Tales Of Lonely Trails

Before Zane Grey became the king of the Western novel, he was something perhaps more fascinating: a man obsessed with riding into the real American West and documenting what he found. This 1922 collection gathers six vivid narratives of his journeys through the most dramatic landscapes America had to offer, from the painted wonders of the Grand Canyon to the punishing depths of Death Valley, from the wilds of Colorado to the forgotten corners of Tonto Basin. Grey writes with the same muscular poetry he brought to his fiction, but here the stories are true, the stakes are real, and the loneliness of the open range isn't dramatic tension, it's simply the price of witnessing something magnificent. These are accounts of a man camping alone under stars so bright they hurt, of climbing formations that had no names, of encountering a West that was already vanishing even as he rode through it. For anyone who has ever felt the pull of the open road, or who believes that some landscapes are too grand for anything less than a life devoted to their exploration, this book is a time machine to an America that existed only in the memory of those who were there to see it.