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Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

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When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road and many other critically acclaimed books vividly captures the essence of his life during three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah. This is a rare view of a quest to experience nature in its purest form--the silence, the struggle, the overwhelming beauty. But this is also the gripping, anguished cry of a man of character who challenges the growing exploitation of the wilderness by oil and mining interests, as well as by the tourist industry.

Abbey's observations and challenges remain as relevant now as the day he wrote them. Today, Desert Solitaire asks if any of our incalculable natural treasures can be saved before the bulldozers strike again.

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

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About the author

Edward Abbey

67 books1,695 followers
Edward Paul Abbey (1927–1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views.

Abbey attended college in New Mexico and then worked as a park ranger and fire lookout for the National Park Service in the Southwest. It was during this time that he developed the relationship with the area’s environment that influenced his writing. During his service, he was in close proximity to the ruins of ancient Native American cultures and saw the expansion and destruction of modern civilization.

His love for nature and extreme distrust of the industrial world influenced much of his work and helped garner a cult following.

Abbey died on March 14, 1989, due to complications from surgery. He was buried as he had requested: in a sleeping bag—no embalming fluid, no casket. His body was secretly interred in an unmarked grave in southern Arizona.

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Profile Image for Will Byrnes.
1,325 reviews121k followers
September 6, 2023
Desert Solitaire seemed the right book to take along on a trip to the southwest in September 2009.

Abbey writes of the beauty of the southwest. As a ranger at Arches National Park he had a close relationship with some of our country’s most exquisite scenery. In the 18 essays that make up the book, he offers not only his appreciation for the sometimes harsh environment of Utah and Arizona, but his notions on things political. Those are not so compelling. He tells tales of people he has known and in doing so enhances an image of his southwest as at once a beautiful and terrible place.

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North Window in Arches National Park

However, I have concluded, with apologies to Ernest Thompson, that Edward Abbey is an old poop. It is one thing to have a deep and abiding appreciation for a place, a thing, an experience, an environment, but Abbey seems determined that only certain sorts should be allowed to share that joy. And while he may wish for us as readers to appreciate what he appreciates, he seems uninterested in allowing for other joys by other people. While he offers detail and poetry about the desert and about untouched places, he sneers at the urban, at those he sees as lesser than himself. As such he taps into some tried and true American themes such as the romantic myth of self-sufficiency and our persistent national history of anti-city bias. Toss in some other dark impulses when he suggests that perhaps birth control for some poor people should be mandatory. Add a dose of survivalist paranoia as he sees one strong reason to support National Parks to be preserving a staging area for rebel militias after big government comes after us all. But don’t forget a gift for language, for description, for story-telling, and a strong poetic sensibility.

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Park Avenue - in Arches National Park

For those of us who, for whatever reasons, may not be able to manage ten-mile hikes, or who cannot rappel down canyon walls to experience the full range of experience available at our national parks, for those who may not have dedicated our existences to living as closely to the land as possible, we also are Americans, we also are people, and it is possible to take joy in natural wonder without the benefit of Abbey’s athleticism. He clearly winces at the possibility of roads being built that allow the non-hikers among us a chance to see at all, up close, or, at least closer, some of the parts of our parks that are currently inaccessible and he decries as abominations the possibility of mechanisms being constructed that provide an enhanced experience to those in wheelchairs, as if that were somehow shameful. Having just returned from several of the national parks mentioned in this book, I can safely report that I saw much stunning beauty, felt my appreciation of my country’s natural wonders swell, and believe that it is my entitlement as an American, no less than 20-something backpackers, to take joy in this common heritage. My inability to manage a back-country hike should not prevent me and others like me from sharing in our nation’s natural wonders. Surely there is a happy medium between the paving over of everything that Abbey fears and allowing reasonable access to our nation’s natural treasures to those of us who are not outdoorsmen.

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Balanced Rock - at Arches National Park

Beyond my gripes about his notions concerning who should be allowed into our parks, and other dark political impulses, Abbey is a very gifted writer. He has many stories to tell both about his personal experiences and about other characters he has encountered in his southwest existence. His love of the land comes through like a cactus barb into an unshod foot. You will get a feel for the lands he portrays, the land he loves. In addition, he seasons his narrative with references to more refined culture that one might find a bit surprising in a guy who presents as a mountain man.

I have not read Abbey’s later writings so will keep an open mind on where he wound up regarding his politics. I may not harbor particularly warm feelings for the guy overall, but I do share his love of our national parks, his visceral appreciation for natural beauty and appreciate his great skill as a writer. Hold your nose over some of the darker parts of this book, but it is a special read when he is not ranting.


(The shots in the review are mine from that trip.)

You might check out this wonderful article by Douglas Brinkley about Abbey and this book - President Trump, Please Read ‘Desert Solitaire’
Profile Image for Scott.
207 reviews59 followers
October 26, 2018
Part Walden, part Mein Kampf ... Desert Solitaire (1968) is to a certain extent sand-mad Edward Abbey's homage to the beauty of the American Southwest and to the necessity of wilderness ... but mostly, the book is an autobiographical paean to the sheer wonder of Abbey himself. Like the pioneers, prospectors, and developers who preceded him, Abbey lays claim to all the canyonlands and Four Corners region of southern Utah and northern Arizona: "Abbey's Country" he calls it, and he seeks to fill every twisting canyon and windswept plateau of his private playground with his own immense, misanthropic ego. His collected jottings form a notebook of random, often paranoid observations cast in anemic prose. He throws in everything that crosses his mind: a wearisome narrative of his float down the Colorado with a laconic traveling companion; bare, boring lists of plant names; a violent short story about prospecting; a dishonoring and disgusting story about finding the body of a lost tourist; jejune meditations on death and mortality; all of it crusted over with inane metaphysical babbling, insulting rants, and absurd polemics directed against technology, development, Native Americans, tourists, religion, the Park Service, the aged, the young, the government, and anyone or anything that is not Ed.

Yes, there are a few colorful descriptions of the scenery, but they are obscured by beer-swigging, cigar-chomping, beefsteak-chewing, bacon-burping, Bull-Durham big-mouth Ed's constant grab for attention. Abbey needs solitude about as much as a jackass needs a flush toilet. Ed's like your 10-year-old brother who torments you by jumping in front of your camera while you're trying to take a picture of a sunset or like a blathering guide who can't stem his prattle long enough to let you listen to the wind blowing through the canyons. All too often I found myself thinking, "Ed, shut up already and let me look around!" But he won't because he's got to tell me how he's crushed a rabbit's skull with a rock (it was an "experiment"), or how in a lovelorn moment he carved his name in an aspen (graffiti that will be twice as big in fifty years), or how he tore up dirt roads in his government-owned Chevvy pickup, or how he insulted some tourist or some tourist insulted him, or how he burned everything in sight with his paraffin-coated matches.

Desert Solitaire is gonzo environmentalism, and it's showing its age. The immense majesty and haunting beauty of southern Utah's canyons deserves a far better panegyrist.

Update: It's been ten years since I read Desert Solitaire and wrote this review. I'm happy to say that since then I've come across many excellent books on the Four Corners region. Two of the best are Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone and Sky, a new journalistic approach filled with wit and charm. And next, Ann Zwinger's very detailed and still readable Wind in the Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah. In fact, you can't go too far wrong with anything written by these two authors.
Profile Image for Julie G .
927 reviews3,306 followers
October 25, 2020
Reading Road Trip 2020

Current location: Utah

Oh, Mr. Abbey, how do I loathe thee?

