Utah Wild and Beautiful

Utah: Wild and Beautiful is a vivid portrayal of Utah s mesas, deserts, sandstone canyons, and mountain ranges by photographer Scott T. Smith of Utah. When Henry David Thoreau wrote that in wildness is the preservation of the world, he might have been writing about Utah, with its five national parks, seven national monuments, thirteen wilderness areas. In Utah Wild and Beautiful, Scott T. Smith offers us brilliantly colored, clear images of the landscapes and landforms in the state where Brigham Young and his lieutenants declared at the mouth of Emigrant Canyon on July 24, 1847, This is the Place. In 158 photographs carefully selected from 26 years of work, Scott shows you the home of some of the world s most beautiful natural features: the grand sweep of Capitol Reef National Park, the rugged Mesa Arch, a rippled slot canyon in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, and blood-red paintbrush in Zion National Park. With a foreword by Tom Wharton of the Salt Lake Tribune, the book captures the grandeur of state in images large and small: sunlit mesas as well as a black-chinned hummingbird on a strand of barbed wire; immense slabs of cross-bedded Navaho Sandstone as well as delicate claret cup cactus blossoms; the rugged Factory Butte as well as a delicate elk pictograph. Wharton writes that in this book, Smith captures the vivid landscapes of Utah, large and small, the from the white desolation of the Bonneville Salt Flats to the sandstone arches to the sandhill cranes.