Some compare the Southwest's environmental transitions to what you'd experience traveling from Mexico to Canada. For this book, author Craig Childs trekked over hundreds of miles, observing the transitions close to his Southwest home and discovering something about life. In crystalline prose he relates the landscape to a passage in his life. Scattering his father's ashes in remote Canyon Creek, he reflects:
"I did not think of my father and his ashes as a traveler, ceaselessly flowing from one confluence to the next. Instead, I thought of him as a process. A story being told. I thought of him as a pool of unknown trout and the busted trunk of an alder half sticking up through the water. I thought of him as a raw, deep canyon heaped with boulders and mazes of creek passages -- the canyon he had once promised me. I thought of him as the beginning and the end at once."
Childs' journey of discovery covers Alpine to the Little Blue River; up Mount Graham, a perfectly contained sky island; around Sedona; through Canyon Country; along the lower Colorado River; and through the Sonoran Desert to the Sea of Cortes, with magnificent full-color photography by internationally recognized Arizona Highways photographers illustrating the range of his travels.
