Friends of the Marriott Library

In the fall of 1897, Dave Rust, a young placer miner from Caineville, Utah, looked up from his sluice box on the Colorado River and gazed at the brilliant sandstone cliffs of Glen Canyon. He wasn’t finding much gold, but he knew that this landscape abounded in scenic beauty and that people would pay good money to see it.

A quarter century later, he would fulfill his dream of taking adventurous travelers through this stunning canyon in his little canvas-covered canoes. By that time he had amassed a comprehensive knowledge of the geologic wonders of the Colorado Plateau province of Utah and Arizona, and each summer he led clients who were typically well-educated Eastern travelers on a month-long pack trips and river trips through a mind-boggling variety of cliffs, mesas, mountaintop overlooks, and hidden desert canyons of Zion Canyon, Capitol Reef, the Aquarius Plateau and the Escalante Canyons before they became well known to the outside world. Rust was an early practitioner of adventure travel at a time when few Americans knew what wonders this region held, and his life story follows the development of southern Utah from a primitive frontier to a prized recreational destination.

Frederick H. Swanson fell in love with the wild landscapes of the Northwest, the Northern Rockies and the Colorado Plateau as a youngster and has written numerous articles urging protection of their natural beauty. He has written for and edited several newsletters for conservation groups about the Colorado Plateau’s park lands and wilderness areas. In 1990 he published Wilderness at the Edge: A Citizen Proposal to Protect Utah’s Canyons and Deserts (Utah Wilderness Coalition), in 1998, America’s Redrock Wilderness: Protecting a Natural Treasure (SUWA, 1999), in 2005 he edited George C. Fraser’s, Journeys in the Canyonlands of Utah and Arizona, 1914-1916 (University of Arizona Press), and in 2007 Dave Rust: A Life in the Canyons (University of Utah Press).

The Friends thank Dan Johnson and Chevron for their sponsorship of the 2007- 2008 Books & Authors Series

BOOKS COURTESY OF SAM WELLER'S ZION BOOKSTORE

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