The Four-Cornered Falcon

by Saner, Reg

• ISBN13: 9780803236349
• ISBN10: 0803236344
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-05-01
• Publisher: Bison Books

Summary

The western United States is a region of open space that has profoundly shaped the American character. InThe Four-Cornered Falcon, Reg Saner explores places that can still transform the human spirit with almost sacred power and describes journeys--both physical and spiritual--to areas of the interior West as remote as they are beautiful. He explores northern New Mexico's Pajarito Plateau, home to the ancient Anasazi culture and the weapons laboratories of Los Alamos. He recalls a long night spent in Chaco Canyon, alone and frightened after sustaining a serious rock-climbing injury. He tells of encounters with magpies and coyotes, botanists and wildlife officials. And he looks down on the multiplying lights of Boulder and realizes that the West he has long known cannot escape being blighted by growth. Saner draws on a lifetime of hiking, climbing, and skiing in the backcountry of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, but the themes and experiences he explores are the opposite of regional. Like the falcons of the title essay--like humans themselves--Saner's essays are "four-cornered," not simply for their connection to those famous intersecting borders but because they range so widely over space and time.

Author Biography

Reg Saner is a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado and is the author of, most recently, Living Large in Nature: A Writer's Idea of Creationism, as well as Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo and the Anasazi and four poetry collections. His work has been included in over sixty anthologies and he has won an NEA fellowship, the Creede Repertory Theater Award, the State of Colorado Governor's Award, and the Wallace Stegner Award.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Prologue: Pliny and the Mountain Mouse	p. 1
Glacier Gorge	p. 9
The Magpie Scapular	p. 24
Wind	p. 39
Sacred Space	p. 56
Technically Sweet	p. 73
Naming Nature	p. 104
The Ideal Particle and the Great Unconformity	p. 122
The Mind of a Forest	p. 160
Snow	p. 184
Chaco Night	p. 196
Swiss Wilderness	p. 213
The Four-Cornered Falcon	p. 230
Epilogue: What's to Become?	p. 268
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