national park

Led by Captain Clarence E. Dutton, the U.S. Geological Survey’s exploration of the Grand Canyon in the early 1880s resulted in a scientific text and this stunning over-sized folio atlas, considered the greatest book by any of the government surveys of the American West. The expedition included artist/archaeologist William Henry Holmes and the artist Thomas Moran. Three double-page, color-tinted lithographed plates by Holmes, when set together, form the magnificent “Panorama from Point Sublime.” In the bottom left corner Dutton is depicted leaning over Holmes as he sketches the view.

In 1871, seventeen-year-old Fred Dellenbaugh, under the lead of Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War hero and the first director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, journeyed into the Grand Canyon and its subsidiary canyons and rivers with the intention of exploring, mapping, and recording descriptions of the uncharted territory. The men found themselves battling the great force of the Colorado River, with its fatal, quick rapids and mighty waterfalls. This is Dellenbaugh’s personal story, written thirty years after the great adventure.

Ansel Adams curated a selection of more than 100 images of his photographs of the Southwest, taken between 1928 and 1975. In 1937, Adams wrote to his friend Alfred Stieglitz of his time in the Southwest: "it is all very beautiful and magical here--a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you." In this book, Adams' iconic black and white photographs encompass both expansive, awe-inspiring landscapes and quiet studies of nature and people.