Several books relating to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument are hot off the presses and ready for curious readers and adventurers. More, publishers say, are in the planning stages. These are among the most recent:
WILD AND BEAUTIFUL: GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT, photography by Anselm Spring, with an essay by Mark A. Taylor (Gibbs Smith, Publisher; 128 pages, $45).
Spring, a German photographer, captures the monument's palette of colors, from the vibrant to the subtle. Several enlarged images seem a tad grainy for a coffee-table book like this, though that may be for artistic effect. He relishes abstract patterns in the rock and nature's details as well as panoramas in both sunlight and storm.
Taylor's text, as does as the preface by publisher Gibbs Smith, leans often toward the landscape's spiritual impacts, with variable success. However, the writer's take-you-there travelogues and personal experiences are laced with observational nuggets.
Oddly perhaps, little of the territory's historic or scientific value - President Clinton's avowed basis for establishing the national monument - is discussed until the end of the book, where Jerry Meredith, the monument's manager, is given a few pages to clue us in.
An error of fact early in the book, too, is jarring. The 100,000-square-mile Colorado River Plateau is NOT larger than all Europe. Our encyclopedias estimate that the continent is 40 times bigger. Whoops.
VISIONS OF THE GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE: EXAMINING UTAH'S NEWEST NATIONAL MONUMENT, edited by Robert B. Keiter, Sarah B. George and Joro Walker (Utah Museum of Natural History-Wallace Stegner Center, distributed by University of Utah Press; 184 pages; $19.95).
A daylong conference last year at the U. generated a mass of information - maps, charts and diagrams - as well as a flood of words about Grand Staircase-Escalante. This well-conceived volume is one of the end results. It collects 18 papers and essays to create a particularly effective introduction to the monument.
Yes, certain sections of the book tend to be bureaucratically defensive, environmentally insistent or dense and scholarly, couched in the precise yet - to the lay public - opaque language of researchers. But if you're intrigued by facts, figures and perspectives, this can be a fascinating read, unveiling details about the monument's 286-million-year geologic past and noting that it is an ecological crossroads for the West's flora and fauna.
And several essays are entertaining and/or invigorating.
Dean L. May effectively intertwines his personal and familial connections in relating the region's human history. Scott Truman uses anecdotes to tell of local concerns about insiders who arrive "with an insult on their lips and an injunction in their hands." With justification, economist Thayne Robson gets on the stump to rail against "segments of the Utah community and national interest groups (that) have created an environment in which the democratic tradition of compromise that produces rational decisions is impossible."
THE UNTOLD STORY OF UTAH'S GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT, by Maxine Newell and Terby Barnes (Canyon Country Publications; 112 pages; $11).
This enlightening little paperback is actually more about the 20th century controversies preceding President Clinton's declaration than about what has become Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
An interesting map reproduced on the back cover outlines the "Escalante National Monument" proposed in the mid-1930s, during the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rooted in a suggestion from geologist Harry A. Aurand, it would have set aside 4 million acres along the Green and Colorado rivers in southeastern Utah. Today much of the same area has indeed been given special status - as Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and now Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Authors Newell and Barnes base much of their book on a file about the early monument proposals barely saved from the Park Service trash bin, as well as research and back copies of the Moab Times-Independent. In the process, they've helped give a modicum of credit where credit is due, to people like Aurand and Park Service visionaries Roger Toll, Jesse Nusbaum and George Olcott.
Today's controversies are nothing new. A political, bureaucratic and economic wrestling match has been under way for more than six decades.
CANYONEERING 3: LOOP HIKES IN UTAH'S ESCALANTE, by Steve Allen (University of Utah Press; 328 pages; $21.95).
Allen, a veteran explorer and guide, outlines 37 hikes - all of them loops - in the Escalante region. About half of them involve canyons, slots and ridgelines now included within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. His intent is to direct hikers of various abilities, from novices and day hikers to back-country adventurers, to places of possible interest.
This is an ethically tricky thing to do in print if you're an avowed environmental conservationist, as Allen seems to be. His friend Bert Fingerhut offers justification in the book's foreword: "My own answer is simple: Where did the generals and soldiers for the neverending war to protect wild places come from and how did they get there?" The "leap from city or farm to the wilderness" requires guide books, photography books, slide shows and articles about backcountry exploration as well as crusading organizations, Fingerhut writes.
As it happens, Allen's style is informed and clear. In addition to specific hikes, he provides chapters on the area's geology (with Tom Messenger) and history, as well as inserts on notable characters, such as adventurers Harry Aleson, Georgie White and the vanished Everett Ruess. The trail instructions also include specific historical and geologic notes and route "digressions."
BEST EASY DAY HIKES: GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE & THE GLEN CANYON REGION, by Ron Adkison (Falcon Publishing; 80 pages; $6.95).
We haven't seen this one, but a few bookstores we contacted are aware of it or have it on order. Pat Davis of Falcon Publishing says it includes 24 hikes. Adkison has written Falcon guides about Utah's national parks, the Grand Canyon and other regions of the West.