Jack Burns Lives!

(originally published on my savethewetland.org site)
It’s gone.
That’s right. Gone. The wetland is gone.
A few trees remain, but the vast majority of the wetland is nothing but mud and the scraggy remains of the trees that once stood there. Also gone are the homes of various species that inhabited this place, gone forever so [...]

So, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve tried to spend more time on Abbey related topics or things related to the Southwest. Not totally, but it’s really why I created this blog, and it’s frankly more enjoyable.
More enjoyable that politics, certainly, except that our current national mess surely has us headed the right [...]

Speaking of fire lookouts, the summer ‘08 edition of The Paris Review has an enjoyable piece written by Philip Connors titled “Diary of a Fire Lookout.” It’s his daily diary from a summer spent in a fire tower and cabin in The Gila National Forest in New Mexico.
Ever since I read Abbey’s Black Sun, [...]

Thanks to Tom Keith for sending these photos and notes.
The images were produced by Tom and the photocopy (text document) is from one of Ed’s notebooks housed a the special collections department at The University of Arizona.
Pictured above (click for large resolution pic) is “Pair copulating on the left- female giving birth on [...]

photo credit: Joe C.
Joe and another Abbeywebber, Chuck, recently returned from a hiking excursion to Numa Ridge, the old observation tower that Ed manned back in the mid-70’s and wrote about in ‘77. He spent the summer there with Renée and seven volumes of Marcel Proust. Also present were Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, lingering [...]

I’ve always had special admiration and a high degree of interest in Everett Ruess. Well known to most Edward Abbey fans and western wilderness lovers, Ruess is more interesting and inspirational than Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild fame. He was a true romantic, an artist, writer and wilderness wanderer, who spent most of [...]

Monique from the Abbeyweb recently came across the July 1979 edition of National Geographic with an Ed Abbey article titled Guadalupe’s Trails in Summer. She was kind enough to send me some scanned images of the article which I’ve uploaded for your viewing pleasure.
It’s typical Abbey, full of interesting anecdotes, short but sufficient technical descriptions, [...]