Puzzles, Mysteries, and Reviews

Floating boats down rivers came to Amos Burg almost as routine as walking down streets came to others of his generation. But was it the thrill of adventure, or the desire to be a writer of adventure tales, that motivated the Oregon man to paddle the West's major rivers?

If you're hiking across the landscape at Arches National Park, following rock cairns across the slickrock, how would you know when to turn right or left? The answer is found within the pages of Cairns: Messengers in Stone, a wonderful little book that traces the history of these rock piles.

Does time change all? Sometimes, to some degree. But a new book on Yellowstone National Park places photographs side by side to show that sometimes that change is not as much as you might imagine over a period of decades.

In Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe we are treated to a Jigsaw puzzle of sorts that spans 150 years of Grand Canyon photography, paintings, sketches, and even postcards, a seamless melding of the past and present as seen through works of such giants as Ansel Adams and Thomas Moran.

Rebuilding habitat to what it once was is no easy task, but David Wingate's success in largely reassembling the flora and fauna on one of Bermuda's island can be seen not only in the vegetation, but in a bird once thought extinct.