Let me count the ways:

I loathe the way you wrapped a gopher snake around your waist and stroked your “friend's” head, thinking you were “astonishing and delighting any tourists” who happened by. You were supposed to be serving as a park ranger, Mr. Abbey, not a showboating dipshit who wanted to stroke a proxy second head in front of female visitors to the park. None of these ladies were “astonished” or “delighted,” by your exhibition sir. Just revolted.

I loathe the way you started every day with a cup of black coffee (which is extra manly, by the way, and always pointed out), and ended a day with a beer (preferably a free beer), but you quickly vilified anyone who drank a Coke or drove a car (According to Mr. Abbey, all people who drive cars are fat. Did you know that?).

I loathe the way you make fun of gardeners: “Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!” Really? You found it necessary to make fun of people who grow food and flowers, peacefully, in their yards??

I loathe the way you share your fantasies with us, telling us how you'd love to live in “a good tough Nevada mining town with legal prostitution” and how you dream of having a “chocolate-covered mistress to rub [your] back.” Now, this part confused me. If I were attracted to you, Mr. Abbey (shudders), would I need to dip my very white ass into a pot of chocolate to please you, or were you just letting us know that you'd prefer a lady of color? I wasn't quite sure.

I loathe the way you hate everything except yourself, black coffee, beer and prostitutes. I started tracking how many times you called people “filthy,” and I particularly loved these lines: “What about children? What about the aged and infirm? Frankly, we need to waste little sympathy on these two pressure groups.” Pressure groups??

Is this a joke? I set out to read this, thinking it would be a memoir of nature writing, desert conservation and National Park preservation. Instead, I get the non-stop inner thoughts of a misanthropic jerk-off.

I get it, Mr. Abbey: humans can be disrespectful, wasteful, and short-sighted in protecting our planet. Not just at National Parks in the U.S., but everywhere. Yes, we need to get our heads out of our asses, collectively, but nobody needs to stick their head up your ass, either.

I loathe the fact that I bought my copy of this book.
Profile Image for Orsodimondo.
2,265 reviews2,135 followers
December 21, 2021
TERRA INCOGNITA


Delicate Arch

La maggior parte delle cose di cui parlo in questo libro è già scomparsa o sta scomparendo in fretta. Questa non è una guida di viaggio, ma un’elegia. Una commemorazione. Avete in mano una pietra tombale. Un sasso insanguinato. Non lasciatevelo cadere su un piede, lanciatelo contro un grosso oggetto di vetro. Cosa avete da perdere?


Balanced Arch

Pagine che sgorgano, come l’acqua che nella canyonlands è così preziosa, dall’esperienza che lo stesso Abbey fece dieci anni prima della pubblicazione (1958 – 1968) lavorando sei mesi come ranger in un parco nazionale: Arches National Monument. Esperienza ripetuta l’anno dopo e poi ancora a distanza di qualche altro anno.
E se non fosse chiaro già da quanto citato sopra, Abbey enuncia esplicitamente il concetto: c’è chi si sente “a casa” di qua o di là, in campagna o in città, e est o a ovest, teologi, piloti, astronauti hanno persino sentito il richiamo della casa provenire dal cielo sopra di loro, nella fredda, oscura profondità dello spazio interstellare. Per quanto riguarda Edward Abbey il più bel posto sulla terra è canyonlands: in particolare la zona intorno a Moeb, nel sudest dello Utah.


Le tre Chocolate Drops nel Maze, che all’epoca della spedizione di Abbey non avevano ancora un soprannome.

Abbey - che poi scriverà quel divertente e piacevole manuale per l’ecoterrorista del XX secolo intitolato The Monkey Wrench Gang – I sabotatori - era uno spirito ben coltivato (laurea e master in letteratura inglese e filosofia), profondamente anarchico. In quel modo come lo sono, o lo possono essere, solo i cittadini a stelle-e-strisce: insofferente a governi, poteri, regole, limiti e confini.


Double O Arch

Dal punto di vista ambientale, era un ecologista avanguardista. Che nella difesa del territorio e della natura, poteva scivolare nel conservatorismo.
Questo bel libro è un inno alla natura selvaggia da difendere e preservare e conservare integra. È un’invettiva contro il progresso, la civiltà consumistica, il turismo industriale, contro l’uso distorto della scienza.
È anche un reportage di avventure ed escursioni, esplorazioni, incontri, cowboy e indiani.


Escalante River

Solo nel silenzio, per un attimo comprendo il terrore che assale tanti quando si trovano di fronte al deserto primordiale, la paura inconscia che li costringe a domare, ad alterare o distrugger ciò che non riescono a capire, a ridurre il pre-umano e il selvaggio a dimensioni umane. Qualsiasi cosa è meglio di affrontare direttamente l’anti-umano, quell’ “altro mondo” che spaventa non per i suoi pericoli e per la sua ostilità, ma per qualcosa di molto peggio, per la sua implacabile indifferenza.


Skyline Arch

Un capitolo a parte merita la musica del deserto, ispirata dal deserto, o che dia sensazioni desertiche.
Per Abbey è forse la musica di Schoenberg quella che meglio rappresenta la categoria, se così si può definirla:
la sua musica si avvicina più di qualsiasi altra che conosco a rappresentare la separazione, l’essere altro, l’estraneità del deserto. Come certi aspetti di questa musica, anche il deserto è privo di tonalità, crudele, limpido, inumano, né classico né romantico, privo di movimento e di emozioni, contemporaneamente sia disperato che profondamente caldo.

Proprio negli anni in cui Abbey scriveva si sviluppava un filone di musica del deserto - che segna differenze da deserto a deserto - ma si può comunque riassumere con una caratteristica che definirei psichedelica.
Nel 1970 Antonioni abbinava all’esplosione finale nel deserto californiano di Zabriskie Point l’esplosione cosmica dei Pink Floyd (la versione speciale di “Careful with That Axe, Eugene”). I deserti d’America ispiravano le sessioni senza limiti di tempo dell’allucinato Jerry Garcia e della sua band del Morto Riconoscente.
Man mano quella che negli States si definisce musica del deserto si è diretta a cercare l’effetto lisergico nelle chitarre elettriche sempre più dure, martellanti (lo stoner rock).

Il deserto del Sahara genera musica diversa: si dice che il blues sia nato lì. Ma certo è un blues molto diverso da quello degli Stati Uniti del sud: meno caldo, meno emotivo, con meno movimento e meno tonalità. E su questo mi pare Abbey avesse colto in pieno, con buon orecchio.



Per me i momenti più belli e pregnanti sono le descrizioni del paesaggio, di una bellezza che toglie il fiato (anche se Abbey direbbe che non c’è fiato da togliere): la flora e la fauna, che per quanto in pieno deserto senza oasi, riescono a essere di forme e varietà e colore e consistenza e odore molteplici. Le rocce, i cieli, la sabbia, l’acqua dei fiumi e delle pozze, gli animali, quelli che camminano, quelli che strisciano o nuotano o volano.
E i momenti più belli sono quelli di immersione totale nella natura primordiale del deserto. Di profonda solitudine con totale appagamento dei sensi e dello spirito.


Landscape Arch

Il mezzogiorno qui è come una droga. La luce è psichedelica, l’aria secca ed elettrica fa da narcotico. Per me il deserto è stimolante, eccitante, esigente; non ho la tentazione di dormire o di rilassarmi in sogni occulti, ma mi fa l’effetto opposto, mi affila e accentua la vista, il tatto, l’udito, il gusto e l’odorato. Ciascuna pietra, ciascuna pianta, ciascun granello di sabbia esiste in se stesso e per se stesso con una chiarezza che non è diminuita da nessuna suggestione di realtà diversa. Claritas, integritas, veritas. Solo la luce del sole tiene unite le cose. Il mezzogiorno è l’ora cruciale: il deserto si mette a nudo con crudeltà, senza nessun significato aldilà della sua stessa esistenza.


