When reading Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider, he mentions that he gets book suggestions from the book he is reading. I did the same, Desert Solitaire, suggested in his very own Ghost Rider book. It was pitched as a book about solitude, written by Edward Abbey back in the mid-1960’s. He was a Forrest Ranger in the Arches National Park, prior to it being as popular and visited as it is today.
The book is splendid and conveying what these remote places were like before the build out of roads, hotels, cell phones, and the tourist industry. Hence the solitaire theme. Over his three years, he details his own adventures, discovering the nuance of nature, and the pursuit of modernization as the engineers want to build bigger and better roads. This book is an ode to the high desert.
The question that this raises for me is are these beautiful remote spaces meant to be quiet and undisturbed or should they be available to everyone? Everyone is a lot of people.