The Dawn Collector: On My Way to the Natural World (Center Books on the American West) [signed] [first edition]

Award-winning writer Reg Saner recollects, "Years ago I said that if I had a dozen lives to live, I'd live every one of them in Colorado." Saner first saw the Rocky Mountains in 1962, and since then he has never strayed far, spending his days in Boulder at the foot of the Colorado mesa. The Dawn Collector is a testament to Saner's devotion to his long-time home and its surrounding western landscape.This collection of fourteen thoughtful and meditative essays reveals Saner's love of the outdoors and his deep concern for the American West. Saner explored on foot the wild country of the West, from just beyond his backyard to remote places that most people can only dream about exploring, and recorded his thoughts and insights here. Tiny details such as a ladybug on a dawn yucca or a coyote hunting in snow are illuminated and expanded in Saner's essays as platforms for larger ideas about nature's simultaneously comforting and wildly chaotic character.Saner also explores in his essays how the Rocky Mountains and interior West are enduring landscapes of stark beauty that have witnessed tremendous changes during the past forty years. But Saner's writings are not an activist's call for environmental conservation so much as a thoughtful and stirring reflection on the role of human beings in a vast, powerful, and unpredictable cosmos. Accompanying Saner's writings is a gallery of his colorful photographic images that expands on his musings with a powerful visual document of the majesty and wonder of the landscape of the American West, giving full form to his statement, "That we live in a mystery has always fascinated me."