Devil’s Garden
Profile Image for Marvin.
1,414 reviews5,369 followers
June 4, 2009
Any discussion of the great Southwest regional writer Edward Abbey invariably turns to the fact that he was a pompous self-centered hypocritical womanizer. And those were his good qualities (just kidding, Michelle). He advocated birth control and railed against immigrants having children yet fathered five children himself, he fought against modern intrusion in the wilderness yet had no problem throwing beer cans out of his car window, He hated ranchers and farmers yet was a staunch supporter of the National Rifle Association, he hated tourists yet saw the Southwest as his personal playground, and (my favorite) he advocated wilderness protection with one reason being they would make good training grounds for guerrilla fighters who would eventually overthrow the government.

Yet with all that, his readers forgive him mainly because he realized the total insanity of his contrary positions and made fun of it in his writings. And even his detractors have to admit that no other writer wrote more eloquently about the Southwest, often with the passion of a John Muir and the radical zeal of a Che Guevara. Desert Solitaire is a love song to the American Southwest and Abbey is the Thoreau of the desert. Laugh if you must at the author's ridiculous antics. There are many of them in this collection of essays. But it is worth it to get past the man and marvel at this eloquent plea for the preservation of the wonders of the Southwest desert.

One more point, I first read this book while on a backpacking trip in Utah's Canyonland National Park. I don't think I ever read a book in a more appropriate and inspiring setting.
Profile Image for Murray.
Author 129 books653 followers
July 31, 2023
I think every person has a bit of the monastic in them - some more, some less - a part of their soul that wants to withdraw, sans disturbance, for greater or lesser amounts of time, far from the madding crowd.

Now and then a change of location (if not other kinds of changes) seem necessary - a park, a river bank, a forest, a mountaintop, a monastery, a retreat or healing center, a room accessible only to yourself, a rooftop (I love the flat rooftops of New Delhi).

Or a desert. White Sands in NM. The Mojave near Las Vegas. Death Valley in California. The Sahara of Egypt. The Outback of Australia. The Negev. Places to hear the wind, the soft hissing of sands being shifted and sifted, the soft silent heartbeat of your soul. To see what you rarely or never see anywhere else because life is too fast and too busy and has shoved important sights and comprehensions aside.

This is that kind of book.

🏜️ 🏜️ 🏜️
Profile Image for Lucas.
8 reviews1 follower
March 4, 2008
I'm not sure why everyone loves this book, or Edward Abbey in general. I couldn't even finish this. He is a macho hypocritical egomaniac, hiding behind the veil of saving the earth.

totally thumbs down.
Profile Image for Ken-ichi.
600 reviews606 followers
May 11, 2010
Anyone who thinks about nature will find things to love and despise about Desert Solitaire. One moment he's waxing on about the beauty of the cliffrose or the injustice of Navajo disenfranchisement and the next he's throwing rocks at bunnies and recommending that all dogs be ground up for coyote food. He says "the personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself" (p. 6) and then proceeds to personify every rock, bird, bush, and mountain. He's loving, salty, petulant, awed, enraptured, cantankerous, ponderous, erudite, bigoted and just way too inconsistent to figure out what he's really trying to say.

Which, clearly, is the wrong question all together. This book is about the desert and it is about Abbey and I don't think judging either of them is a particularly fruitful line of inquiry. Instead, think of Abbey as the naturalist's Id, the unfiltered conservationist urge, and the desert as the distilled un-human world where that beast rages and sleeps. If you love nature and you're appreciating an amazing view, you probably feel a very basic, child-like wonder. And if you then see some idiot drive by and throw an empty bottle out of his Hummer, I bet that at least for a moment, there is an Abbey-esque part of you that wishes the humans were dead. Well, most of the humans. Except for the ones that you like. And the ones that they like. And you know, the Hummer guy probably isn't all bad, just ignorant. But that first set of emotions, that, to me, seems to be the human half of this book, and in that sense, Abbey does a wonderful job exploring a wide range of emotional, personal reactions to the outdoors. And in the end, I think he provides so many contradictory personifications of the desert that they get all get stuck in the door Three Stooges style, and you're left with fairly dehumanized sense of the desert itself.

I've never been to Utah myself, so I put together this gallery of some of the scenes and things in the book.

Words & Notes

demesne (n): a feudal lord's land, where the serfs labored. (p. 5)

usufructuary (n): the holder of an usufruct, which is the right to use or benefit from property that you do not own. (p. 5)
"Loveliness and exultation." This line made me consider the possibility that my favorite nature writers tend to spend as much time describing discomfort and horror at the hands of nature as they do adulating it. Abbey definitely gets at the former later in the book. I wonder if part of the reason some people find this kind of writing boring is a surfeit of ecstasy most readers don't share.

gelid (adj): icy, cold. (p. 16)

"Don't really care for ants." He also apparently doesn't like tarantulas. Sad. (p. 26)

pismire (n): an ant, apparently because formic acid smells like piss. (p. 26)

"There is no beauty in nature, said Baudelaire." Would love a citation. (p. 36)

sinecure (n): an office without power or responsibility. (p. 41)

"To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar." (p. 97)

"Fear betrays the rabbit to the great horned owl. Fear does the hard work, making the owl's job easy. After a lifetime of dread it is more than likely that the rabbit yields to the owl during that last moment with a sense of gratitude, as pleased to be eaten—finally!—as the owl is to eat." This is the kind of anthropomorphism I'm talking about (p. 98)

"Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction." (p. 125)

"'In the desert', wrote Balzac, somewhere, .there is all and there is nothing. God is there and man is not.'" I would love to source this quote but I just can't find it. Was Abbey's recollection faulty? (p. 184)

He occasionally makes the point that the most horrifying thing about nature is not its capacity to mame, murder, and eat us, but its "implacable indifference." We don't fear the world because it's out to get us, we fear it because it doesn't even notice us, it doesn't even care enough to despise us. I like this idea. Oceans crush us, storms flatten us, lions eat us, viruses subvert us, not because we deserve it, but just because we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They're scary because they don't acknowledge us, and make us doubt our own reality. This is why Alien will always be scarier than the Predator. (p. 191)

"Gaze not too long into the abyss..." Apparently this is Nietzsche. Reminds me of Neal's paraphrasing, "If you look too long at a makefile, the abyss looks back at you." (p. 210)

I had no idea delphinium was toxic enough to kill cows. Go delphinium! (p. 222)

In possibly his only citation, Abbey notes (I think) 2 Kings 3, which describes how the armies of Israel, Judah, and Edom lay waste to the Jordanian land of Moab. Not sure what he was getting at. That Moab, UT also suffers at human hands? Incidentally, the Moabites were founded when Lot's own daughters seduced him and got preggers. Scandalous! (p. 227)
Profile Image for Christy.
Author 5 books430 followers
January 14, 2012
I wanted to like this a lot more than I was able to. Abbey includes some beautifully poetic writing about the desert landscape at times and if that remained the central focus of the book, it would be fantastic; however, the other focus of Desert Solitaire is Abbey himself and, at least based on the way he presents himself here, I just don't like Edward Abbey. He's pompous, both racist and sexist, hypocritical, and a rabbit murderer. He's not the kind of company I want to keep.
Profile Image for Moonkiszt.
2,372 reviews279 followers
January 28, 2020
This came across my horizon through a list book - the 1000 books you should read before you die, by J. Mustich. . . never had I heard of Edward Abbey and his fierce opinions specifically captured in his book Desert Solitaire, all about the nature spilled over the earth in the Four Corners area of the southwest. I don't usually think about that area. . . I was deeply in love there once upon a time, a love that slid into a carefully catered (the most overused word these days, but accurate in many ways) forgetfulness. So all things Zion Park, Grand Canyon, Moab and Kanab. . .yeah. I rarely go there in real life or in my imagined life.

