The red-rock, high-desert country of the south-west of the United States is among the most stark and beautiful natural wildernesses remaining in North America. For this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Jack W. Dykinga and author Charles Bowden travelled to the Escalente River system and Paria Canyon on the borders of Utah and Arizona to reveal a land endowed with historic and natural gifts, and yet relatively unknown. Hiking through precipitous and parched slick-rock canyons, Dykinga captured brief, brilliant springtime flowerings, rich autumn colour changes, simmering midsummer heat pulsing off variegated canyon walls, and the extraordinary contrasts of early winter snow on deep, red rock. Bowden's narrative recalls wading through icy streams that seasonally slice through narrow clefts, and nights under the stars watching bats wheel overhead. He writes of long-ago Spanish mission fathers, and of Mormon settlers who struggled through the treacherous "hole in the rock" en route to new homesteads south of the Great Salt Lake.