BOOKS: 1970s & 1980s — APPRENTICESHIP—THE NATIONAL PARKS
Steve's career grew right out of his work as a national park naturalist—an apprenticeship that allowed him to write, photograph, and publish general interpretive park booklets while working as a young ranger. Great Sand Dunes came first.
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Western National Parks Association (formerly Southwest Parks and Monuments Association), 1975)
Awards: National Park Service Cooperating Association Biennial Publication Award
Purchase: Western Parks Association, Amazon
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The natural and human history of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, in Colorado's San Luis Valley—a park that harbors stunning diversity. The dunes lie at the foot of 14,000-foot peaks in the Sangre de Cristo Range; the sand rises 750 feet above the valley floor—the highest dunes on the continent. Grand themes of western history converge here, at this crossroads, where the threads of Southwest culture and frontier lives lead past Great Sand Dunes in story after story.
After working as a park ranger at Great Sand Dunes in 1974, Steve wrote the text for this booklet—his first book, and a benchmark of professionalism in park publishing. He returned 25 years later to research and photograph for the latest edition.
Praise:
"Crystal-clear descriptions and eye-enchanting photos. One wishes that our parklands will be blessed with more of such naturalists and guidebooks."
Gary Paul Nabhan, High Country News
"A work of art worthy of hard-cover gift book status, but a monumental bargain in brochure form."
Rocky Mountain News
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Capitol Reef Natural History Association, 1977)
Awards: National Park Service Cooperating Association Biennial Publication Award
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In 1975, Steve worked as a seasonal park ranger/naturalist at Capitol Reef National Park—Utah's least-known national park. He came back two years later to work for an additional summer on this booklet, emphasizing the backcountry—trying to lure the timid visitor into adventure, into the canyons.
He has returned to Capitol Reef nearly every year since and now lives part of each year in nearby Torrey, Utah. This territory feels like home.
A walk in the Waterpocket Fold takes you through a rock desert frozen in time. This momentary view of a constantly changing landscape is but one of a continuous stream of moments that stretch unbroken into the past and toward the future for millions of years. Such timelessness puts our lives in perspective—a tiny, fiery glint in a long, long unknown, lost in an endless cycle of swirling water, of hot winds bouncing sand grains down dry canyons.
We mark our time in months, in lifetimes. To hear the rhythms of erosion—the measure of earthtime—listen to water drip from a seep, walk canyons until you jump at the sudden menacing crash of a rockfall. Drop by drop, sand grain by sand grain, the cadence ticks off another million years.
Praise:
"Informed and gorgeously visual and touched with wonder, the way the country itself is."
Wallace Stegner
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Joshua Tree National Park Association, 1979; revised and updated in 2003)
Purchase: Joshua Tree Association, Amazon
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An introduction to California's Joshua Tree National Park, a stunning landscape that straddles the boundary between the Mojave Desert and the sere Colorado Desert section of the Sonoran Desert. Trimble tells the park's stories by poking around in these two distinct places: High Desert and Low Desert. Mountains rise from both, harboring old mines and bighorn sheep. Native palm oases serve as icons for the park just as powerfully as the Joshua trees themselves.
The park's stories span the heart of the Desert Southwest, from Joshua tree biology to cattle rustling, from the San Andreas Fault to spring wildflower ecology, from flash floods to Coahuilla Indian ethnobotany.
Praise:
"With its dazzling photographs and lyrical narrative, this book serves as a comprehensive introductory guide to Joshua Tree NP as well as a memento of past visits. Trimble debunks the image of the desert as a dry barren wasteland by revealing the unexpected beauty and variety in the magical desert world."
Arrowhead
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Point Reyes National Seashore Association, 1980)
Awards: National Park Service Cooperating Association Biennial Publication Award
Purchase: Pt. Reyes Association, Amazon
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The natural and human history of Point Reyes National Seashore, California: the Point, Beaches, Bluffs, Esteros, Grassland, Woods, and Bear Valley.
This stubborn piece of land juts out into the Pacific just north of San Francisco Bay, refusing to give in to the sea and smooth out the California coastline. This is its story—from Miwok Indian people to Sir Francis Drake to the conservationists who preserved Point Reyes for all.
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Point Reyes National Seashore Association, 1989)
Purchase: Pt. Reyes Association, Amazon
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Steve wrote this booklet about the wildlife of Point Reyes National Seashore, California, as a journal through the seasons from June to May, with impressions and natural history stories about creatures as diverse as mountain lions, elephant seals, and fallow deer.
