A personal and historical exploration of the Bears Ears country and the fight to save a national monument.The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by President Trump in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. It's also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s.In The Bears Ears, acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes readers on a tour of his favorite place on earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts...

The Mormon handcart tragedy of 1856 is the worst disaster in the history of the Western migrations, and yet it remains virtually unknown today outside Mormon circles. Following the death of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, its second Prophet and new leader, Brigham Young, determined to move the faithful out of the Midwest, where they had been constantly persecuted by their neighbors, to found a new Zion in the wilderness. In 1846-47, the Mormons made their way west, generally following the Oregon Trail, arriving in July 1847 in what is today Utah, where they established Salt Lake City. Nine years later, fearing a federal invasion, Young and other Mormon leaders wrestled with the question of how to bring thousands of impoverished European converts, mostly British and Scandinavian, from the Old World to Zion. Young conceived of a plan in which the European Mormons would travel by ship to New York City and by train to Iowa City. From there, instead of crossing the plain...

The riveting story of one of the greatest but least-known sagas in the history of exploration from David Roberts, the "dean of adventure writing."By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed "Gino"), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level. The Ice Cap Station was to be the anchor of a transpolar route of air travel from Europe to North America.The weather on the ice cap was appalling. Fierce storms. Temperatures plunging lower than –50° Fahrenheit in the winter. Watkins's scheme called for rotating teams of two men...

In 1937, Mount Lucania was the highest unclimbed peak in North America. Located deep within the Saint Elias mountain range, which straddles the border of Alaska and the Yukon, and surrounded by glacial peaks, Lucania was all but inaccessible. The leader of one failed expedition deemed it "impregnable." But in that year, a pair of daring young climbers would attempt a first ascent, not knowing that their quest would turn into a perilous struggle for survival. Escape from Lucania is their remarkable story.Classmates and fellow members of the Harvard Mountaineering Club, Brad Washburn and Bob Bates were two talented young men -- handsome, intelligent, and filled with a zest for exploring. Both were ambitious climbers, part of a small group whose first ascents in the great mountain ranges during the 1930s and 1940s changed the face of American mountaineering. Setting their sights on summitting Lucania in the summer of 1937, Washburn and Bates put together a team of four...

Famed adventure writer David Roberts re-creates the extraordinary 1,700-mile journey of the eighteenth- century Domínguez-Escalante scouting expedition.In late July 1776, fathers Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Francisco Vélez de Escalante set out from Santa Fe to chart a route to the new Spanish missions in California. The Fransiscans planned to scout the country for mineral wealth and locate the Ute and Navajo tribes for conversion. In present- day Utah, however, the dangers of starvation and hypothermia forced them to turn back. By November the friars were reduced to survival mode: stymied by the raging Colorado River, they had to kill their horses for food. At last they succeeded in fording the river at a place later known as "Crossing of the Fathers."In this adventure- history, David Roberts travels the Spaniards' forgotten route, using Escalante's first- person report as his guide. Blending personal and historical...

Epub v5 (retail) The dramatic and tragic story of the only successful Native American uprising against the Spanish, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. With the conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Spanish governors, soldiers, and missionaries began their brutal subjugation of the Pueblo Indians in what is today the Southwestern United States. This oppression continued for decades, until, in the summer of 1680, led by a visionary shaman named Pope, the Puebloans revolted. In total secrecy they coordinated an attack, killing 401 settlers and soldiers and routing the rulers in Santa Fe. Every Spaniard was driven from the Pueblo homeland, the only time in North American history that conquering Europeans were thoroughly expelled from Indian territory. Yet today, more than three centuries later, crucial questions about the Pueblo Revolt remain unanswered. How did Pope succeed in his brilliant plot? And what happened in the Pueblo world between 1680 and 1692, when a new Spanish force reconquered the Pueblo peoples with relative ease? David Roberts set out to try to answer these questions and to bring this remarkable historical episode to life. He visited Pueblo villages, talked with Native American and Anglo historians, combed through archives, discovered backcountry ruins, sought out the vivid rock art panels carved and painted by Puebloans contemporary with the events, and pondered the existence of centuries-old Spanish documents never seen by Anglos.

