southwest’s breathtaking backcountry on the brink of discovery.

George Corning Fraser (1872–1935) studied geology at Princeton, practiced commercial law on Wall Street, and made his home in Morristown, New Jersey. In addition to traveling in the Southwest, he invested in railroad and ranch properties in the region and was chairman of the Aztec Land and Cattle Company. Frederick H. Swanson works as an editor and writer from his home in Salt Lake City and has edited publications for the U.S. Geological Survey, the Utah Wilderness Coalition, and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

“Fraser enlightens on multiple levels, with the first being his effort to document and inform.”—Journal of the West

“A memoir of a time as well as of [Fraser’s] experience, an expression of a simpler world, where truth and knowing were within the grasp of ordinary people who made the effort to get beyond the limits of their world.”—Hal K. Rothman, author of Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West