NATIONAL PARKS OF UTAH
A Journey to The Colorado Plateau
Nicky Leach
64 pages. Oversized 10”x13”
ISBN 1-58071-046-8
$9.95

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.

It is an early July evening at Green River Overlook in Canyonlands National Park’s Island in the Sky District. The smooth sandstone boulder beneath me still radiates warmth from today’s 100-degree scorched sunlight. It is peaceful up here on this 6,000-foot headland. There’s not a human being in sight. The silence is so deep, I can hear my heart knocking inside its bony cage.

Two enormous resident ravens call to each other from across the canyon, debating the best place to find supper, their stereophonic caws amplified and echoing in the still air. One flies up to where I sit, strutting like a tuxedoed waiter. It bows and scrapes in front of me, iridescent blue-black feathers ruffling slightly on the cooling evening canyon winds. Beak half-open, it stops in mid-sentence to look me over. The breeze stirs the yellow waving wands of prince’s plume and dislodges a fragile butterfly resting on a petal. A ground squirrel scuttles over the rocks, airy tail aloft, searching for seeds.

...I first saw Utah’s national parks 21 years ago. I have returned many times since. When I want to be awestruck by rock and space, I go to Canyonlands. When I want to be embraced by water, vegetation, and redrock canyons, I go to Zion. We are privileged in this country to have so much that is beautiful and intact made available to us whenever we need it. In turn, we must come to such places with an open heart, willing to enter into an intimate relationship with the wild. “The desert, the real desert,” wrote Randall Henderson, publisher of Desert Magazine and an early explorer of Canyonlands, “is a land whose character is hidden except to those who come with friendliness and understanding.” Welcome friends.

—From “A Journey to The Colorado Plateau” by Nicky Leach

A Journey to The Colorado Plateau
Nicky Leach
64 pages. Oversized 10”x13”
ISBN 1-58071-046-8
$9.95

OTHER TITLES THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST

Arches: Where Rock Meets Sky by Nicky Leach

Arches & Canyonlands: Walking In Canyon Country by Nicky Leach

Arches & Canyonlands Postcard Book

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

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

Zion: Sanctuary in the Desert by Nicky Leach

Windows of The Past: The Prehistoric Drama by Florence Lister