Four Corners: History, Land, and People of the Desert Southwest

With its spectacular ancient rock formations, high plateaus and desert valleys, its Native American multistory cliff dwellings, its confluence of Mormon, Spanish, Navajo, Ute, Anglo and other cultures, the Four Corners region--the intersection of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah--is a world unto itself. Nature writer Brown (Cycles of Rock and Water) takes readers on a wondrous odyssey through this sparsely inhabited region in a seamless mix of travelogue, geology, biology and history. He visits the hanging gardens and alcove pine forests hidden in Utah's canyons; takes us into lava fields near the Zuni Mountains; and joins an archeological dig of an ancient village in New Mexico built by Archaic hunters and gatherers perhaps 7000 years ago. We stumble upon rock paintings depicting giant, ghostlike figures and tour pueblos of several hundred rooms built by the Anasazi, a sophisticated people who abandoned their homes some 600 years ago. Brown's reports on Arizona Hopi struggling to preserve traditional ways, on a Spanish village cooperative in New Mexico and on geophysicists' mapping of the Colorado Plateau's paleomagnetic fields inspire awe and reverence for the earth. (Jan.)