His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book. Warning that the reader may find his pages 'coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced.' But if they are all these, they are many things besides. The author is a rebel, an eloquent loner. To the 'builders' and 'developers' among park administrators, his book may well seem like a wild ride on a bucking bronco. Yet the dilemma is that each of the proliferating roads subtracts something from the wild scene the park is supposed to preserve and at the same time attracts more cars as inevitably 'as water under pressure follows everyĬhannel open to it.' Unless something is done to exclude or confine the swelling tide of cars, the author maintains, the gradual destruction of our national parks, as we know them, is inevitable. The solution, according to the 'developers' among park administrators, is to build The same problem has overtaken other parks and threatens almost all eventually. Now the summer problem there is the traffic problem, what to do with all the people in automobilesĬreeping bumper to bumper along the roads of this confined valley. Seventy-five years ago, when John Muir and his fellow conservationists organized the Sierra Club, one of its early aims was to attract people to Yosemite. For 'to serve the public' has come to mean 'to serve the public These two goals are now in head-on collision.

Designed to set aside, for all the people, wild areas of specialīeauty, this system originated with a two-fold purpose: to serve the public and to preserve the areas. It is the outgrowth of a bitter awareness of all that has been lost, all that is being lost, all that is going to be lost in that glory of our American democracy, our system of national parks.

Based roughly on the months of the April-to-September season of the ranger-with side excursions, mentalĪnd physical-his book is a voice crying in the wilderness, for the wilderness. The one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.' For him, this is the desert, beyond the end of the roads, in the stark canyonland of southeast Utah.Īs the sole park ranger at the Arches National Monument, 20 miles from Moab, he knew it before the paved roads, before the high tide of beer cans, gum wrappers, cigarette stubs, bottle caps and discarded Kleenex, before the parked trailers, their windowsīlue tinged at night while the inmates, instead of watching the desert stars, watch TV and listen to the canned laughter of Hollywood. He third sentence of Edward Abbey's 'Desert Solitaire' reads: Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place,

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