Animals make the land whole. They heighten our awareness. They remind us of the special relationship with wildlife that American Indian people developed. When we pay similar attention to animals, we sense more of Point Reyes.
A companion book to Point Reyes: the enchanted shore
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Colorado National Monument Association, 1981)
Awards: National Park Service Cooperating Association Biennial Publication Award
Purchase: Colorado National Monument Association, Amazon
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At Colorado National Monument, vertical-walled canyons slice through the northeast edge of the great Uncompahgre Plateau of western Colorado. Below lies the broad Grand Valley of the Colorado River swinging westward in a flat, fertile sweep of irrigated green past Grand Junction. In telling the stories of the natural and human history of this small national monument, Trimble introduces the traveler to the canyons of the Colorado Plateau.
Here, we wait on a ledge, balanced on the brink of an old canyon, seeing before us the first instant in the life of a new canyon. In this invisible moment between the long past and the unknown future, we stand on the edge, living on the rim of time.
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Western National Parks Association (formerly Southwest Parks and Monuments Association), 1983)
Awards: National Park Service Cooperating Association Biennial Publication Award
Purchase: Western Parks Association, Amazon
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This booklet explores the natural and human history of the Wasatch Range and nearby Utah Valley and the fascinating inner workings of jewel-like Timpanogos Cave National Monument on Mount Timpanogos in northern Utah.
We enter Timpanogos Cave and the mountain swallows us. We pass into silence broken only by the dripping trickle of groundwater. But this cave is a natural, dynamic place, with its seasons, its moods—tied in subtle ways to the plants on the hillside above, to the mountain's ice, and to the American Fork River rushing by below. It remains an integral part of the reality of this place, its entrance less a barrier than a connector.
It is a window into the earth.
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Petrified Forest Museum Association, 1984)
Awards: National Park Service Cooperating Association Biennial Publication Award
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This clever road guide can be read in either direction, back to front, front to back, north to south, south to north—and takes the reader on the 26 1/2 mile journey along the highway through Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona.
Petrified wood is not rare. But here in the park lies one of the Earth's greatest exposed accumulations of large, colorful fossil trees. These petrified logs from a rare payoff of jewels against the long odds of chance fossilization—and the compounding odds against exposure by erosion. Passing by on their water-borne path, for a time they intersect our own travels here. For this moment, we share a journey through rainbows.
Praise:
"Stephen Trimble's colorful book, Earth Journey, is almost as good as a guided tour of the park's scenic drive."
Frommer's National Parks of the American West
The Sierra Club Guide to the National Parks of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains
Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Rocky Mountain, and Theodore Roosevelt national park chapters by Stephen Trimble
(Stewart Tabori & Chang/Random House, 1996 revision and update of the 1984 edition)
Purchase SW Guide: IndieBound, Powell's, Amazon
Purchase Rockies Guide: IndieBound, Powell's, Amazon
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Steve surveys the heart of his home territory in these essay-like guidebook chapters. Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef national parks protect the inner Canyon Country of the Colorado Plateau. In his twenties, Trimble worked as a park ranger at two of them, and he has been writing about all three throughout his career.
In exploring the diversity of Canyonlands along the Green and Colorado rivers, the zen-like rock gardens of Arches, and the unmistakable cliffline of the Waterpocket Fold at Capitol Reef, Trimble offers a condensed and authoritative guide to the natural and human history of the Canyon Country between Moab and Torrey, Utah in the Southwest Guide.
In the Rocky Mountains & Great Plains guide, Steve writes about two more favorite places. In describing the spirit of Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, Trimble provides a capsule guide to the natural and human history of the Southern Rockies.
He does the same for Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, where the West begins. The park protects more than the grassland and badlands along the Little Missouri River. It preserves the experience that transformed Teddy Roosevelt into a conservationist when he came West.
Praise:
"...an excellent introduction to the parks. The books combine superb color photography with concise but thorough outlines of each park's history and geology and extensive guides to its most-significant features."
The Washington Post
"...excellent ...outstanding color photographs, maps, park facility charts, geological and historical infomation about each park, and identification of animals and plants commonly found within the parks. Our month-long tour of the Desert Southwest was greatly enhanced by this book."
Motorhome