Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

"Based on [the author]s own experiences as a young man, the books two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in [the author]s own words, 'a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.'y--...

Leaving behind a madcap, fishing-obsessed family, Gus embarks on an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery along his beloved Oregon rivers. What he unexpectedly finds is man's wanton destruction of nature and a burning desire to commit himself to its preservation. The River Why is a tale that gives a contemporary voice to the concerns and hopes of all living things on this beautiful, watery planet. It is the story of one man's search for meaning,...

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...

"When the residents of Leadville, Colorado awoke the morning of February 23, 1983, it was to the Arkansas River gushing blood red with toxic mine waste headed straight to a pump station supplying public water. The event sparked a Superfund cleanup that drew national attention at the same time the mining industry abandoned the people it had supported with employment for more than a century. That volatile formula catapulted the town into a modern-day...

Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems, the rational mind and the emotional mind, that compete for control. The rational mind wants a beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. This tension can doom a change effort but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. The Heaths show how everyday people have united both minds and achieved dramatic results.

Narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire of August, 1910, and Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservation efforts that helped turn public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt in the fires of today.