Overview
Called "Frog Mountain" by native Tohono O'odham people, the Santa Catalina Mountains offer the citizens of Tucson a wilderness in their own backyard. Over the years it has attracted treasure hunters and entrepreneurs; today recreational facilities dot its summits while resorts and housing development creep up its foothills and into its canyons. Charles Bowden and Jack Dykinga have hiked the Catalinas for years and bring to this book not only a love for the land but the experiences of others who have "lived the mountain." Frog Mountain Blues contrasts the mystery and power of this majestic range with its fragility, and cautions us that this unique wilderness could easily be lost through overuse. By showing the capacity of society to whittle away a whole mountain in pursuit of a "better life," Bowden and Dykinga impress upon us the need for an urbanized society to have wilderness close at hand—both as a retreat from its own insanity and as a reminder of the natural world.
Synopsis
Called "Frog Mountain" by native Tohono O'odham people, the Santa Catalina Mountains offer the citizens of Tucson a wilderness in their own backyard. Over the years it has attracted treasure hunters and entrepreneurs; today recreational facilities dot its summits while resorts and housing development creep up its foothills and into its canyons. Charles Bowden and Jack Dykinga have hiked the Catalinas for years and bring to this book not only a love for the land but the experiences of others who have "lived the mountain." Frog Mountain Blues contrasts the mystery and power of this majestic range with its fragility, and cautions us that this unique wilderness could easily be lost through overuse. By showing the capacity of society to whittle away a whole mountain in pursuit of a "better life," Bowden and Dykinga impress upon us the need for an urbanized society to have wilderness close at hand—both as a retreat from its own insanity and as a reminder of the natural world.
Publishers Weekly
This is one of the finest books on ecology in this decade, for it delineates the creeping environmental degradation that occurs when a boomtown pushes toward a wilderness. Bowden, author of Blue Desert, here explores the Santa Catalina Mountains (declared a Reserve in 1902) just outside of Tucson, Ariz., where he has lived for more than 40 years. Today, he writes, the city is ``a living, crawling thing probing the desert with subdivisions, roads and machines.'' The chronology runs like this: mining claims, ranches, a sawmill, summer cabins and camps, an inn, a paved highway in 1950, followed by radar towers and observatories on the mountain tops. There was further development: the Forest Service approved removal of an ancient stand of Douglas fir for a ski run; in 1984, bulldozers mowed down huge mesquite stands to widen the highway; the Forest Service recorded 1.3 million recreation visitors. Meanwhile, notes Bowden, hotels and foothill homes peddle natural splendor even as they destroy it. He makes an eloquent plea to ``get the cattle, mines, houses, roads, ski runs, golf courses and towers off the range.'' He reminds us that the Catalinas are just a small part of the worldwide assault on wilderness areas. His narrative is admirably supported by Dykinga's dramatic photographs. (May 22)
Editorials
From the Publisher
"This is one of the finest books on ecology in [the 1980s], for it delineates the creeping environmental degradation that occurs when a boomtown pushes toward a wilderness." —Publishers Weekly "Trembles with a raw and vital energy missing from much current writing about the vital questions of wildness and wilderness." —New York Times Book Review "This is a beautifully written, handsomely illustrated love poem to a mountain range that has the fatal curse of being not merely too awesome in its beauty for its own good but, worse, too accessible to man." —Los Angeles Times Book Review"A microcosm . . . of the 'civilized' overuse of the entire planet." —Bloomsbury Review