"If you want to know Arches National Park, and you've read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, your next book needs to be The Arches Reader. Jeff Nichols is a historian, and he shows here his respect for fascinating original sources and excerpts long enough to capture their full-throated flavor. Many stories in Nichols’s anthology feature park rangers and their families who turn out to be the colorful opposite of faceless bureaucrats. Arches sits on the bank of the Colorado River just outside Moab, and so this collection extends beyond the park to include uranium hunters, pilgrim poets, cranky environmentalists, and early outfitters. Nichols uses Arches as a springboard into Colorado Plateau environmental history and rural Utah culture. It’s a worthy plunge into vastly enjoyable territory."—Stephen Trimble, editor of The Capitol Reef Reader and Red Rock Stories
“Arches’ story is unique, tied so closely as it is to the fate of its adjacent community. I’m not sure that any other park can tell quite the same story of an explosion in popularity and a community’s attendant ambivalence. And its sometimes despair.”—Jen Jackson Quintano, author of Blow Sand in His Soul: Bates Wilson, the Heart of Canyonlands