Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996 and Utah went to war over it, and this was the first book to actually walk you through what got protected. It’s 1.9 million acres, bigger than Utah’s five national parks put together, bigger than Delaware, and it stayed a literal blank spot on American maps longer than anywhere else in the lower 48. Chesher writes the geology, the twelve thousand years of people, the thousand-year-old piñon and juniper, the strange soils and rare plants that grow nowhere else, and the hundred thousand or so archaeological sites nobody has catalogued. Liz Hymans shot the panoramas. There’s a chapter at the end on the writers and painters who kept coming back, and a good stretch on the designation fight itself.