CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK
Wilderness of Rocks
Nicky Leach
64 pages. Oversized 10”x13”
ISBN 978-1-58071-079-4
$12.95

This stunningly beautiful, oversized book is lavishly illustrated with breathtaking color imagery by America’s leading landscape photographers. In addition to the stunning photography, the book also includes detailed maps of the park and region and insightful, heartfelt narratives detailing the park’s natural and human histories.

Summertime in southeast Utah’s La Sal Mountains. Up here, among the aspens, it’s a pleasant 75 degrees—a blessed relief from the 100-degree temperatures in the sandstone canyons below. Hummingbirds dive-bomb the yellow spout of the red gas can inside my truck, mistaking it for a flower. A ground squirrel sits on its hind legs on a stump, angrily scolding me in a series of odd ratcheting sounds. Curious mule deer rustle in a clearing, huge ears twitching away flies and radiating heat, then bound off into the deep forest, all four legs leaving the ground at once like cartoon Bambis.

In the meadows below, a herd of pronghorn slowly wanders single file behind a huge fallen boulder. Nearby, a local rancher’s mama cows and their calves idly graze the road margins, watched by a single cowboy out for a morning ride. Knee-deep in grass, the cows meander at will, growing big and fat, before the September roundup brings them down to the 4,000-foot rims of the Canyon Country below—a fall ritual enacted in this historic ranching region for well over a century.

Overlooks along the scenic La Sal Mountain Loop offer mesmerizing 100-mile views of Canyonlands and Arches national parks and the Canyon Country beyond. Rolled out to the horizon, it looks like a giant topographical map—all tilted angles and skewed planes, as unexpectedly pleasing to the eye as the ordered chaos of a Frank Gehry building amid the cookie-cutter architecture of a city street. Nature is the architect in this wild country, though, which has more weirdly eroded buttes, spires, fins, arches, natural bridges, grabens, salt domes, monoclines, synclines, anticlines, laccoliths, and other geological wonders than anywhere else in the Southwest.

From my mountain perch, it’s clear that the La Sal Mountains are inextricably linked to the adjoining Paradox Basin in which Canyon Country has taken shape. Dropping down even as the mountains were pushed up millions of years ago, the Paradox Basin is actually a huge bowl filled with several miles of sediments built up over millions of years from a succession of encroaching seas, sandy beaches, mud flats, dune deserts, and shedding mountain debris. The weight of successive layers compressed the underlying sediments, hardening them into rock layers cemented and colored by minerals that have given the rocks their distinctive personalities and hues.

—From “Wilderness of Rocks” by Nicky Leach

Wilderness of Rocks
Nicky Leach
64 pages. Oversized 10”x13”
ISBN 978-1-58071-079-4
$12.95

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Arches: Where Rock Meets Sky by Nicky Leach

National Parks of Utah: A Journey to The Colorado Plateau by Nicky Leach

Arches & Canyonlands: Walking In Canyon Country by Nicky Leach

Arches & Canyonlands Postcard Book

Peaks, Plateaus, and Canyons: Scenes from the Grand Circle by Jeff Nicholas and Jim & Lynn Wilson

Grand Canyon: Window of Time by Stewart Aitchison

Bryce Canyon: The Desert’s Hoodoo Heart by Greer Chesher

Zion: Sanctuary in the Desert by Nicky Leach

Grand Staircase Collection: Bryce, Zion and Grand Canyon