Happy to announce that my image of Thompson Pass looking toward Moab was used as the cover image to a great new book published by The University of Utah Press. The book is Roads in the Wilderness Conflict in Canyon Country by Jedediah S. Rogers who is the winner of the Wallace Stegner Prize in American Environmental or Western History. It can be ordered through Amazon and University of Utah Press. Over the Holidays I had time to read it and found it very enlightening. For example I had no idea how deeply entrenched differing views of the landscape are and how roads play directly into those views. As a new westerner (from Ohio) and avid vehicle based explorer I found Roads in the Wilderness to be welcome change from the trail guides I read on the area. After reading Jedediah Rogers book I have a deeper understanding of how the roads came to be, what they represent to various parties in Southern Utah. I can highly recommend this book to fellow explorers of southern Utah. I am grateful to have one of my images grace the cover of this fine book.

From the back of the book: “A fresh and engaging contribution to environmental history, especially for its interpretation of the Mormon cultural heritage as a driving force for the economic development of the Utah hinterlands. Rogers’s work shows how cultural imperatives arising out of the nineteenth-century settlement period, including memories of the 1879 to 1880 Bluff–San Juan expedition, gave roads their lasting and significant meaning in the minds of many contemporary residents.”
—Frederick H. Swanson, author of Dave Rust: A Life in the Canyons