Unkar Delta at Mile 73The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke’s description of “raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet.” Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified.

~ Ann Zwinger

Ann Zwinger Beauty Colorado River Colors Deep Time Geological Time Geology Grand Canyon Landscape Lyrical National Parks Nature Prose River Running

This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash, flipped through in succession, leaving a richness of images imprinted on a sunburned retina.

~ Ann Zwinger

Ann Zwinger Beauty Canyons Grand Canyon Landscape Memory Mindfulness National Parks Nature Nature Writing Southwest

How we treat our land, how we build upon it, how we act toward our air and water, in the long run, will tell what kind of people we really are.-Laurance S. Rockefeller

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams Conservation Environment Land National Parks Nature

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

~ Ann Zwinger

Ann Zwinger Canyon Constellations Dawn Grand Canyon Imagery Metaphor National Parks Nature Nature Writing Night Sky Poetic Prose Sky Sunrsie

Yellowstone, of all the national parks, is the wildest and most universal in its appeal... Daily new, always strange, ever full of change, it is Nature's wonder park. It is the most human and the most popular of all parks. -Yellowstone Park for Your Vacation (circa 1920s)

~ Susan Rugh

Susan Rugh National Parks Travel Yellowstone

I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.

~ Ann Zwinger

Ann Zwinger Canyon Colorado River Grand Canyon Mindfulness National Parks Nature Naturalist Nature Writing Psyche

I spent my summers at my grandparents’ cabin in Estes Park, literally next door to Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a view of Longs Peak across the valley and the giant rock beaver who, my granddad told me, was forever climbing toward the summit of the mountain. We awoke to mule deer peering in the windows and hummingbirds buzzing around the red-trimmed feeders; spent the days chasing chipmunks across the boulders of Deer Mountain and the nights listening to coyotes howling in the dark.

~ Mary Taylor Young

Mary Taylor Young Animals National Parks Wildlife

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

~ Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Escape Hope National Parks