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A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. When the Nazis seize Austria in March 1938, Verity Browne - the New Gazette's correspondent in Vienna - is one of the first to be deported as a well-known anti-Fascist. Before she leaves she is able to arrange for a young Jew, Georg Dreiser, to escape to England, but where he expects to find safety, he finds danger and sudden death. Lord Edward Corinth also finds death where it is least expected, in the grounds of Lord Montbatten's country house, Broadlands. There to meet his friend the Maharaja of Batiala, Edward's nephew Frank stumbles on a corpse. The police are satisfied that the man, identified as Peter Gray, a painter of some repute, died of natural cause but his niece, Vera, persuades Edward that all is not as it seems. Between them, Edward and Verity investigate two murders and Verity's eyes are opened to what has been obvious to all their friends, that Edward is the man she loves and that her destiny is...

In the late 1960s, Dave Roberts, like most teenage boys his age, was football mad.

In February 1939 it is clear that Britain will soon be at war and will depend on Winston Churchill's leadership. But MI5 learns that an enemy agent has been dispatched to assassinate Churchill. Lord Edward Corinth must identify the killer and his first port of call is Cliveden, the Astors' country house, the focus for those who are prepared to go to any lengths to avert war.Verity Browne is also with the Astors, though she despises the so-called Cliveden Set. Communist Party bosses have told her to get close to another guest, Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador, who believes Britain could never win against Germany. Then the Ambassador's sons, Joe and Jack Kennedy, discover a man's body in Cliveden's grounds and Verity recognizes him to be a fellow journalist. As war looms, Edward and Verity enter a tense race against time to identify the assassin. Praise for David Roberts' Previous Novels 'A gripping, richly...

It is August 1935 and the Duke of Mersham is hosting one of his influential parties, bringing together public figures interested in improving Anglo-German relations. One of his guests is General Sir Alistair Craig VC, who swallows poison in the duke's excellent port and dies just as latecomer Lord Edward Corinth and journalist Verity Browne arrive on the scene. The unlikely pair - the younger son of a duke and a journalist committed to the Communist Party find common ground as they seek for the truth behind the genera's murder and discover that everyone present - including the duke himself - had a motive for wanting Sir Alistair out of the way. First published in hardback in 2000, this classic detective story introducing Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne was much acclaimed.

A celebrated mountaineer and author searches for meaning in great adventures and explorations, past and present.David Roberts, "veteran mountain climber and chronicler of adventures" (Washington Post), has spent his career documenting voyages to the most extreme landscapes on earth. In Limits of the Known, he reflects on humanity's—and his own—relationship to extreme risk. Part memoir and part history, this book tries to make sense of why so many have committed their lives to the desperate pursuit of adventure.In the wake of his diagnosis with throat cancer, Roberts seeks answers with sharp new urgency. He explores his own lifelong commitment to adventuring, as well as the cultural contributions of explorers throughout history: What specific forms of courage and commitment did it take for Fridtjof Nansen to survive an eighteen-month journey from a record "farthest north" with no supplies and a single rifle during his polar expedition of...

August 1939, the last hot days of a perfect English summer - war is now certain, this week, next week . . . soon. Lord Edward Corinth, newly married, is determined to spend these last days of peace quietly with Verity in their new house, The Old Vicarage, in the sleepy Sussex village of Rodmell - a honeymoon of sorts. Fight against it as he might, for Edward it turns out to be a busman's holiday. The poet, Byron Gates is bizarrely murdered after the village fete - executed, in fact, his head chopped off on a wooden block - and Edward is asked to investigate.Alas, murder is not yet done with Verity and Edward. For even in the hallowed studios of Broadcasting House, murder dares to rear its ugly head while Verity is being interviewed about her interesting life as a war correspondent. And before she can take up her new foreign posting, reporting on the international crisis for the New Gazette, there are more deaths, and the intrepid couple embark on one of their most...

It is October 1936. Lord Edward Corinth is invited by his friend Joe Weaver, the press lord and close friend of the British royal family, to recover certain letters stolen from the king's intimate friend Wallis Simpson. There is no mystery about who has taken these letters - a woman called Mrs Raymond Harkness, a former mistress of the king and a close friend of Edward's. When Edward goes down to Haling, the country house of conservative MP Leo Scannon where Mrs Harkness is also a house guest, he is far from easy in his mind at the task before him, but he cannot guess that retrieving stolen goods is to be complicated by murder...