Geology is the star attraction in many national parks, but Arches National Park reveals erosional wonders like no other place on earth. There’s something thrilling and slightly unsettling about a massive rock with a hole in its middle or a ribbon of stone flung like a spider’s thread from one rock face to another. And there’s nothing quite like a view of blue sky or snow-capped mountains framed by stone. So many stony holes of so many shapes and sizes abound here that people spend years hunting unrecorded arches, quarreling over measurements and categories, and dreaming up original names.
Part of the National Park Readers series, The Arches Reader is an anthology of writing about Arches National Park and the surrounding area. The selections range from creative nonfiction to short fiction to poetry to amateur versions of scientific reports; they are wide-ranging and have never before been collected in one place; several selections are previously unpublished. Photographs collected here include both historic black-and-white images and beautiful, full-color images of some of Arches’ most striking features. The Arches Reader is an essential companion for anyone who wants to better understand its unique natural and human past.
If you want to know Arches National Park, and you've read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, your next book needs to be The Arches Reader. Jeff Nichols is a historian, and he shows here his respect for fascinating original sources and excerpts long enough to capture their full-throated flavor. Many stories in Nichols’s anthology feature park rangers and their families who turn out to be the colorful opposite of faceless bureaucrats. Arches sits on the bank of the Colorado River just outside Moab, and so this collection extends beyond the park to include uranium hunters, pilgrim poets, cranky environmentalists, and early outfitters. Nichols uses Arches as a springboard into Colorado Plateau environmental history and rural Utah culture. It’s a worthy plunge into vastly enjoyable territory.
Stephen Trimble, editor of The Capitol Reef Reader and Red Rock Stories
Arches’ story is unique, tied so closely as it is to the fate of its adjacent community. I’m not sure that any other park can tell quite the same story of an explosion in popularity and a community’s attendant ambivalence. And its sometimes despair.
Jen Jackson Quintano, author of Blow Sand in His Soul: Bates Wilson, the Heart of Canyonlands
About the Author
Jeffrey D. Nichols is professor of history at Westminster University. He is the author of Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power and co-editor of Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Edward Abbey, The First Morning (1968)
2. Amy Irvine, The First Morning, A Reply (2018)
Part I: The Place of Rainbows
3. Arthur Winslow, A Natural Bridge in Utah (1898)
4. Joseph C. Anderson, Geology of Arches (1934)
5. Raye Ringholz, Bonanza at Big Indian (2002)
6. Frank A. Beckwith, 17-Year-Old Youth Finds Dinosaur Bones While Herding Cows (1934)
7. D. Elden Beck, Biology on Horseback (1947)
8. Brooke Williams, The Colorado: Archetypal River (2014)
9. Edward Abbey, Cliffrose and Bayonets (1968)
10. Gerald Callahan, Almost Like Dancing (1998)
11. Sam Webster, Mountain Lion (2011)
12. Terry Tempest Williams, Winter Solstice at the Moab Slough (1993)
Part II: Living and Working in Arches
13. Descendants of Arches' First Peoples (2016)
14. Tom McCourt and Wade Allinson, Quit-sub-soc-its (2017)
15. Mary Langworthy, William Grandstaff, African-American Frontiersman (2022)
16. Esther Stanley Rison, Wolfe Ranch Memories (ca. 1977)
17. B. W. Allred, The Life of a Horse and Buggy Stage Line Operator (1972)
Part III: A Wonder for the World
18. Alexander Ringhoffer, The Man who Discovered the Devil’s Garden (1928)
19. John F. Hoffman, Devil’s Garden: The Case of the Perambulating Place-name or, How Arches Became Part of the National Park System (1981)
20. Frank A. Beckwith, Good Roads (1933-1934)
21. Managing the Monument: Excerpts from Custodians’ and Superintendents’ Reports, Arches National Monument (1940s-1950s)
22. Jack Breed, Utah’s Arches of Stone (1947)
23. Mitch Williams’s Story (2004)
24. Tug Wilson Remembers (2012)
25. Caroline Wilson Remembers (2012)
26. Jim Stiles, Quiet Times at Arches National Monument (2013)
27. Jim Stiles, Ken Sleight Remembers: Arches (2016)
28. James Swensen, Life comes to Arches: Josef Muench’s 1953 Photograph of Delicate Arch, Utah (2022)
29. Tom Till, Tom Till’s Arches (2022)
30. Visitors on the Trail (1953, 2008, 2010)
31. Commendations and Complaints (1978, 1987)
32. Reactions to the Expansion of Arches (1969)
33. Jim Webster, Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way (2015)
34. Noel Poe, Dealing with Cremains (2016)
35. Doug Travers, The Very Original Arch Hunter (1969)
36. Jim Stiles, The “Stabilization” of Delicate Arch (2015)
37. Tom Sloan, New Arches Opposed (?)(1977)
38. Correspondent Todd, Arched Entrance Arches Eyebrows (1987)
39. Bruce Hamilton, Edward Abbey, Druid of the Arches (1976)
40. Ken Sanders, The Pasty White Shellfish Comes to Arches National Park (2022)
41. Jim Stiles, Tourists in the Vortex (2007)
42. Tourists Bite Back (2015)
Part IV: Imagining Arches
43. José Knighton, Near Delicate Arch (1979)
44. David Feela, A picture is worth, maybe, 25 cents (2011)
45. Rebecca Bailey, Wall Arch (2016)
46. Erica Olsen, Adventure Highway (2012)
47. Natasha Sajé, a meeting (2016)
48. Terry Tempest Williams, The Coyote Clan (1989)
Timeline
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Sources and Permissions
