Abstract
Review: Cedar Mesa: A Place Where Spirits Dwell By David Peterson Reviewed by Joyce Metzger Arcadia, Florida, USA David Petersen; photographs by Branson Reynolds. Cedar Mesa: A Place Where Spirits Dwell. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. 86 pp. ISBN 0-8165-2234-0 (paper). $US13.95. Recycled, acid-free paper. Cedar Mesa in Utah is a vaguely forbidding and intimidating landscape of sky, space, stone, and sun. Life struggles to survive rugged terrain and severe changes in weather. Here one can revel in wild country and personal freedom while recognizing a dignity in the landscape that must be fostered and preserved within the natural wildness. Cedar Mesa proves difficult to get to, but for these collaborators, writer and photographer, the result of their effort is well worth any hardship they endured as they share this uniquely magical, high-mesa desert maze of vertical-walled, vertigo-thrilling canyons animated by towering, bigger-than- life sandstone formations known as hoodoos. This is a surreal place filled with tantalizing, frozen-in-time, rock-hard waves surrounded by sweet, clean air and profound silence. This is pinion- pine/juniper pygmy forest ecology with sage brush and glimpses of evening primrose, Indian paintbrush, sego lily, sacred nature, monkey flower, yucca, columbine, and sunflowers. One can enjoy the solitude, magnetic shadow pull, and fragrant pinions while watching for deer, rabbits, ground squirrels, lizards, snakes, desert tortoise, cliff swallows, canyon wrens, swifts, hawks, falcons, eagles, vultures, and iridescent ravens. As rodents scurry by, brushing the sagebrush, senses become attuned to desert sounds and imagination listens for Anasazi ghosts and Ed Abbey's humorous spirit who, most sense, still haunts the vertical sandstone columns that have eroded to resemble people, animals, and other worldly and magical beings. In this rarefied place, solitude befriends; it is not an enemy. The tabletop mesa is high, sparsely timbered land covered by slow-growing, crusty lichen that aids in water retention while slowing wind erosion. Large expanses of weathered slick rock are weirdly eroded and natural depressions form catch basins for rainwater and snowmelts. Cedar Mesa lies near the heart of the Colorado Plateau, which straddles the
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