But then this book slaps itself into my Things to Do. . . and I did. So lovely. His voice is so of its time. Not politically correct. Not compelled to wear pants. Not bending to your preferences in exchange for continued reading time. His tone is a warm, gravelly, Read-Me-Or-Don't and I liked it a lot.

E. Abbey was mostly writing in the desert, alone, and that sure worked for him. He thought big, important thoughts worthwhile to this work-a-day woman who doesn't particularly see herself spending any time in a desert again (my growing up had a lot of time in Joshua Tree, outhouses and all). Still, I easily agreed to stretch and join him, snuggling close (in my head) as he waxes poetic about the stars, the beauty of snake eyes and spider webs and the weight of human history in the resting air. It's fantastic prose.

If you need a vacation, a get away place, but have no time, money or ability to "do" it. . . read this. When you close the book, I'm pretty sure you'll see a bit of red dust on your footwear, and reach for a bandana to wipe that dampness off your brow. . .
Profile Image for Jenny (Reading Envy).
3,876 reviews3,492 followers
January 28, 2015
Almost all my friends who have read this book have given it five stars but not written reviews. Hey friends. *poke*

I feel like this book has been recommended to me numerous times, enough to compel me to buy it one day from Amazon, where it has festered unread in my Kindle library for at least a year. But the universe was commanding me to read it, three mentions in 2015, so I buckled down to read it. My only wish is that I had been reading it IN Utah so I could have seen some of the places mentioned in person rather than in my endless image searching on the internet.

Of course, Edward Abbey warns that the places he describes won't exist once the reader encounters them in the book, because the desert is destined for gross commercialization and some of the land will literally disappear underwater because of damming ("you're holding a tombstone in your hands".) And the book was printed in 1968. It went on to become one of the most important early environmental works, alongside books like Silent Spring.

Edward Abbey is admonishing, cranky, but completely reverent about the space he gets to live for a "season." He embraces the solitude, the heat, the utter lack of moisture, and the natural features that are only possible in this specific climate.

I have so many parts of this book marked, but to do them justice would write a book in itself. I'd read the book, but feel that Abbey would be admonishing you for trying to experience anything through a book instead of getting OUT there.
"I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk - walk - WALK upon our sweet and blessed land!"
Profile Image for Rachael.
181 reviews128 followers
September 14, 2007
This is one of the few books I don't own that I really really really wish I did. I love this book. It makes me want to pack up my Jeep and head out for Moab. I love Abbey's descriptions of the desert, the rivers, and the communion with solitude that he learns to love over the course two years as a ranger at Arches National Park.

Abbey explores environmentalism and government policies on the national parks. It wasn't my favorite part of the book, but he manages to do it in such a way that it's not too invasive. What makes this book really work for me is the sheer love that Abbey has for Arches and Canyonlands, and the way in which he manages to make me believe I'm right there on the red rock with him. It's the literary equivalent of Ansel Adams.

Oh, and I love how he throws beer cans out his truck window as he's meditating on the destruction of the wilderness by tourists and the government. Classic.
Profile Image for High Plains Library District.
633 reviews74 followers
October 24, 2014
I know, I know. This is Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. The favored book of the masses and the environmentalists' bible. I feel guilty giving it only 2 stars like I'm treading on holy ground. I purposely read this while recently traveling to Arches National Park, the VERY place he lived/worked while penning these deep thoughts. So I guess I set myself up for some magical, mystical moment to occur - only compounding my disappointments.

Granted, he does write some good descriptions about being in nature. I'll give him that. Hence the 2 stars. He describes an intimacy with nature that heralds back to Thoreau. (IMHO, however, this is no comparison to Walden.)

He first turned me off with his rant on "industrial tourism." He wants the National Parks wild, free from roads, bustling tourism. Okay, I get that. Being a huge fan of national parks I share similar values. I want them pristine, conserved for future generations.

But his solutions are quite extreme (1) No more cars - "let the people walk" (2) Therefore, "no more new roads" and (3) "put the park rangers to work". He wants the parks so wild that only the extreme backpackers and extremely fit can appreciate it. He admits this plan excludes children and elderly and physically challenged. He doesn't seem to care. For this he says kids can wait until they are old enough to hike and carry a backpack. The elderly and/or infirm, well, maybe they can use a shuttle. Let me provide a direct quote so you can see the issue I have with his snobby tone, "The aged merit even less sympathy: after all they had the opportunity to see the country when it was still relatively unspoiled. However, we'll stretch a point for those too old or too sickly to mount a bicycle and let them ride the shuttle buses." Um, condescending much?

Personally, I really appreciate the friendly trails and roads in our national parks. I am constantly impressed with how "natural" they appear, not obstructing the beauty of nature but rather getting us as close as possible without killing ourselves. I'm not an extreme backpacker. With Abbey's way I'd never experience the rim of the Grand Canyon, the hoodoos of Bryce canyon, or the beauty of Landscape Arch. In other words, I need a little bit of that "industrial tourism." And I must point out that there are still hundreds of miles of "back country" still available for the young, healthy, ambitious hikers. Power to them!

This whole chapter was pretentious and unrealistic.

He mentions our need to learn -- "how to read a topographical map...saddle a horse...memorize landmarks...avoid lightning" [okay, these I get] but he continues with "survive a blizzard...splint a broken bone...find water under sand...cook a porcupine...bury a body..." [really? I thought we lived in the modern world specifically so we don't have to worry about these things?]

I think our park rangers are helpful and well-trained. If I fall into a box canyon I pray one is nearby to help me out. But I think our parks are designed to avoid these mishaps while still allowing intimacy with nature.

And then, as I growled about his pretentious, arrogant attitude I came upon this hypocrisy near the end of the book: "...we stopped off briefly to roll an old tire into the Grand Canyon...watching the tire bounce over tall pine trees, tear hell out of a mule train and disappear with the final grand leap into the inner gorge."

What?! Excuse me? I had to re-read this to make sure I understood. He never mentions regretting this youthful folly. Who rants about protecting the beautiful lands and then throws a tire into the Grand Canyon?!

Yes, I love our national parks. Yes, I appreciate the shuttles that omit the use a gazillion cars. Anything that protects the land while also bringing people and nature together. But no, this book will not become my bible for respecting nature.

-Victoria
30 reviews1 follower
February 4, 2008
This man is such a hypocrite! He is preaching respect for the wild outdoor spaces, then he has the audacity to relate how he kills a little hidden rabbit just for the fun of it! His philosophy of locking up wild places with no roads, so they are only accessible to the fit hiker is also very exclusionary. Roads are tools, allowing old and young, fit and handicapped, to view the wonders and beauty of this country. Yes teach love and respect of this beauty and of the wildlife, but allow people to personally experience wilderness and through this to develop this respectful attitude!
Profile Image for Emily.
264 reviews2 followers
June 22, 2012
I'm sorry, I know I should finish Book Club books. But they guy is an arrogant a**hole and I'd rather spend my little free time reading something I enjoy.
Profile Image for Quo.
300 reviews
April 2, 2022
The late Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire is a sardonic mix of character studies that reveal the observer as much as those profiled. The author himself is best described as a contrarian, a curmudgeon, an intellectually-driven, free-spirited man who celebrates anarchy & random disorder, while railing against what he saw as the dross of a routine, tidy & systematic existence.



