Books for the Nature Lover in Your Life

Amid the rock spires and red-rock canyons west of Grand Junction near the Utah state line, a young man with a checkered past single-handedly built trails at a salary of $1 a month. John Otto brought the beauty of the canyons to the attention of the local chambers of commerce and eventually the National Park Service. With the stroke of a pen, Pres. William Taft added the Colorado National Monument to the park system in 1911. Otto's eccentricities toward bureaucrats and businessmen caused him to abandon a quarter-century of trail building in the mid-1930s. His legacy was then picked up by hundreds of young men from the Civilian Conservation Corps prior to World War II. Today their combined efforts bring thousands of hikers, bicyclists, and motorists to the same trails Otto first used to introduce people to the canyon lands a century ago and the odd rock monoliths that seem to rise hundreds of feet out of the canyon floor. Scenic vistas of the Little Bookcliffs mountain range and the great Grand Mesa complete the beautiful panorama.

The appreciation of the Chimney Rock region goes back more than 1,000 years. Here in southwestern Colorado, the Ancestral Puebloans inhabited the northern San Juan River Basin as an outlier community of Chaco Canyon. Its function and use has created much conjecture. The site was abandoned by the early 1100s for reasons that some speculate were related to drought, resource depletion, warfare, migration, or a combination of these factors. Over the course of its recorded history, archaeologists, astronomers, regional historians, and visitors have celebrated the rocks, ruins, and landscape that make up this important feature in the Four Corners region. It has been called La Piedra Parada by Spanish explorers, Fire Mountain by Tewa-speaking pueblos, and Tupiwiniri by the Utes. Today, we know it as Chimney Rock National Monument due to a proclamation made in 2012 by Pres. Barack Obama.

Southern Colorado's unique Great Sand Dunes rise to a height of 750 feet above the San Luis Valley floor and are the nation's highest dunes not adjacent to an ocean or lake. The sweeping dunes were protected as a national monument in 1932 and as a national park in 2000. From prehistoric hunter-gatherers to the historic Ute Indian tribe, inhabitants have long used the resources of the land around the dunes. Zebulon Pike was the first American explorer to witness the dunes in 1807, followed by a long procession of other explorers, ranchers, and miners. Today, visitors from around the world come to climb up and slide down the dunes in Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.

"John Charles Frémont--popularly known as "The Pathfinder" during his times--played a major role in opening up the American West to settlement by pioneers. His reliable accounts, including published maps, narrations, and scientific documentations of his expeditions, guided emigrants overland into the West starting in the mid-1840s.

Frémont was born illegitimate to a Québécois father and a Virginian mother. Through the lucky circumstance of obtaining highly influential patrons at his parents' adopted home city of Charleston, South Carolina, he was appointed second lieutenant in the United States Topographical Corps and quickly rose within its ranks. Through the influence of his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri--the powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs--he led his first expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1842. With his party of 25 men, including Kit Carson, he embarked from the Kansas River on June 15, 1842, followed the Platte River to the South Pass, and starting from Green River he explored the Wind River mountain range. He climbed a 13,745-foot mountain, Frémont's Peak, planted an American flag, and claimed the Rocky Mountains and the West for the United States.

His second expedition--the subject of a separate book--succeeded in charting all of the way to California, mapping and confirming the Oregon Trail as the route for pioneers heading toward the West."