Review by Choice Review
Great Sand Dunes National Park in the remote San Luis Valley of the inner mountains in southwestern Colorado is home to the tallest sand dunes in North America. This work is primarily a cultural history of this place, which Geary, a Colorado public lands historian, describes as a "veritable crossroads of human history" and a "microcosm of the broader history of the American West." Jeffersonian-era explorer Zebulon Pike first described the shifting dunes in 1807 as "exactly that of a sea in a storm." This unique place has been used (and more recently battled over) for thousands of years and has been the stage for many familiar western actors, including pre-Columbian Native peoples, farmers, ranchers, railroaders, miners, and, most recently, tourists. The region is the driest in Colorado (a historically dry state), and the contests, predictably, have centered around water rights, appropriate land usage, and federal management practices. As this work exhaustively details, in 1932 the federal government designated the area a national monument; in 2004, it became a national park. An extensive bibliography and numerous photos, illustrations, and maps supplement the text. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Keith Edgerton, Montana State University at Billings
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