Abbey has described himself as having been driven by equal parts of anger & love. One of my favorite quotes from the author is that he "had a love affair with the earth but it was unconsummated."

According to Abbey, his published books were met by "a near unanimous indifference, sprinkled with peppery pockets of abuse." To that, he declares to future writers:
Be of good cheer & ignore the critics. Disregard the best-selling paperbacks with flashy, embossed covers in the supermarkets, high-rent bookstores & airport shops. When we want money from the rich, we'll take it by force. The honorable way. Death before dishonor, as it were. Live free or die. The best of our brother novelists & sister poets are in prison or in hiding or in exile. So, scribble on, honor life & praise the divine beauty of the world.


Desert Solitaire presents the reader with a sundry anthology of meandering thoughts & memorable characters, one of whom is named Roy Scobie, a "leather-hided, long-connected, sober-sided old man with gray hair, red nose & yellow teeth, a kind, gentle guy who worries too much." Roy, a Basque fellow named Viviano Jacquez & Abbey are atop horses rounding up stray cattle as one of their duties at Roy's combination dude & cattle ranch, as cowboys are won't to do. This involves being able to
shoe a horse, rope & brand & castrate a calf, fix a flat tire, stretch barbed-wire, dynamite a beaver dam & lay out an irrigation ditch--a good liberal education. Viviano's English is 50% profanity & he can sing, play the guitar & read your fortune in cards. He is short, dark & savage, like most good Basques, with large glamorous eyes that seem to appeal to the ladies from 13 to 35, all of whom he pursues.
Among other things, with every day being irregular, the trio ends up freeing a cow from quicksand while cursing the bovine creature for having caused them to spend an uncommon amount of effort on a single, stray animal.

Among the other tales is one entitled "The Dead Man at Grandview Point", involving the retrieval of a heavy-set tourist who had wandered too far off a trail into the bewildering heat of the desert & perished.

But even amidst this somber duty within a desert canyon, Abbey speaks prosaically of feeling himself "sinking into the landscape, fixed in place, like a stone, like a tree, a motionless shape of a vague outline, sand-colored & with the wings of imagination, look down at myself through the eyes of a bird, becoming smaller in the receding landscape."



Whenever possible it seems, Abbey seeks to leave the greater world behind, heading off in an old truck or on a horse in search of solitude, as in a chapter labelled "Havasu" when the author:
rented a horse from some Havasupai Indians, bought a slab of bacon, 6 cans of beans & proceeded down the canyon to an old mining camp 5 miles below the village, remaining alone for the next 35 days, except for the ghosts, finding a pool of water below a waterfall 120 feet high, thundering over caverns & canopies of solidified travertine rock, with the "white noise" of the waterfall as soothing as hypnosis.

What did I do during those 5 weeks in Eden? Nothing, or nearly nothing. I caught rainbow trout & lived in the nude, though once a week or so, I put on my pants & walked up to a small Indian village to buy bacon, canned beans & Argentine beef, which was all the Indians had in stock at the store. To vary my diet just a bit, I used the telephone to order more exotic foods from the supermarket at Grand Canyon Village, including sweet corn, figs & peaches. There was nothing that had to be done.

I listened to many voices--vague & distant but astonishingly human & the creaking doors of the old forgotten cabins. I went native & dreamed away days on the shore of the cottonwoods, inspecting the cactus gardens.

The days became wild, strange, ambiguous--a sinister element pervaded the flow of time. I lived narcotic hours in which like the Taoist Chaung-tse, I worried about butterflies, saw a serpent, a red racer living in the rocks of the spring where I filled my canteens; he was always there, slipping among the stones or pausing to spellbind me with his suggestive tongue & cloudy, haunted, primeval eyes.

I thought of Debussy, of Keats & Blake. I went for walks & on the last of those, regained everything that seemed to be ebbing away.
Yes, there is a mystical quality about Edward Abbey, someone who reveled in the commonplace but also admired & even exalted so many things beyond the reach of easy description.

I have lingered over the transcendental aspect of Abbey's character, in part because to some he was visceral, blunt & contradictory, all of which are fairly rendered attributions; beyond those however, he was an inveterate lover of nature who often became enraptured by it, especially when focused on the desert southwest of America. Above all else, Abbey excelled in applying well-crafted prose.



While Edward Abbey is quite definitely not everyone's cup of tea, though Abbey would much prefer Mescal or a good bourbon, I suspect that many if not most of those who vilify the man, do not really read his prose, preferring to lead with a feeling of antagonism, some of which is not unprovoked by the late & very gifted author. Desert Solitude & Abbey's other works are highly recommended to most readers.

*Quite beyond this review in praise of Edward Abbey & the book it attempts to detail, I recommend finding a copy of a DVD (much if not all of which is available online) of Freedom & Wilderness: Edward Abbey Reads From His Work, a rare case where a voice seems to perfectly embrace the profile of the person in question.
Profile Image for L.G. Cullens.
Author 2 books87 followers
May 31, 2020
Imagine what Edward Abby would have to say if he were still alive to see what humankind has further wrought.

In not having read this particular book of Abbey's before, I've shortchanged my reading experience. To me, his narrative in Desert Solitaire is befitting the setting, at once harsh and lulling, even hauntingly poetic with discordant notes. If you discern the writing's undercurrent, you may also feel its poignancy.

In this book, the best of his writing to my mind even if a little drawn out, he is more in touch with the paradoxes of the natural world than many can countenance. It is also a Nature book, pleasurable for those that can visualize the detailed settings, especially those that have alone and on foot previously experienced the awe of true wilderness.

I have to agree that Edward Abby can come across as intolerant and contemptuous of much of society, which stems from his idealism. A subjective reaction on our part though, where to the objective mind he's often enough on the mark, if abrasively so, in highlighting shortcomings we are loath to admit in ourselves. Sadly, we are for the most part subjective creatures that have followed a path to the brink of disastrous environmental changes, which evidences how lacking we are as judges.

Reading widely serves us best in stimulating critical thinking, and that to me is the real value of this book. One is not required to take as gospel all they read, but a thoughtful, objective mind can assemble the salient pieces of life's sketchy puzzle. Edward Abby serves up a smorgasbord of thoughts, applicable in extension, for the reader's mind to sort through and assimilate.

To those unacquainted with the Southwest, or wishing to recall its beauty, there are ample descriptive passages, such as:

"The cliffrose is practical as well as pretty. Concealed by the flowers at this time are the leaves, small, tough, wax-coated, bitter on the tongue—thus the name quinine bush—but popular just the same among the deer as browse when nothing better is available—buckbrush. The Indians too, a practical people, once used the bark of this plant for sandals, mats and rope, and the Hopi medicine man is said, even today, to mash and cook the leaves as an emetic for his patients."

And, of course, there are passages about the ecological consequences of human ignorance:

"Like the porcupine the deer too become victims of human meddling with the natural scheme of things—not enough coyotes around and the mountain lions close to extinction, the deer have multiplied like rabbits and are eating themselves out of house and home, which means that many each year are condemned to a slow death by starvation."

That paradoxically, so it would seem, together with the acceptance of Nature's model of life continuance, that of life fueled by life:

"We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!"

As to Edward Abby's abrasiveness, how better could we be insulted than with the glaring light of human destructiveness we shield our eyes from? Sawing away at branches of evolution as we are, despite being on one of the branches. Points well made in assessing where the wild places have gone and why. Can the public granted their desires escape anymore the stress and turmoil of the sardine can existence they are trying to leave behind for a while?

