No one writes today about the Colorado Plateau and the American Southwest with the eloquence and insight of Craig Childs. With his five books about this region, he joins Mary Austin, Joseph Wood Krutch, Ann Zwinger, Ed Abbey, and Terry Tempest Williams in describing and celebrating the natural and cultural heritages of this region.

Flying Home combines his prose with magnificent photographs to crystalize the essence of this amazing place.

This 160-page publication is the final issue of the Sojourns magazine, which has been published over the past decade by the Peaks, Plateaus and Canyons Association, a consortium of nonprofit cooperating associations for public land agencies in the Colorado Plateau region. 

Sojourns, a membership benefit of the cooperating associations, has offered excellent writing and superb graphics throughout its history. Fittingly, this final issue, clearly a book rather than a magazine, is a climax to an outstanding publishing venture. It may be acquired through the cooperating associations (go to peaksplateausandcanyons.org for a listing of these organizations).

In October 2013, Childs and his pilot friend Neal Schwieterman flew over the Colorado Plateau in a 1946 cloth-wing Cessna 140, beginning in Paonia, Colorado, and touching down five times as they explored the canyons, mesas, buttes, and mountains of the Plateau. They flew over Arches and Canyonlands national parks, Comb Ridge, Cedar Mesa, and the new and threatened Bears Ears National Monument.

Throughout his life, Childs has explored the Southwest on foot, raft, canoe, and vehicle, writing about it in such books as The Secret Knowledge of Water, House of Rain, and Stone Desert. He recounts some of his early forays into this place in the first sections of Flying Home, and how he fell in love with it.

What you do is evolve with a place. At first, you might need skies on fire and thunder pounding in the distance to attract your attention. A woman may later be perched like a spire in the sun. In the end, you are writing love letters to its finest, most elegant details: the way a hummingbird has built a tiny nest at the tail of a piece of flash-flood debris hanging in a shadow between boulders, the way maidenhair ferns and monkey flowers bob around desert seeps and springs, the unfurling of a datura bloom. This is how my heart was taken by this place, how I was led in.

This plane trip allows him to reflect on the place and his experiences of it even as the journey above the landscape amplifies his understanding of it.

Childs enjoys the perspectives flying gives him. Flying commercial at 30,000 feet over the Colorado Plateau, forehead pressed to the jet’s window, he sees “a land feathered by watercourses cutting through slowly bobbing pieces of earth. A maze of chiseled and burned country where rivers eat the rock.”  On his current flight, he can see “every curl and dip” of this wild landscape, and approaching Comb Ridge it “came like a serpent. It’s reared-back scales scraped the horizon for a hundred miles, and we cleared it at about six hundred feet.” A quality of the Colorado Plateau he knew intimately from his explorations on the ground was confirmed from the aerial perspective.

If the Colorado Plateau had no rivers, it would be a gentle dome, a bald head topped with an alpine toupee of Ponderosa pines, aspens, spruce, and fir. There would be no Zion, no Grand Canyon, no gouged, eroded lands. The trees of Petrified Forest would still be buried miles inside the earth. All the rivers and every wash and canyon leading to them have torn it all apart. The beautiful bones of the Colorado Plateau have been exposed by water.

Childs knows the rivers, describes his explorations of the Grand Canyon, his float of the San Juan below Clay Hills where river trips usually end, a friend’s wild kayak ride of a flooding Little Colorado River. Childs knows Southwest water like few do or ever have, and shares this knowledge.

But Child’s prose is not the whole story in this book. The photography and book design are spectacular, and worth the price even if that’s all one sees. From the front cover, a photo of the West Rim, Zion National Park, to a fold-out aerial shot of Petrified Forest National Park on the back cover, the photographs are simply stunning. They do not always match the textual topic, but no matter, they are an experience in themselves. We look up from the river in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River, down on Bryce Canyon, down on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, and out along the Kaibab Trail in Grand Canyon National Park. We see an anthill that might upset the plane landing on a remote airstrip scraped decades ago by uranium prospectors, up at the Milky Way over Owachomo Bridge in Natural Bridges National Monument. The images throughout this book are a great complement to Child’s excellent writing.

Childs raises Colorado Plateau issues like the destruction of Glen Canyon, the threats to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. He writes, “We look to the land as possibility, a place with its own agency, and it teaches us, heals us, gives us space from the press of humanity. To take this away would rob us of a resource that may be the rarest of all. This is why I fight for Bears Ears.” 

Flying Home is not, however, a call to arms in defense of the beauty and wilderness of the Colorado Plateau so much as a celebration of its beauties and wonders. It seems to say, “If we know and appreciate what is here we will value and protect it, and here it is!”

Everything I read about nature and public lands in the American West these days is upsetting, depressing, and riles me up. Flying Home, not so much. Though I have been to just a few of the places Childs describes, I can relate to his experiences of all of them. The photographs make me want to go there. But even if I don’t make it physically, I have been there in spirit along with Childs and his friends. For that I am thankful to him, to the photographers, and to the designers of this wonderful book.