In the late 1950s, author Edward Abbey takes a position as a seasonal park ranger in Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah. In this first chapter, Abbey offers his first impressions of his new, temporary environs. He describes the area as “a sea of desert” (5) and “the most beautiful place on Earth” (1).

It’s a cold, snowy night when he arrives, after a 450-mile drive, at the mice-ridden “little tin government house trailer” (3) that will serve as his home for the next six months. He wakes in the morning in the pre-sunrise twilight, pulls on his stiff boots and coat, steps outside, and takes in the view. He sees “lavender clouds,” (4) the “dark gorge of the Colorado River,” (5) the “Moab Valley between thousand-foot walls of rock,” (5) the “Roan Cliffs and the Book Cliffs,” (5) as well as the Arches themselves, which he describes as “holes in the rock, windows in stone, no two alike, as varied in form as in dimension […] formed through hundreds of thousands of years by the weathering of the huge sandstone walls” (6).

Abbey states that he has come to this place to confront “the bare bones of existence” (7) and that he dreams of a “hard and brutal mysticism” (7), one in contrast to any sentimental notions of nature.