"Modern politics is expensive—power follows money.
. . .
"Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry—they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started.
. . .
"To all accusations of excessive development the administrators can reply, as they will if pressed hard enough, that they are giving the public what it wants, that their primary duty is to serve the public not preserve the wilds."

Rounding out he book's board stroke there are engaging side stories, a bit of desert survival advice, insights (e.g. "prejudice cultivates prejudice"), and prophesying born out since its writing.

"What reason have we Americans to think that our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions?

"... history demonstrates that personal liberty is a rare and precious thing, that all societies tend toward the absolute until attack from without or collapse from within breaks up the social machine and makes freedom and innovation again possible."

And yes, satirical humor with significant points:

"Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous—however roseate—Unmoved Mover. (Play safe; worship only in clockwise direction; let’s all have fun together.) That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the Church Fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference, passing on into the oblivion it so richly deserved, while the Paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand."


Though this book is in good part studies of the animals, plants, geography, and climate of the region around Arches National Monument, maybe in reading and broadening focus one might glean a better understanding of the value of wilderness.

"Wilderness, wilderness.… We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.

"The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit."
Profile Image for Joy D.
2,276 reviews259 followers
July 8, 2020
Step back in time to the 1960s and discover the Utah desert with Edward Abbey. This book is full of beautiful nature writing about his time spent working as a ranger at Arches National Park. He describes his explorations, either alone or with one person, into regions of desert, mountains, and rivers. He vividly describes his love of the desert wilderness in passages such as:

“Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

He is outspoken in his opinions, which venture into political territory and may be off-putting to some readers. He is not a fan of industrial tourism or building roads to view nature from the comfort of a car. He is very much a “back to nature” individual. I found it interesting to consider how the perceptions of environmentalism have changed in fifty-plus years. I did not agree with all his opinions, but I enjoyed spending time in his head and seeing the desert through his eyes.
Profile Image for Jeanette.
3,545 reviews692 followers
February 20, 2020
Whew! I read it. The entire thing.

This could be given any rating from one to 4 stars, IMHO- all with good reasons. Some of the other reviewers here on both ends of that scale did excellent reviews. Most parts of these very varying reviews; I would whole hardily agree with their parsing. BUT. How can you overlook the politico or the man's "eyes"? Or some of his actions and impulses so heartily self-heralded? Like the quick dart throw of a rock to kill a jackrabbit just to see if he could do it. And then tossing the body for the vultures and ravens when he so happily succeeded. Not for food at all. Jolly good fun.

The writing is excellent, although jumpy and tending to over long descriptive "Faulkner" type syndrome, that is true. But it DOES work to paint a desert scene that if you have never viewed it yourself, it will almost let you smell the juniper smoke.

My problem is Edward Abbey. He reminds me nearly to twinning with men and women I walked within and traipsed through every weekday in a period of my youth. Despite Abbey being nearly 20 years older, he could easily been SDS ranter of 1965-67. Although his politico differs in weird degrees of slant and is contrary at points- his attitude, anger, reaction sense is much the same. Also couple that with being Weatherman Underground friendly "fellow well met" viscous qualities peeking out every once in awhile. (That body finding tale!) Left politico or Right politico mean/hateful edge urges, he is still on his best day of sun rise glory- nasty 90% anarchist.

The chapter on Cowboys and Indians, I literally got nausea.

These are essays done during the time he was a ranger at Arches National Park- Utah. The Draft (Armed Forces/ USA Army) was currently in practice, as well.

He loves the natural world, and hates humans who deem to use it. (While pretending he's there to encourage them.) He considers himself the elite of the elites, while living in the land of the super "fit" desert dweller, that especially. He considers human populations successful when they shrink, do NOT change their surroundings, and especially do not build or pave.

He hates urban and 100 other types of people generally as weak or drone like (the entire fodder sheep thing he posits a couple of times). He loves himself the most when he is the greatest at survival. A couple of times here in these tales, by the skin of his teeth.

Looking at his Wikipedia afterwards, he sure didn't seem to practice what he preached. Nor did he do much better than the "old man" of 60 he found dead in one of the essays.

People did review this book without mentioning Edward's thoughts about Edward at all. I just couldn't. He hated religion, but he, himself, was his own sculpted god in several of his own summations. And he admits, that he didn't like that one (himself) much to a "love" point, regardless. He has opinions- not the least of which who is worthy of natural world use or any other type of living modes (like medicine, electricity etc.). To Edward, less and less humans- the better for the Earth. And he prefers none on his gig as ranger- his perfect solitary job.

His quotes are witty and usually visceral dislike cored for their "mood". Sardonic is his crux nugget undertone. From everything soup to nuts if it has to do with human organization or administration double the mistrust and leer or aside literature with the big L quote of poetic quality. Triple that disdain for government, religion, group authoritarian anything. (How did he exist in the Army for 2 years in Italy? Oh, he was demoted twice for insubordination.)

All the myriads of Four Corners literary excellence of expression that DO convey the places there- the voice accompanying it.

I won't be reading any more of his. An excellent writer but exactly the kind of person I have spent 72 years trying to avoid.
Profile Image for Lauren .
1,773 reviews2,462 followers
July 6, 2017
Why didn't I read this book sooner?? I asked myself.

...because I was meant to read it now.

Right now, as I am looking at the arches and canyons described - as they are so fresh in my mind just returning home.

As I can hear the canyon wren's song and feel the sun and breeze and snowflakes on my face.

With the Navajo sandstone dust still in my boots.

Now was the perfect time.
Profile Image for Ian Beardsell.
249 reviews28 followers
September 26, 2022
Wow! This was something else!
Unfortunately, I should have spent more time focused on this book than I did this summer, as sometimes I would lose the thread of Abbey's long-winded recollections of adventures in the desert wilderness over a couple seasons he spent as a parks ranger at Arches National Park in Utah.
But in the end, perhaps that was part of Abbey's point. Life is a long, winding, circuitous journey through this world, a world in which we often ignore the beauty and silent grace offered to us by nature.

The prose is wonderful, practically poetry:
I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert-colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself through the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening--a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierrra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.

Perhaps a run-on sentence, but worth it!

Abbey seems to have been a man who could bridge the everyday with keen insights into human philosophy of the mid to late 20th-century America that was just awakening to the ecological mess it was leaving behind.

The book is not all divine nature word porn. He dabbles here and there in local geology and history, personal anecdotes of hiking trips with friends, and even a murder mystery or two.

Some find Abbey's tendency to anarchist irreverance bothersome, but I see in it a humorous attempt at dealing with our society's ecological crimes. I literally laughed aloud at this one while reading at my local coffee shop:
At the main entrance to each National Park we should erect a Billboard 100' high 200' wide courageously filigreed in brilliant neon and outlined with blinker lights, exploding stars, flashing prayer wheels and great Byzantine phallic symbols that gush like geysers every 30 seconds. (You could set your watch by them.) Behind the fireworks will loom the figure of Smokey the Bear, taller than a pine tree, with eyes in his head that swivel back-and-forth watching you, and ears that actually twitch. Push a button and Smokey will recite, for the benefit of children and government officials who might otherwise have trouble with some of the big words, in a voice ursine, loud and clear, the message spelled out in the face of the Billboard: 'Howdy folks! Please park your motorized vehicle in the world's biggest parking lot behind the comfort station immediately to your rear. Now get out of your motorized vehicle. Get on your horse, mule, bicycle or feet and come on in. Enjoy yourselves! This here park is for people only.


I'm not sure what more I can say to convince the potential reader to have a go at this one. Like many things in this life, whether it be our work or pleasure, a place to spend the summer, or an idea encapsulated in a book, we bring a deep part of ourselves along that colors the experience.
Profile Image for Kurt.
590 reviews66 followers
August 30, 2007
This is one of only four or five books that I can say truly impacted my life. Many years ago my boss saw me reading "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (which did not significantly impress me). He suggested "Desert Solitaire" as a much better example of Edward Abbey's work. I took his recommendation seriously, and have been thankful to him ever since.

Having grown up in Idaho I had done a fair amount of backpacking in the mountains and forests, and I was somewhat of an outdoor enthusiast at the time. But the thought of recreating in the desert never held much allure to me--until I read this book. Now I make at least a couple of backpacking/camping trips per year into the desert. I still love the mountains, lakes, rivers, and forests, but I now know that the deserts are also full of wonder.

My favorite chapter told about Abbey's trip to Havasu Creek and Falls. While reading about it I remember saying to myself, "There can't possibly really be a place like this". I determined that I would find out if such a place actually existed and if it was as wonderful as Abbey described it. A few years ago I made the trip to Havasu Falls, and I found that the author's description of the place was perfect. But I would have loved to have seen the place in the early sixties, like Abbey did, before the excessive tourism had diminished the place.

Not only did this book help me to appreciate the desert for what it is, it taught me to appreciate non-fiction writing in general and nature writing in particular--things I thought I did not care for previously. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an appreciation for the outdoors.
Profile Image for Sean.
3 reviews
February 10, 2008
What a bunch of tripe. On p.20 he avoids killing a rattlesnake at his bare feet saying "I prefer not to kill animals. I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake." And by p.40 he is throwing a rock at a rabbit's head as an "experiment" and is "elated" when he crushes it's skull. What a jerk-off. I was going to throw it in the trash burner, but instead I'll just try and get my money back on it. I wish he was still alive so I could throw a rock at his head.
2 reviews
May 10, 2022
I’m loath to admit that Edward Abbey and I have something in common, and it isn’t our love of the great outdoors. It’s our anger: Edward Abbey is angry at everyone that isn’t Edward Abbey, and I’m angry that I wasted my time reading this piece of shit book. Plain and simple, Edward Abbey is an asshole. He’s a virulent racist; his passages on Native Americans are despicable and shocking, even for a book written in 1968. He’s an unrepentant misogynist, made worse by the fact that he has a wife and kids “back home” that he never mentions once. He’s a terrible conservationist; he litters on roads (they’re not natural, so why should he care?), he poaches out of season and discards the meat (“probably” infected with tularemia, he excuses himself), at one point he even admits to throwing a tire into the Grand Canyon.

All of these passages are a great reason to stop reading Desert Solitaire, but a glutton for punishment I am, so I stuck around until the end. And my biggest takeaway from this pile of garbage is that Edward Abbey is dumb. Fucking dumb. His theories on the outdoors are idiotic, his ideas on the “wilderness” probably set conservation back 50 years or so. He is selfish, completely devoid of any self awareness or humility, even in the face of the beauty that is Arches. And on top of that, his actions are dumb, so dumb in fact that we have to read multiple passages where he almost dies out of sheer stupidity. He’s a terrible outdoorsman; at one point he starts a forest fire and flees the scene. No explanation is given, just that some errant paper caught fire and destroyed a channel of the Glen Canyon. Why was he burning paper in the middle of the wilderness? No idea. Does he face any repercussions from his actions? Seemingly not a one. Fortune favors the dim, I suppose.

So much of Desert Solitaire focuses on humans’ impact on the wilderness, or rather, humans-who-aren’t-named-Edward-Abbey’s impact on the wilderness. Roads are bad, especially in nature, except of course if Abbey is behind the wheel. He loathes the tourists that drive to Arches, screaming at them to get out of their cars and walk or take a horse, and yet at the same time, he has no issue driving a Range Rover miles into The Maze. He cuts down welcome signs to Moab, removes surveying markers, and is a general pain in the ass of anyone wanting to visit nature who isn’t named Edward Abbey. Why? I still don’t know. The only thing that seems to separate the author from the unwashed masses that are fucking up nature is that he is named Edward Abbey. And because of this, nature is his domain exclusively. His self-aggrandizing knows no bounds. His excursion into The Maze is a great example. He congratulates himself for being the first person to explore it since the Native Americans left, despite the fact that he takes a jeep trail down there. Who built the trail, Abbey? The Mormon settlers in their 1880s Willys? Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Desert Solitaire is lauded as a classic of the genre, and I am at a complete loss as to why. It’s not engaging, it’s not particularly well written, and for every interesting passage about Glen Canyon before the dam or Arches before the roads, there’s an absolutely reprehensible passage about women or Native Americans or both. Skip this book. It is not a classic. Take some of Abbey’s advice (maybe the only bit of decent advice in the whole book), and go outside instead.
Profile Image for Stefani.
345 reviews16 followers
June 20, 2012
With great difficulty, I sometimes think about my own mortality, the years I have left on earth, how with each year that I get older, the years remaining disproportionately seem shorter. Admittedly, it's a depressing train of thought to entertain, and makes me want to crawl under a proverbial rock and die...it also has a sickening domino effect with my thoughts then residing in the eternal questions of life—why am I here, what is my purpose in life, etc...and all the anxieties and regrets that go along with those ponderings. *Sigh* I think I know now what it's like to be Scandinavian or French.

In any case, I feel a little calmer about everything after reading this book.

Although Abbey is admittedly a bit of a hypocritical prick with an axe to grind against humanity—calling the world overpopulated when he himself had five children is among one of several such statements he makes—he seems to have a very tender reverence for the natural world, and devotes much of the novel to prodigiously recording the natural beauty of Arches Natural Park from his six-month tenure as a park ranger. At the same time, he abhorrently rejects man's infringement on nature and lack of respect for the natural world, opposing development of all forms (including the dam that was being constructed in the park circa 1968).

But if you can overlook all these short-lived rants, there is something meaningful to be gleaned from Abbey. I think the below passage sums it up pretty well:

A few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of the second. Nothing is lost except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream and rise again. The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And again.

Despite the sentimentalities we humans heap on the significance of our individual lives, we are only a small part of a much larger universe.
Profile Image for Jenna Los.
22 reviews2 followers
January 18, 2008
Edward Abbey has a wonderful love of the wild and his prose manages to actually do justice to the unique landscape of the West. That said, I don't like him. He contradicts himself quite often in this book - hatred of modern conveniences (but loves his gas stove and refrigerator), outrage at tourists destroying nature (but he steals protected rocks and throws tires off cliffs), animal sympathizer (but he callously kills a rabbit as an "experiment"), etc.

His "Monkey Wrench Gang" also upset me - he feels sabotaging road-building equipment is justified because of the value of the wilderness. However, sabotage puts the lives of the workers (who are usually just doing what they have to to put food on the table) at risk, not to mention corporations will simply replace the broken equipment. This hurts the environment even more - you still have machines ripping up the wilderness, but you also have broken machines decaying and leaking toxic fluid into the earth.
Profile Image for El.
1,355 reviews497 followers
June 21, 2017
In his early 30s in the late 1950s, Edward Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in east Utah. He lived in a trailer from April-September; his responsibilities included maintaining trails, talking to tourists, and, at least once, had to go on a search party to find a dead body. Remember that anecdote when you're working whatever summer job you have this year and feel like complaining about it. At least you didn't have to go look for and help carry back a dead body in 100-degree weather. For many of you, anyway. I probably have one friend on my list here who is all like "But that's what I do everyday!"

Years ago when I actually gave a fuck about my partner's family and their friends, his brother's best friend and I got to talking about books. I asked him what his all-time favorite book was, and he told me about this book. I had heard of Abbey's more well-known The Monkey Wrench Gang (which I still haven't read, but at least I had heard of it), but Desert Solitaire was a new title for me at that time. This friend went on and on about how much of an impression it made on him when he read it as a teenager, and how it helped form him as an adult and made him decide to get into whatever education and career he wound up in. Sorry to say, because I give no fucks anymore, I have forgotten what that was.

Regardless of whatever personal issues I have with the people in my partner's past, the fact that this particular person was so adamant that I had to read Desert Solitaire really stood out to me. A few years back I picked up a used paperback copy for a buck just because I had once made a promise that I would read the book, even though I knew I would not want to see this person to have a discussion about the book now.

Edward Abbey is the sort of person I probably would have liked to know. He was a curmudgeon, I think, based on some of what he wrote in this autobiography about his time working for the park service. He loved his job - I think that's evident in his words. He loved the scenery, he loved the wilderness. He loved the animals and critters, and everything that comes with that wild energy. He didn't even mind the heat which is just bizarre to me, but I also cry anytime the temperature rises above 78 or so.

But he hated people. Rather, he hated tourists. Even though he had a job because of the tourists, he hated them. And rightly so. The aspect he saw in his job involved people who didn't want to get out of their cars, who complained because there were no paved roads (the roads are now paved, by the way - something that would make Abbey roll over in his grave, I think), and the sort who throw their trash out their car windows.

This is where Abbey and I would probably have gotten along smashingly. I too hate tourists, even when I am one, and we try really hard not to be those kinds of tourists.
No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs - anything - but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.
p 65 (Chapter 5: Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks)

Most of this autobiography is quite beautiful, almost poetic. Abbey had a way with words when he was writing about something he loved. I most liked the chapters that involved his thoughts on his surroundings, his experiences with wildlife, or just his rambles about thoughts on life, monuments, and people in general. At times he wrote about his environment with such love that I wanted to get in the car and drive out there right now, go sunbathing amongst the rocks. But then I remembered that I go outside to walk to the cafeteria for lunch and I nearly shrivel up because I live like a shrew and hate the sunlight and you can practically hear my skin screaming from the contact of the rays.

Where he lost me a bit are the few chapters that were about specific people, and their older stories. They were the sorts of things that if someone wanted to tell me an old-timey story, I'd be down, but in this book they felt somewhat out of place and disrupted the poetic flow. But I'm also fairly certain Abbey gave no fucks about what someone like me would think about his writing, or his choices in material to include.

The reason I recommended this book for my book club is because of #45's opinions on the United States Environmental Protection Agency. I live in Pittsburgh, PA, where in the not-so-distant past every day was a "cloudy" day after years and years and years of pollution from the steel mills. There are buildings within walking distance of where I work that are still covered in soot. Pittsburgh knows what can be lost if the EPA goes away. We also have this claim to fame. Top 10!

And then don't even get me started on #45's opinions on the National Park Service.

In light of these serious issues, this book came to mind as something that seemed timely. Now that I've read it, I still maintain that. Abbey anticipated a lot of the issues that would come with, well, really anything as what he wrote here behind this spoiler link (which I've included only because the excerpt is so large, but it is not an actual spoiler - unless you're worried about our lives being spoiled...):



The Arches National Monument of Abbey's day is different today. As previously mentioned, there are roads cutting through the national park, it's quite a bit less "distant" from civilization than it used to be. Abbey would hate it the way it is now. It's still beautiful, don't get me wrong. But it's different from his world, and he would not be happy with how it is, and the level of bureaucracy occurring.

I had friends in high school and college who made regular pilgrimages to Moab for rock climbing purposes, and while I never went with them, the mere mention of Moab reminds me of them and their love of it. I don't know if they still go or not, because I've lost track of most of them, but I want that particular world to continue to exist for them and others to love and appreciate. It was there before us, it will be there after us, and in the meantime we should be able to enjoy it without destruction.
Profile Image for Ms.pegasus.
746 reviews162 followers
February 27, 2018
Humanist/misanthrope, spiritual atheist, erudite primitive, pessimistic idealist – not that these traits are incompatible. As descriptions of the author, Edward Abbey, they hint at a complicated man struggling to reconcile the contradictions he finds in himself. He embraces an individuality that defies categorization, and that often places himself in an uncomfortably ambivalent relationship with the reader. It is a point worth confronting because DESERT SOLITAIRE is in part a memoir of Abbey's year as a park ranger at Arches National Park. Abbey voices at times a surly and wounded outrage. Destruction of natural habitats by a society consumed by growth, government using its power as a profiteer rather than as a steward, and the alienation of people from nature are the primary targets of his outrage.

I only began to like this book when he relaxes into a description of the terrain. The spring blooming of desert flowers, the symbiosis between the yucca and a particular type of moth, the animated awakening of sparse and precious life are described in vivid prose. We see the colors, feel the movement of wind and sand, taste the water, and smell the dried sage. Four plant communities are described: Pinyon pines and junipers on the mesa, brushes and grasses in the Salt Valley, poplar and cottonwood along the washes and streams, and fern, primrose, and columbine along the canyon walls. Each season is distinct and yet part of a total continuity: “Balanced on a point of equilibrium, hesitating, the world of the high desert turns toward summer.”

One of Abbey's most interesting digressions from the present is his story of an excursion through Glen Canyon just before it was flooded by the Glen Canyon Dam which created Lake Powell. The imagery of architecture, geology, and a polyglot of history bring this now lost scenic wonder to life. This story is a perfect blend of personal testament, poetry, and historical perspective. Other reminiscences from the author's life are also embedded in this year's chronicle.

DESERT SOLITAIRE is a thought-provoking book. Although published in 1968 it's relevance has, if anything, grown. Demands for oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, denial of the reality of Global Warming, Bureau of Land Management round-ups of mustangs, and legalization of wolf hunting are issues under debate today. In 2008 the Wall Arch collapsed, to much publicity. DESERT SOLITAIRE allows us to understand that event in a deeper way. Although there is a pervasive strain of pessimism, I'm glad that I read this book.

NOTE:
added 2/27/2018: Abbey's outrage has become an inspired plea in view of the latest political outrages. Had I read his book today, I would have found his voice less curmudgeonly and more of a rallying cry. There was an excellent essay: "Our Public Land," by Douglas Brinkley that appeared in the January 28, 2018 edition of the New York Times Book Review (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/bo...)
Profile Image for Angie.
373 reviews14 followers
November 21, 2011
with Edward Abbey.

4|25|2008: The day I finally finished Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey.
Usually I read books very quickly and all at once. Most books don't take me longer than a few days to finish. I just love stories so much that I don't like to stop once I've started. Desert Solitaire, however, has taken me years to get through. I've started it half a dozen times, and every time I love it, but when I set it down I don't pick it back up again. Then in a month or two, I pick it up again starting over again, of course. I've read the first half of the book several times. Finally I realized I don't have to read the first half over again every time I set it down. So although this time there was a substantial gap between my reading the first part and reading the last, I finally read the entire thing.

I know that taking forever to get through it doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement for the book. However, it is excellent. There is essentially no plot in the book, and so I never felt that compulsive urge to find out how things are going to go. Instead, the book is like sitting down outside your tent at night, with a seasoned outdoorsman, telling anecdotes & talking philosophy. Abbey is an excellent writer, who helped me envision the areas he wrote about. Throughout the book, I felt challenged to think about his philosophy on life, the wilderness, and everything and decide if I agreed or not.
I've dog-eared about every third or fourth page, to go back to for quotes & to think about some more.

So, I guess, really I'm still not finshed with Desert Solitaire
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