ABOUT THIS BOOK

Geology is the star attraction in many national parks, but Arches National Park reveals erosional wonders like no other place on earth. There’s something thrilling and slightly unsettling about a massive rock with a hole in its middle or a ribbon of stone flung like a spider’s thread from one rock face to another. And there’s nothing quite like a view of blue sky or snow-capped mountains framed by stone. So many stony holes of so many shapes and sizes abound here that people spend years hunting unrecorded arches, quarreling over measurements and categories, and dreaming up original names.

Part of the National Park Readers series, The Arches Reader is an anthology of writing about Arches National Park and the surrounding area. The selections range from creative nonfiction to short fiction to poetry to amateur versions of scientific reports; they are wide-ranging and have never before been collected in one place; several selections are previously unpublished. Photographs collected here include both historic black-and-white images and beautiful, full-color images of some of Arches’ most striking features. The Arches Reader is an essential companion for anyone who wants to better understand its unique natural and human past.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jeffrey D. Nichols is professor of history at Westminster University. He is the author of Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power and co-editor of Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West.

REVIEWS

"If you want to know Arches National Park, and you've read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, your next book needs to be The Arches Reader. Jeff Nichols is a historian, and he shows here his respect for fascinating original sources and excerpts long enough to capture their full-throated flavor. Many stories in Nichols’s anthology feature park rangers and their families who turn out to be the colorful opposite of faceless bureaucrats. Arches sits on the bank of the Colorado River just outside Moab, and so this collection extends beyond the park to include uranium hunters, pilgrim poets, cranky environmentalists, and early outfitters. Nichols uses Arches as a springboard into Colorado Plateau environmental history and rural Utah culture. It’s a worthy plunge into vastly enjoyable territory."—Stephen Trimble, editor of The Capitol Reef Reader and Red Rock Stories

“Arches’ story is unique, tied so closely as it is to the fate of its adjacent community. I’m not sure that any other park can tell quite the same story of an explosion in popularity and a community’s attendant ambivalence. And its sometimes despair.”—Jen Jackson Quintano, author of Blow Sand in His Soul: Bates Wilson, the Heart of Canyonlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents: