The Arches Reader

In forty-eight chapters divided into four sections, editor Jeffrey D. Nichols, an historian at Westminster University in Salt Lake City, chronicles a delightful appreciation of Arches National Park from geologic wonderland to national monument in 1929 and up to today, when it is a national park tourist magnet annually attracting over 1.5 million people. This anthology includes poems, photographs, short essays, government reports, and diverse documents. The book is more than an anthology of writing about Arches itself, and Nichols has skillfully combined archaeology, history, nature writing, satirical spoofs, and facts about both the Colorado River and the town of Moab now inundated with visitors and motels. This volume is a fine addition to the National Park Readers Series edited by David Stanley and published by the University of Utah Press.Edward Abbey is here, of course, along with his prescience that a tourist tide would engulf Moab. Abbey called it “industrial tourism.” But in The Arches Reader those years are far off. Instead, we have halcyon days of little to no visitation; poor, unimproved roads; and tales of seeing the arches on horseback. The usual writing suspects are well represented: Ed Abbey, Amy Irvine, Brooke and Terry Tempest Williams, Tom McCourt, Jack Breed, Tom Till, Jim Stiles, Erica Olsen, Raye C. Ringholz, and Ken Sanders. There are also lesser-known writers, newspaper accounts, and ranch memories.After Abbey's introductory essay, a vital piece from Abbey's Desert Solitaire (1968) titled “The First Morning,” and Amy Irvine's rejoinder “The First Morning, A Reply” in Desert Cabal (2018), the anthology begins with part 1, “The Place of Rainbows,” with essays on flowers, the Colorado River, biology, geology, and the 1950s uranium boom. Raye C. Ringholz portrays the luck of prospector Charlie Steen, who was down to his last tank of gas when he hit the “Bonanza at Big Indian,” which became the title of an essay from Ringholz's book Uranium Frenzy (2002). The Mi Vida mine changed Steen's life and put Moab on the yellowcake map.Part 2 is “Living and Working in Arches,” with a variety of stories including information on Arches’ Native Americans and a skirmish with Utes at the beginning of Moab's settlement. A short essay features as many facts as can be mustered about William Grandstaff, an African American cowboy whose name graces a nearby canyon south of the national park.Part 3, “A Wonder of the World,” includes information on discovering Devil's Garden; the desperate need for good roads into Arches; stories by Tug Wilson, whose father was Arches’ superintendent; and Jack Breed's National Geographic article on Arches in 1947. This is the longest section and includes visitors’ comments, the expansion of Arches, national park status, and “Tourists in the Vortex” from Jim Stiles's book Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed (2007). In true Abbey-esque fashion, Stiles rants against tourists and has fun doing so. The best screed is his piece on “The Mega Motor Home” where he writes, “Because size does matter. Some locals despise motor homes. . . . So to you wealthy weasels in mechanical, high-tech mansions, all I can advise is that you not make things any worse than they already are” (266). Stiles is referring to taking up parking spaces, which motor homes do with outsize abandon.The book wraps up with part 4, “Imagining Arches,” and concludes with Terry Tempest Williams's paean to canyon country “The Coyote Clan,” where she observes, “These astonishing formations invite a new mythology for desert goers, one that acknowledges the power of story and ritual yet lies within the integrity of our own cultures. The stories rooted in experience become beads to trade. It is the story, always the story, that precedes and follows the journey” (290).This is a welcomed book. For Arches readers and revelers, it's all here, from Abbey sipping coffee in his trailer near Balanced Rock, to a bizarre attempt to “stabilize” Delicate Arch with a concrete collar around the east leg, to the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the James Watt dummy fashioned after the Christian millennialist James Watt who as Secretary of the Interior didn't care a fig about public lands. The map on page xi is too small to be useful. Additional maps, with frequently mentioned place names such as the Wolfe Cabin, Devil's Garden, the Windows, Delicate Arch, Landscape Arch, Balanced Rock, Courthouse Wash, etc., would help readers. That comment aside, the essays are tight, succinct, and charming.James Swensen's piece on “Life Comes to Arches” explains the power of Joseph Muench's 1953 color photo of Delicate Arch that ran on the cover of Life magazine and reached millions of Americans. In 1941 only two hundred tourists arrived at the monument. Eight decades later, in 2021, that number had swollen to 1.8 million. The Arches Reader is an excellent contribution to Southwestern environmental history and the history of our national parks. This would be a valuable book for visitors to have in their vehicles as they now wait patiently in line for timed entries to see the world's largest collection of sandstone arches.